Sean Pears's academic research focuses on literature and rhetoric in the United States, particularly the aesthetics and politics of Reconstruction. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in English Literary History, The Arizona Quarterly, and The Emily Dickinson Journal. He has also published reviews and essays in Jacket2, The Denver Quarterly, Fanzine, and elsewhere. His edited collection of essays about poetics at the University at Buffalo, At Buffalo: The Invention of a New American Poetry (2020), was published by Lake Forest Press. 

Kimberly A. Collins is the author of a book of poems, Bessie’s Resurrection (Indolent Books, 2019), and a book of essays, Choose You! Wednesday Wisdom to Wake Your Soul (CreateSpace, 2017). She attended Spelman College and holds a BA from Trinity University, a MA in American and African American literature from Howard University and MFA in poetry from Spalding University. Collins’s poems have appeared in Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Black Magnolias, Berkeley Poetry Review, and the Women Artists 2017 Datebook, and in the anthologies Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary Pragmatism of Black Women, Fingernails Across the Chalkboard: Poetry and Prose on HIV/AIDS from the Black Diaspora, The Nubian Gallery, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, and 50/50: Poems and Translations by Womxn Over 50. Collins is a Callaloo Fellow, and teaches English and creative writing at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Her poem, “Remember My Name” has become a staple of annual Domestic Awareness Month observances.