Kaliis Smith is a writer and musician who does other things also. She went to school in Colorado and Ohio and now lives in Western Massachusetts. She wrote a book of poetry once, but with luck, it is lost to the annals of time. If you are driving through the Pioneer Valley, you can sometimes hear her on 93.9 WRSI: The River, expounding way too much about how much she loves cluster chords. She is also in many bands, and you should come to see one of those if they are playing nearby. Bring your earplugs. She has no kids of her own, but will gladly borrow yours if you need a night off.
Photo credit: Julian Parker-Burns

Kelly Link is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk! and Monstrous Affections. Kelly is the co-founder, with her husband Gavin, of Small Beer Press. The couple recently purchased White Square Books in Easthampton and opened Book Moon last fall.

Photo Credit: Sharona Jacobs Photography

Lesléa Newman (she/her) has created 75 books for readers of all ages including the dual memoir-in-verse I Carry My Mother and I Wish My Father; the novel-in-verse October Mourning: A Song For Matthew Shepard; and the children’s books Heather Has Two Mommies, Sparkle Boy, and Gittel’s’s Journey An Ellis Island Story. Her literary awards include poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, the National Jewish Book Award, the Massachusetts Book Award, two American Library Association Stonewall Honors, and the Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work award. From 2008 – 2010, she served as the poet laureate of Northampton.

Michael Favala Goldman is a poet, a jazz clarinetist, and a widely-published translator of Danish literature. Among his sixteen translated books are The Water Farm Trilogy by Cecil Bødker and Dependency by Tove Ditlevsen (a Penguin Classic). His first book of original poetry, Who Has Time For This? was published in 2020. He lives in Northampton, MA, where he has been running bi-monthly poetry critique groups since 2018.