Gillian Conoley (born 1955) is an American poet, the author of seven collections of poetry. Her work has been anthologized widely, most recently in Norton’s American Hybrid, Counterpath’s Postmodern Lyricisms, Mondadori’s Nuova Poesia Americana (Italian), and Best American Poetry. Conoley's poetry has appeared in Conjunctions, New American Writing, American Poetry Review, The Canary, A Public Space, Carnet de Rouge, Jacket, Or, Fence, Verse, Ironwood, jubilat, Zyzzyva, Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, the Missouri Review and other publications. A recipient of the Jerome J. Seshtack Poetry Prize from The American Poetry Review, as well as several Pushcart Prizes, she is Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Sonoma State University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt. She has taught as a Visiting Poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, the University of Denver, Vermont College, and Tulane University.

Conoley's work is difficult to classify into any discrete poetic category. Haunted by narrative, linguistically alive, the work is inventive and exploratory, certainly influenced by such movements as Language Poetry and the French Symbolists, Conoley's poems are often meditations on culture which may contain multiple dictions and narrative directions. Language itself seems to be of particular interest. Barbara Guest has said of her work, "The poems of Gillian Conoley lead us up to then step just out of sight where an ordinary sign begins. They beckon us from where an invisible power distorts; a sudden view appears of innocence aslant."

Henri Michaux (24 May 1899 – 19 October 1984) was a highly idiosyncratic Belgian-born poet, writer, and painter who wrote in French. He later took French citizenship. Michaux is best known for his esoteric books written in a highly accessible style, and his body of work includes poetry, travelogues, and art criticism. Michaux travelled widely, tried his hand at several careers, and experimented with drugs, the latter resulting in two of his most intriguing works, Miserable Miracle and The Major Ordeals of the Mind and the Countless Minor Ones.

In 1930–1931, Henri Michaux visited Japan, China and India. The result of this trip is the book A Barbarian in Asia. Oriental culture became one of his biggest influences. The philosophy of Buddhism, and Oriental calligraphy, later became principal subjects of many of his poems and inspired many of his drawings.

He also traveled to Africa and to the American continent, where he visited Ecuador and published the book Ecuador. His travels across the Americas finished in Brazil in 1939, and he stayed there for two years.

Donald Revell (b. 1954, Bronx, New York) is an American poet, essayist, translator and professor.

Revell has won numerous honors and awards for his work, beginning with his first book, From the Abandoned Cities, which was a National Poetry Series winner. More recently, he won the 2004 Lenore Marshall Award and is a two-time winner of the PEN Center USA Award in poetry. He has also received the Gertrude Stein Award, two Shestack Prizes, two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as from the Ingram Merrill and Guggenheim Foundations. His most recent book is The Bitter Withy (Alice James Books, 2009). He also recently published his translation of Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell (Omnidawn Publishing, 2007).

Revell has taught at the Universities of Tennessee, Missouri, Iowa, Alabama, Colorado, and Utah. He currently teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He lives in Las Vegas with his wife, poet Claudia Keelan, and their children. In addition to his writing, translating, and teaching, Revell was Editor of Denver Quarterly from 1988–94, and has been a poetry editor of Colorado Review since 1996.

Dean Rader is an American writer, blogger, poet, and professor who teaches at the University of San Francisco. He is primarily known for his scholarly work on Native American poetry. In 2008, his blog, The Weekly Rader, got some attention in the blogosphere when one of his posts, [1] grading President Bush's State of the Union Speech, "graded" President George W. Bush's speech like it was a student paper. In April 2008, Rader's blog got even more attention as he was one of the first to write about the web sensation Stuff White People Like.

Rader is also a well-published poet who won two major poetry prizes in 2010. His poem "Hesiod in Oklahoma, 1934" won the Sow's Ear Review poetry prize, judged by Kelly Cherry. The Sow's Ear Prize, with a purse of $1,000, is among the most lucrative awards for a single poem. Rader's debut poetry collection, Works and Days, won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize judged by Claudia Keelan. Awarded for the best unpublished collection of poems, the award is the only domestic poetry prize sanctioned by Eliot's widow. It carries a purse of $2,000 and publication by Truman State University Press. Works & Days was also named a finalist for the Bob Bush Memorial First Book Award, and it won the Writer's League of Texas Book Award for Poetry.

Rusty Morrison is an American poet and publisher. She received a BA in English from Mills College in Oakland, California, an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, and an MA in Education from California State University, San Francisco. She has taught in the MFA program at the University of San Francisco, and was Poet in Residence at Saint Mary’s College in 2009. She has also served as a visiting poet at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Redlands, Redlands, California; University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona; Boise State University, Boise, Idaho; Marylhurst University, Marylhurst, Oregon, and Milikin University, Decatur, Illinois. In 2001, Morrison and her husband, Ken Keegan, founded Omnidawn Publishing in Richmond, California and continue to work as co-publishers. She contracted Hepatitis C in her twenties and has spent much of her poetic career on the forefront of the literary study of disability.

Because her disability has greatly affected Morrison's life, it is no surprise that her affliction has worked its way into her poetics. Morrison believes her poetry functions as translations. In essence, she feels that her work–––in a seemingly therapeutic manner–––translates bodily pain (the language of the body) into spoken and written language. In the anthology Beauty is a Verb, Morrison writes, "As a poet, I have experienced directly the ways that a formal constraint can hone the clarity, intensity, and inspired power of a writing project. In similar ways, a physical constraint, such as illness, can engender surprising perceptual attunement in the body" (Morrison 325).