Steve Bellin-Oka’s first book of poems, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost, won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and was published in 2020 by the University of North Texas Press. He is also the author of four chapbooks, including Tell Me Exactly What You Saw and What You Think It Means, winner of the 2020 Blue Mountain Review LGBQT Chapbook Contest, and Proviso (Paper Machine Press, 2022), a text/image collaboration with the painter Kristen Tomecek. His work has earned him fellowships from Yaddo, the National Parks Arts Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Crosstown Arts Center. He has also been a translation scholar at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He has taught poetry writing and literature at Ripon College, the University of Mississippi, and St. Norbert College. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow in poetry and translation.

Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. The author of five poetry collections including Copper Yearning, Apprenticed to Justice, and Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance, Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and her monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition was the first native-authored book-length study of an Indigenous author. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have been included in exhibits such as “Ancient Light,” “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, Blaeser is an Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist who grew up on the reservation. She is the recipient of a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas and a Wisconsin Library Association Notable Author award for her body of literary works as well as awards and fellowships from Wisconsin Arts Board, Wisconsin Humanities Council, Tribal College Journal, and Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters among others. A Professor Emerita at UW—Milwaukee and MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts, Blaeser is an editorial board member for the University of Nebraska Press “American Indian Lives” series, serves on the Poetry Coalition of the Academy of American Poets and on the boards of directors of Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. Her writing is included in 100+ anthologies with selections translated into multiple languages including Chinese, Spanish, Norwegian, Indonesian, Hungarian, French, Slovene, Armenian, and Anishinaabemowin. Blaeser has performed at 400+ in-person and virtual venues around the globe from arctic Norway to the Kingdom of Bahrain. She lives in rural Wisconsin; and, for portions of each year, in a water-access cabin near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. http://kblaeser.org