Laura Shovan is a children's author, educator, and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet. Her chapbook Mountain, Log, Salt, and Stone won the inaugural Harriss Poetry Prize. Her work regularly appears in journals and anthologies for children and adults. Laura's middle grade novel-in-verse, The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary, won multiple awards, including NCTE Notable Verse Novel. Her novel Takedown was selected for Junior Library Guild, PJ Our Way, and the ALA's Amelia Bloomer/Rise Feminist Books Project. A Place at the Table, written with author/activist Saadia Faruqi, is a Sydney Taylor Notable. Laura is a longtime poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council and serves on the faculty of VCFA's MFA program in Writing for Children and Young adults. www.laurashovan.com Michael Rothenberg was a poet, editor, artist, and publisher of the online literary magazine BigBridge.org, co-founder of 100 thousand Poets for Change (www.100tpc.org), The "Read A Poem To A Child" Initiative, and co-founder of Poets In Need, a non-profit501(c), assisting poets in crisis. He published over 20 books of poetry, most recently The Pillars (Quaranzine Press) and Drawing the Shade (Dos Madres Press). His editorial work includes several volumes in the Penguin Poets series: Overtime by Philip Whalen, As Ever by Joanne Kyger, David's Copy by David Meltzer, and Way More West by Ed Dorn. He was also editor of The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen published by Wesleyan University Press. He was Florida State University Library's Poet in Residence. His most recent book of poetry, In Memory of A Banyan Tree, Poems of the Outside World, 1985-2020, (Lost Horse Press) published in 2022.