Jesse Graves is the author of six poetry collections, including Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine, Basin Ghosts, Specter Mountain, Merciful Days, the forthcoming volumes A Little Light in the Grave and Across the River of Waking Dreams. His book of prose, Said-Songs: Essays on Poetry and Place, was published in 2021. His work received the James Still Award for Writing about the Appalachian South from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, and two Weatherford Awards in Poetry from Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Graves has served as co-editor for several collections of poetry and scholarship, including four volumes of The Southern Poetry Anthology and The Complete Poetry of James Agee. He teaches at East Tennessee State University, where he is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English.

Robert Morgan is the author of several books of poems, including Terroir (2011) and Dark Energy (2015). To Honor the Imagined Whole: New Poems appeared in 2026. He has published twelve books of fiction, among them the New York Times bestseller Gap Creek, and, more recently, Chasing the North Star (2016), In the Snowbird Mountains and Other Stories (2023). His works of nonfiction include Lions of the West (2011), the national bestseller Boone: A Biography(2007). The Dead Alive and Busy: Selected Essays was published in 2026. Recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he is currently Kappa Alpha Professor of English (Emeritus) at Cornell University.