Deborah Landau is director of the Creative Writing Program at New York University. She is the author of Soft Targets, The Uses of the Body and The Last Usable Hour, both Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press; and Orchidelirium, which was selected by Naomi Shihab Nye for the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry.

Landau studied at Stanford University, Columbia University, and Brown University, where she was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow and earned a PhD in English and American xd. For many years she co-directed the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series and co-hosted the video interview program Open Book on Slate.com. In 2016, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Matthew Zapruder is an associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA Program in Creative Writing, as well as editor at large for Wave Books. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Sun Bear, Come On All You Ghosts, The Pajamaist, and American Linden, in addition to his collaborations and translations. His most recent book is Why Poetry, a book of prose about reading poetry for a general audience. 

Zapruder’s honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at New York University, the New School, the University of California Riverside – Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute, and at the University of California at Berkeley as the Holloway Fellow.