Peter Balakian is the author of 9 books of poems and 4 books of prose and 3 collaborative translations and several edited books. Ozone Journal won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and his forthcoming book of poems is New York Trilogy (Fall 2025). His poems have appeared widely in the leading magazines and journals in English for decades. His prose books include Vice and Shadow: Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture; Black Dog of Fate, a memoir—winner of the 1998 PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for the Art of the Memoir (a best book of the year for the New York Times, the LA Times and Publisher’s Weekly); The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times Notable Book and a New York Times Best Seller. His collaborative translation of Grigoris Balakian’s Armenian Golgotha: A Memoir of the Armenian Genocide was a Washington Post book of the year. Balakian is the recipient of many awards and prizes and civic citations: the Pulitzer Prize, The Presidential Medal and the Movses Horanatsi Medal from the Republic of Armenia, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, The Spendlove Prize for Social Justice, Tolerance and Diplomacy (recipients include President Carter); and The Emily Clark Balch Prize for poetry from the Virginia Quarterly Review. He has appeared widely on national television and radio (PBS, NPR, ABC, CNN, Charlie Rose, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, 60 Minutes, etc) and his work has been translated into many languages and editions and most recently into Tamil in 2025. Donovan McAbee is a poet, songwriter and essayist. His work has appeared in The New York Times, TIME magazine, The Hudson Review, The Sun Magazine (US), Garden & Gun, Poetry London, and a variety of other places. He grew up in a small town in South Carolina, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in Creative Writing and Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and their two children and works as Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University. His poetry collection Holy the Body is set to be released by Texas Review Press in February 2026.