Karen Weiser is the author of two full length collections of poetry: the recently released Or, The Ambiguities and To Light Out (UDP), as well as chapbooks Dear Pierre (Well Greased Press), Placefullness (UDP), and Pitching Woo (Cy Press). She was recently awarded a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency, a Process Space residency through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship in Poetry. She is currently working on the libretto for an opera (“You Who Made the Heavens Incline”) in collaboration with composer Peter Gilbert. It is about one of the first great composers, Kassia, a 9th century Byzantine nun/ She lives in New York City where she teaches and writes on 19th century American Literature.

Amy Parker was born in Okinawa, Japan, and spent most of her childhood on diplomatic and military compounds overseas. She returned to the United States after her high school graduation and attended Indiana University, where she studied comparative literature. She won a Michener fellowship in fiction from the University of Texas, Austin. Afterward, she spent four years doing intensive monastic practice at Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, the oldest Soto Zen monastery in the United States, and at Green Gulch Farm and Zen Center in Mill Valley, California.