Ron Smith is Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher's School in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, judged "a close second" for the National Poetry Series Open Competition by Margaret Atwood. The book's title poem was awarded Southern Poetry Review's Guy Owen Award by judge Linda Pastan, and the collection was subsequently published by University Presses of Florida. Smith's poems have also won Poetry Northwest's Theodore Roethke Prize, and in 2000 his poem "The Teachers Pass the Popcorn" was nominated by The Georgia Review for a Pushcart Prize. More than a hundred of his poems have appeared in periodicals, including The Nation, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, New England Review, College English, and Kansas Quarterly, and in anthologies published by Wesleyan University Press, Time-Life Books, The University of Georgia Press, and University of Illinois Press. Most recently, his eighteen-piece poetic sequence "To Ithaca" appeared in the Summer 2002 issue of The Georgia Review.  

Photo by Eric Dobbs

Stephen Dunn is the author of twelve collections of poetry. In addition to Local Visitations (Norton, 2003), they include Different Hours (winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), Loosestrife (1996, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award); New and Selected Poems, 1974-1994 (1995), Landscape at the End of the Century (1991), and Between Angels (1989), all from Norton; Local Time (William Morrow, 1986, winner of The National Poetry Series); Not Dancing (1984), Work & Love (1981), A Circus of Needs (1978), and Full Of Lust And Good Usage (1976), all from Carnegie-Mellon; and Looking For Holes In The Ceiling (University of Massachusetts Press, 1974). He has also written Riffs & Reciprocities: Prose Pairs (Norton, 1997) and Walking Light: Memoirs and Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2001).

Dunn holds an MA in Creative Writing from Syracuse University. Among his many awards and grants are the Academy Award in Literature, the James Wright Prize, The Iowa Review Subscribers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and Distinguished Artist Fellowship and Creative Writing Fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.