Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter, and critic from Northern Ireland. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Feel Free (2019) and Go Giants (2013), and the children's book Weirdo (2021), written in collaboration with his wife Zadie Smith. Awards include the Betty Rask Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He won the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2022 for Up Late, an elegy for his father. A new collection is forthcoming in 2023. He holds the Seamus Heaney Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. 

Stephen Sexton is a poet. His debut collection If All the World and Love Were Young (Penguin, 2019) won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the E.M. Forster Prize, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and the John Pollard Poetry Prize. Other awards include the UK National Poetry Competition, and an Eric Gregory Award. His second collection Cheryl's Destinies (Penguin, 2021) was shortlisted for the Forward Best Collection Prize. Stephen teaches poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s. 

Jenny Browne is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Trinity University and the author of four books of poems. Her most recent collection is Fellow Travelers: New and Selected Poems (TCU Press, 2020). A former James Michener Fellow at the University of Texas in Austin, she has received the Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and two Literature Fellowships from the Texas Writers League. Her poems and essays have appeared widely, most recently in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Copper Nickel, Oxford American, The Nation and The New York Times.  She served concurrent terms as the 2016-2018 City of San Antonio Poet Laureate, and the 2017-2018 State of Texas Poet Laureate.