David Baker is a poet, critic, literary editor, and educator. The most recent of his books are Transit (2026), Whale Fall (2022), and Swift: New and Selected Poems, from W. W. Norton. He coedited Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly, published in 2025, also from Norton. Baker’s poems and essays appear widely in American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, The Nation, New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and elsewhere. He grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, holds degrees from UCM (Warrensburg) and University of Utah, and currently divides his time between Granville, Ohio, and Hudson, New York.
Mary Troy is the author of six books of fiction–four collections of short stories and two novels: In The SkyLord,Swimming on Hwy N , Beauties, Cookie Lily, The Alibi Cafe and other stories, and Joe Baker Is Dead. She has won the Lyon College Leila Lenore Heasley Prize as a “distinguished representative of American and international letters,” the USA Book award for literary fiction, the Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award, a Nelson Algren award, a William Rockhill Nelson award, and more.
Wayne Couttois: A graduate of the MFA Program at the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Courtois is author of a memoir, A Report from Winter; a novel, Tales My Body Told Me; and two erotic novels, My Name Is Rand and In the Time of Solution 9. His first poetry collection, The Old Ambassador and Other Poems, was published in 2023. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in journals including The Greensboro Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly, Assaracus, Jonathan, and The I-70 Review; in the webzines suspect thoughts: a journal of subversive writing and Velvet Mafia; and in anthologies such as The Shining Years, Gimme Your Lunch Money, Best Gay Erotica, and Hibernation and Other Poems by Bear Bards. His nonfiction has appeared in I Do/I Don’t: Queers on Marriage; Walking Higher: Gay Men Write about the Deaths of Their Mothers; and The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered.
