Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of five poetry collections, including The Gospel of Barbecue, Red Clay Suite, and The Age of Phillis, which was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry and won a 2021 NAACP Image Award. Critic at Large for The Kenyon Review and a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, Jeffers has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society. Additionally, Jeffers has been honored with the Harper Lee Award for Literary Distinction and with induction into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. An instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah Book Club selection, her debut novel The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois chronicles the centuries-spanning journey of a Black American family from the days of the colonial slave trade to our own unsteady era.

The director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Kevin Young is also the poetry editor for The New Yorker, where he hosts the Poetry Podcast. He is the author of the poetry collections Brown, Blue Laws, Book of Hours, and Jelly Roll, a finalist for the National Book Award. His nonfiction books include Bunk and The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The former director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library, Young has been honored with the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry, an American Book Award, and the Paterson Poetry Prize. Stones is the newest collection from Young, “one of the poetry stars of his generation” (Los Angeles Times).