Willie Perdomo is the author of The Essential Hits of Shorty Bon Bon, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; Smoking Lovely, winner of the PEN Beyond Margins Award; and Where a Nickel Costs a Dime, a finalist for the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award.  He is currently a member of the VONA/Voices faculty and is an instructor in English at Phillips Exeter Academy. He is also a former instructor for BookUp, the National Book Foundation’s program for middle school students.

Katha Pollitt writes the award-winning column “Subject to Debate” for The Nation magazine. She is the author of two books of poetry, including Antarctic Traveller, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982, and The Mind-Body Problem. She is also the author of the nonfiction works Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism; Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories; Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time; and Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights.

Jan Weissmiller received an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was the winner of The Loess Hills Poetry Prize in 1999 for her collection In Divided Light and is an editor of A Poetry Criticism Reader (University of Iowa Press, 2006).  She was the first full-time employee of Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City.   In 2008, she and fellow poet Jane Mead bought the store from the original owner, James Harris.