[How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder]

Simone Muench is the author of five poetry books including Wolf Centos (2014), Orange Crush (2010), and Lampblack & Ash (2005), all from Sarabande Books. Lampblack & Ash won the 2004 Kathryn A. Morton Prize. Her collaborative sonnets written with Dean Rader have been published or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review , Zyzzyva , New American Writing , and POOL , among others. Her chapbook Trace (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) won the fall 2012 Black River Chapbook Competition. She has been the recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry, a 2013 Yaddo artists’ residency, two Illinois Arts Council Fellowships, and two Vermont Studio Center Fellowships, among others. She earned a PhD from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She directs the writing program at Lewis University where she serves as chief faculty advisor for Jet Fuel Review . Photo by Chiyoko Yoshida

Dean Rader’s most recent book, Landscape Portrait Figure Form (Omnidawn Publishing, 2014), was named by the Barnes & Noble Review as one of the best poetry books of the year. His debut collection of poems, Works & Days (Truman State University Press, 2010), won the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry. Rader edited the 2013 poetry collection 99 Poems for the 99 Percent: An Anthology of Poetry (The Press). He is a professor of English at the University of San Francisco. Photo by Gavin Rader