Ciona Rouse is a poet and teaching artist. The author of Vantablack, the first chapbook of
Third Man Books (2017), her poetry has also appeared in Oxford American, wildness, Booth, The Account, and other publications. She’s featured on NPR’s Turning the Tables in a collaborative project with poets Adia Victoria and Caroline Randall Williams. Rouse is on
the faculty of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference (2019-2021), in addition to a guest
poetry instructor for organizations like The Porch Writers’ Collective, Tennessee Young
Writers’ Workshop and Hindman Settlement School. A frequent collaborator with various
artists, she served as a resident poet for the “Nick Cave: FEAT” art exhibition at Frist Art
Museum in 2017-2018, culminating in a poem called “We,” which was named 2018’s “Best
Poetry Performance” by Nashville Scene. Presently, Rouse is co-curator of the forthcoming Kara Walker: Cut to the Quick exhibit at Frist Art Museum. She is poetry editor of Wordpeace Journal and a co-host, along with poet Kendra DeColo, of the podcast Re/VERB, a Third Man Books podcast where literature and pop culture meet. A graduate of Columbia College of South Carolina, Rouse currently lives in Nashville, TN. Find Rouse’s work at www.cionarousepoetry.com.

Hannah V Warren is a doctoral student at the University of Georgia where she studies speculative fiction and poetry, and she holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kansas. Hannah’s writing and research interests focus on monster theory, post/apocalypse narratives, and fairy tales. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: Southern Gothic Corpse Machine from Carrion Bloom Books (forthcoming 2022) and [re]construction of the necromancer from Sundress Publications (2020). Her works have appeared in Gulf Coast, Passages North, The Pinch, Strange Horizons, THRUSH, and Fairy Tale Review, among others.

Jesse Graves is the author of four poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape
with Blighted Pine and Merciful Days. His work received the James Still
Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers
and the Philip H. Freund Prize for Creative Writing from Cornell University. Graves has
been an editor on several collections of poetry and scholarship, including three volumes
of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poems of James Agee. He
teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and
Professor of English.

Sarah Pinsker  is the author of over fifty works of short fiction, including the novelette "Our Lady of the Open Road," winner of the Nebula Award in 2016. Her novelette "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," was the Sturgeon Award winner in 2014. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, and Uncanny and in numerous anthologies and year's bests. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, French, and Italian, among other languages, and have been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Locus, Eugie, and World Fantasy Awards.

Sarah's first collection, the Philip K Dick Award winning Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea: Stories, was published by Small Beer Press in March 2019, and her first novel, A Song For A New Day, was published by Penguin/Random House/Berkley in September 2019. Her latest book is We Are Satellites, out in May 2021. 

She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels (the third with her rock band, the Stalking Horses) and a fourth in the works. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland and can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker. 

Taria Person is an alumna of the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, where she received a dual B.A. in English Creative Writing: Poetry, and Interdisciplinary Studies: Africana Studies. She is the author of Rainbow Elephant, and her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including: O’ Woman a Tapestry of Loving You, and Voices of Warriors: Poems of Hope & Healing. Taria Person won 1st place at the regional Big Ears: Spoken Word Expo/The 5th Woman Poetry Slam (2017), the Regional Southern Fried Hip-Hop Slam (2013), and Knoxville Poetry Slam (2012). Also, she has been an actress and Production Stage Manager for The Carpetbag Theatre Inc., during its original series of stage productions that have been funded by The Roy Cockrum Foundation, in celebration of (CBT’s) 50th Anniversary. Recently, Person has been commissioned to write a book of poetry by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation, won an Artistic Professional Development grant from Alternate Roots for her original stage play, Hangers, and became a member of the 5th Woman Touring Collective.