Susan Settlemyre Williams, Blackbird associate literary editor, is an MFA student in poetry at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a JD from the University of Richmond, and is retired from the practice of real estate law. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, DIAGRAM, Aethlon, Calyx, Earth's Daughters, and other journals; and her interviews and book reviews have appeared in several issues of Blackbird.  

Joy Katz held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. She has taught literature and writing at Stanford and at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received her MFA. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Antioch Review, Chelsea, Fence, and Southwest Review. Fabulae was awarded first prize in the 2001 Crab Orchard Award Series Open Competition from Southern Illinois University Press. Katz was trained in industrial design and works in Manhattan as a graphic designer, editor, and writer.