David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. His books of poetry include The Morning Line, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. He has written such nonfiction books as Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man. He lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York.

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry including the forthcoming collection The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020), Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), Holding Company (Norton: 2010), Hoops(Norton: 2006) and Leaving Saturn (University of Georgia: 2002), finalist of a National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in Agni, American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.