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Jessy Randall’s collection of poems A Day in Boyland was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her other books include a young adult novel, The Wandora Unit, about poetry nerds in high school, and a collection of collaborative poems, Interruptions, written with Daniel M. Shapiro. Randall’s poems have been hung from trees, made into rock songs by garage bands, used in library advertisements, and sold in gumball machines. Her writing has appeared in Asimov’s, Flurb, Many Mountains Moving, McSweeney’s, Mudfish, Opium, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rattle, Sentence, West Wind, and Brain, Child. Randall writes regularly for Verbatim: The Language Quarterly about topics such as language in the Harry Potter series, rhyming reduplicative compounds, and the slang of Battlestar Galactica.
Timothy Donnelly is the author of two books of poetry, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, and The Cloud Corporation, the latter of which earned him the 2012 Kingsley Tufts Award. He earned a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from Princeton University. Donnelly’s poems have been published in anthologies such as Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, as well as magazines and journals including Harper’s, jubilat, The Nation, The Paris Review, PEN America, Ploughshares, TriQuartely and various others. He is an assistant professor and director of undergraduate creative writing at Columbia University. He is also the poetry editor for Boston Review. Donnelly is originally from Rhode Island but now lives in Brooklyn, New York with his wife and two daughters.
Tess Taylor grew up in El Cerrito, California, and attended Berkeley High School and Amherst College. She holds graduate degrees in writing from New York University and Boston University. Her chapbook of poems, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship, and her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Literary Imagination, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. She was the 2010-2011 Amy Clampitt Fellow in Lenox, Massachusetts. After 17 years away, she lives again in El Cerrito. Her book of poems, The Forage House, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press.