Susan Settlemyre Williams, Blackbird associate literary editor, holds an MFA in poetry from VCU, as well as a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a JD from the University of Richmond. She is retired from the practice of real estate law. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Shenandoah, Barrow Street, The Cream City Review, DIAGRAM, Calyx, Aethlon, and other journals; and her interviews and book reviews have appeared in several issues of Blackbird.  

Brigit Pegeen Kelly is the author of The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004); Song (1995), which was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and To The Place of Trumpets (1987), which was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. Her poems have appeared in many periodicals, including The Gettysburg Review, The Kenyon Review, and The Yale Review, and her work was chosen for the 1993 and 1994 volumes of The Best American Poetry. Her many honors include a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award, as well as fellowships from the Illinois State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts. She is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  

Photo by Alex Kolodkin