Jane Lunin Perel is a Professor Emerita at Providence College, from which she holds an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts. After completing her MFA in Poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1971, Perel began a four-decade teaching career in English/Creative Writing, Holocaust Studies, and she was the founding director of the Women’s & Gender Studies Program. She also directed and later co-directed the Providence College Poetry and Fiction Series. Her collections of verse poetry include The Lone Ranger and the Neo-American Church, The Fishes, Blowing Kisses to the Sharks, and The Sea is Not Full. In 2012, she published a collection of prose poems called Red Radio Heart. Perel is working on her New & Selected Poems: Cash for Scrap. Along her travels, Perel was a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and has read her poetry at the Museum Frieder Burda in Heidelberg, Germany and Federico II University of Naples in Italy. Her studies of four concentration camps were co-funded by Providence College in order to enrich her teaching of the Holocaust.

At the College, she volunteered to create a program pairing PC students and elders of the St. Martin de Porres Senior Center. These paired writers co-wrote poems about similar memories of childhood, despite their age differences. These poems were published in a booklet titled Writing to Remember. Michael Mercurio was one of these students.

Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, Sewanee Writers' Conference, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and a graduate of the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson.  A Cave Canem fellow, his poems and prose have recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, The Critical Flame, Zocalo Public Square, and On the Seawall, among others.  He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as Poetry Editor for The Massachusetts Review. 

Jenna Baillargeon (she/her) is a chronically ill, queer, New England poet dually spellbound and vexed by the interconnectedness and isolation of bodies, especially those which reside outside of conventional expectation. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, PORT smith, Equinox, and Naugatuck River Review where she was a finalist for the 12th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest in 2020. Jenna earned her B.A. in creative writing and workshop praxis from Hampshire College and currently works as a poetic assistant and freelance editor.

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