Diann Blakely, the author of three poetry collections, is a graduate of both the University of the South and Vanderbilt University. She studied at New York University, Harvard, and Boston University before earning an MFA from Vermont College. While still a work in progress, Cities of Flesh and the Dead, from which this poem is excerpted, won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award.

John Egerton is an independent journalist and nonfiction author who lives in Nashville, Tennessee. His books include The Americanization of Dixie (1974), Generations (1983), Southern Food (1987), and Speak Now Against the Day (1994), for which he received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. His only work of fiction, Ali Dubyiah and the Forty Thieves, is a political satire.

Beth Bachmann‘s first book, Temper, won the AWP Award Series 2008 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, and Tin House, among other journals. She teaches creative writing at Vanderbilt University.

Marilyn Kallet is the author of 14 books, which include translations, children’s books, personal essays, literary criticism, and anthologies of women’s writing. She teaches creative writing at the University of Tennessee, as well as poetry-writing workshops in Auvillar, France, for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.