Adam Chiles’ latest collection, Bluff, was published by Measure Press in 2024. His first collection Eveningland was nominated for the 2009 Gerald Lampert Memorial award for best debut book in Canada and was reissued in the US by Kelsay books in 2023. His work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2006 (Samovar) and has appeared in such journals as Barrow Street, Beloit Poetry Journal, Blackbird, Cimarron Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Plume, The Threepenny Review and Willow Springs. He is professor of English and Creative Writing at Northern Virginia Community College and serves on the editorial board of Poet Lore. 

Eileen Ivey Sirota is a psychotherapist, poet, and potter.  Her poems have appeared in Calyx, District Lines, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Voices: Journal of the American Academy of Psychotherapists, NewVerseNews, Ekphrastic Review, Lighten Up Online and elsewhere.  Her first chapbook, Out of Order, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020.   As a therapist, both her psychological curiosity and her love of a good story are continually stimulated and refreshed.  Having been raised in a family of political junkies and activists in the Washington DC area, political and cultural issues infuse her poetry.  She lives in Bethesda, Maryland where she alternates between sputtering outrage and gobsmacked wonder. Her latest book Watching from the Bleachers (Finishing Line Press, 2024) unites these two tendencies.

Majda Gama was born in Beirut to a Saudi father and American mother. Her hometown is Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and her roots Hijazi, but she also has a long, complicated relationship with Northern Virginia where her father was stationed in the 1970's. Majda is the award-winning author of the debut book In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls (Wandering Aengus Press) and The Call of Paradise, (Two Sylvia’s chapbook prize). Her poetry has been honored with the Graybeal-Gowen award for Virginia poets from Shenandoah, and the Gregory Djanikian scholar award for poetry from Adroit. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Swamp Pink, TriQuarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly.