Jonathan Johnson is the author of two books of poetry, Mastodon, 80% Complete and In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (poems from both of which first appeared in this magazine), and the memoir Hannah and the Mountain.  Johnson recently returned from living in Scotland to resume migrations between upper Michigan, Idaho, and Washington, where he teaches in the MFA program at Eastern Washington University.

Richard Hoffman is the author of the Half the House: A Memoir, the poetry collections, Without Paradise and Gold Star Road, winner of the 2006 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the 2009 Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club for best book of poems in the preceding two years. He has just published a work of fiction, Interference & Other Stories. His work appears in such magazines as Agni, Harvard Review, Hudson Review, The Literary Review, Poetry, Witness and others. He teaches in the Department of Writing, Literature & Publishing at Emerson College, and in the Stonecoast MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. He is currently a Brother Thomas Fellow, an artist’s award administered by The Boston Foundation.

Scott Cairns is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at University of Missouri. His poems and essays have appeared in Poetry, Image, Paris Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, etc., and both have been anthologized in Best American Spiritual Writing. His most recent poetry collection is Compass of Affection. His spiritual memoir, Short Trip to the Edge, and his translations, Love’s Immensity, appeared in 2007. His book-length essay, The End of Suffering, appeared in 2009. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and is Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English at MU.