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, storySouth, Aethlon, and other journals; and her interviews and book reviews have appeared in several issues of Blackbird.  

Brian Teare is a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, his poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Boston Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Pleiades, and the Colorado Review. The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin, 2003) won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry.