Jim Daniels is the author of six fiction collections, seventeen poetry collections, and four produced screenplays, and has edited five anthologies, including Challenges to the Dream: The Best of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Writing Awards. Honors and awards he has received include the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. A native of Detroit, Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
M. L. Liebler is the author of fifteen books and has been on faculty in the English department at Wayne State University since 1980. He is an internationally known and widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist, and arts organizer. He received the 2017–2018 Murray E. Jackson Scholar in the Arts Award at Wayne State University, the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award in 2010, and the 2018 PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. He is currently the President of the Detroit Writers’ Guild.