Susan Settlemyre Williams, Blackbird associate literary editor, holds an MFA in poetry from VCU. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in River City, Shenandoah, Barrow Street, The Cream City Review, DIAGRAM, storySouth, and other journals. She has also published book reviews, both in Review Revue and regularly in Blackbird. Her book-length manuscript Ashes in Midair has been a finalist in several recent competitions. She is retired from the practice of real estate law.  

Linda Bierds’s seventh book of poetry, First Hand, was published in 2005 by Putnam. Her other six volumes include The Seconds (Putnam, 2001); The Profile Makers (1997), The Ghost Trio (1994), Heart and Perimeter (1991), and The Stillness, the Dancing (1988), all from Henry Holt; and Flights of the Harvest-Mare (Ahsahta, 1985). Her prizes include the PEN/West Poetry Award and the Washington State Governor’s Writers Award (both for The Profile Makers), two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, four Pushcart Prizes, the Consuelo Ford Award from the Poetry Society of America, a 1995 Notable Book Selection from the American Library Association (for The Ghost Trio), and fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Artist Trust Foundation of Washington, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 1998 she was named a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her poems appear in such journals as The Atlantic Monthly, FIELD, Gulf Coast, The Journal, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Yorker, TriQuarterly, and The Virginia Quarterly Review, which awarded her the Emily Clark Balch Prize for Poetry in 2004. She is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington.  

Photo by Mary Levin

Victoria Chang’s first book of poetry, Circle, won the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry (Southern Illinois University, 2005). Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2005, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, Threepenny Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Slate, and others. She edited the anthology Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois, 2004) and resides in Los Angeles, where she is completing the PhD Program in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California.  

Photo by Todd Terlecki