Christian Barter is a poet working and writing in Bar Harbor, Maine.  For the past thirty-five years, he has worked for the National Park Service at Acadia National Park as a trail crew supervisor, project manager, arborist, heavy equipment operator, dry stone mason, and specialist in park matters related to Americans with disabilities. He has published three previous collections of poetry, and has served as the Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park and as a Hodder Fellow in Creative Writing at Princeton University. His poems have been published in Ploughshares, Tin House, New Letters, Georgia Review, The American Scholar and Downeast and featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writers Almanac, and on the websites of the PBS Newshour and The Academy of American Poets. He recently released an album of original songs using text from Tennyson’s “In Memoriam, A.H.H.”

Richard Foerster was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1949, the son of German immigrants. He holds degrees in English literature from Fordham College and the University of Virginia. His numerous honors include the “Discovery”/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize, a Maine Arts Commission Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowships—as well as two Maine Literary Awards for Poetry. Since the late 1970s, his work has appeared widely in magazines and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, TriQuarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, and Poetry. His eighth book, Boy on a Doorstep: New and Selected Poems, received the 2020 Poetry by the Sea Book Award. Foerster has worked as a lexicographer, educational writer, typesetter, teacher, and editor of the literary magazines Chelsea and Chautauqua Literary Journal. He lives in a former Nazarene church in Eliot, Maine, with his partner, the artist Douglas Taylor.

Jeri Theriault’s recent awards include the 2023 Maine Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship, the 2023 Monson Arts Fellowship, and the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review). Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The Atlanta Review, The Asheville Review, Plume, and many other publications. Her recent collections are Radost, my red, (M)other, and Self-Portrait as Homestead. She is the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic. Jeri lives in South Portland, Maine.

Kathleen Sullivan is the co-editor of A Dangerous New World. Her poems also appeared in Balancing Act 2.  She is a clinical social worker and lives in Freeport and Addison.