Smith, Carmen Jimenez: - Carmen Giménez Smith, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, was born in New York City, received a BA in English at San Jose State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of a memoir and four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She recently co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latino poetry, fiction and nonfiction, published by Counterpath Press. She has received fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation and CantoMundo. She teaches in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University while serving as the publisher of Noemi Press. Noemi has published over 40 full-length collections of poetry and fiction, which have received reviews in Boston Review, Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, and Pleiades. With Francisco Aragon, she co-founded the Akrilica Series, a Noemi book series for innovative writing by Latinos, and Infidel Poetics, a series of short-form poetics on gender, identity, and the 21st century.

Davidson, Robin: - "Robin Davidson is the author of two poem chapbooks, Kneeling in the Dojo and City that Ripens on the Tree of the World, and the collection Luminous Other, awarded the Ashland Poetry Press's 2012 Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Recipient of a Fulbright professorship at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland and an NEA translation fellowship, she is co-translator with Ewa Elżbieta Nowakowska of Ewa Lipska's poems from the Polish - The New Century (Northwestern UP, 2009) and the forthcoming Dear Ms. Schubert (Tavern Books, 2019). Davidson served as 2015-2017 Houston Poet Laureate under the leadership of Mayors Annise Parker and Sylvester Turner, and edited the citywide 2018 anthology, Houston's Favorite Poems, modeled on Robert Pinsky's national Favorite Poem Project. She has twice been a finalist for Texas State Poet Laureate, and was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters last spring. She teaches literature and creative writing as professor emeritus of English for the University of Houston-Downtown."