Chrissy Kolaya is a poet and fiction writer, author of Charmed Particles: a novel and two books of poems: Any Anxious Body and Other Possible Lives. Her work has been included in the anthologies New Sudden Fiction (Norton), Fiction on a Stick (Milkweed Editions), and Stone, River, Sky: An Anthology of Georgia Poems, as well as in a number of literary journals.

She has received a Norman Mailer Writers Colony summer scholarship, an Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies fellowship, a Loft Mentor Series Award in Poetry, and grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Lake Region Arts Council, and the University of Minnesota. As one of the co-founders of the Prairie Gate Literary Festival, she worked to develop the literary arts community in rural western Minnesota. She now teaches creative writing at the University of Central Florida.

Kris Bigalk (pronounced BEE-yahk) is a writer and professor based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Her second collection of poetry, Enough, was released in the fall of 2019 from NYQ Books; her first collection, Repeat the Flesh in Numbers, was released in 2012 from NYQ Books. Bigalk has published poetry in many literary magazines and anthologies, and also regularly publishes creative nonfiction and reviews. She has won two Minnesota State Arts Board Individual Artist grants in poetry. Kris founded and now directs the groundbreaking AFA in Creative Writing program at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minnesota. She now serves as the Midwest Council Chair on the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Board of Trustees.