Tony Hoagland was born in 1953 in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. His father was an Army doctor, and Hoagland grew up on various military bases throughout the South. He currently teaches at the University of Houston.

His first collection, Sweet Ruin (1992), won the Brittingham Prize in Poetry. His second, Donkey Gospel (1998), won the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets. The third, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was shortlisted for a National Book Circle Critics Award. His first UK book of poems, What Narcissism Means to Me: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005) drew upon these three collections, and was followed by Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty (2010). He has also published Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf Press, USA, 2006).

He won the 2008 Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded by Poets & Writers magazine. In 2005 he received the O.B. Hardison Jr. Prize, awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library; this is the only national prize to recognise a poet's teaching as well as his art. Hoagland also received the 2005 Mark Twain Award, given by the Poetry Foundation in recognition of a poet's contribution to humour in American poetry; of this award Stephen Young said, 'There is nothing escapist or diversionary about Tony Hoagland’s poetry. Here’s misery, death, envy, hypocrisy, and vanity. But the still sad music of humanity is played with such a light touch on an instrument so sympathetically tuned that one can’t help but laugh. Wit and morality rarely consort these days; it’s good to see them happily, often hilariously reunited in the winner’s poetry.'

Jane Hirshfield was born in 1953 in New York and lives in northern California. Her first book of poetry published in the UK was Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), which draws on her collections Alaya (1982), Of Gravity & Angels (1988), The October Palace (1994), The Lives of the Heart (1997) and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001). This was followed by two later collections, After (Bloodaxe Books, 2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Come, Thief (Bloodaxe Books, 2012). In 2008 Bloodaxe published Jane Hirshfield's lectures Hiddenness, Surprise, Uncertainty: Three Generative Energies of Poetry (Newcastle/ Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures).

Jane Hirshfield edited the bestselling anthology Women in Praise of the Sacred (1994), and co-translated The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono No Komachi and Izumi Shikibu (1988) – another bestseller in the States – and, with Robert Bly, Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004). Her own poetry was translated into Polish by Czeslaw Milosz, who also wrote the introduction to her Polish Selected Poems. She has won numerous literary awards.

appeared widely in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry Review, Poetry and The Irish Times. Her translations of contemporary French fiction and memoir are published with Riverhead/Penguin Books. Her other awards include a Berlin Prize Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a Lannan Foundation Award. She has lived in Paris since 1987, and teaches writing and literature at Skidmore College’s program and the French graduate school, the École Polytechnique.

Selima Hill (née Wood) was born in 1945 in Hampstead, London, into a creative family; both her parents were artists, as were her grandparents. She lived in various rural locations in England and Wales during her childhood, and went to boarding school before winning a scholarship to study Moral Sciences at New Hall College, Cambridge in 1965. After marrying in 1968 and starting a family in the 1970s, Selima published her first collection of poetry, Saying Hello at the Station, in 1984.
After winning the Cholmondeley Award for Poetry in 1986, Selima won the Arvon International Poetry Competition in 1989 for parts of her collection The Accumulation of Small Acts of Kindness, first published in 1988. In 1997, her collection Violet was shortlisted for three British poetry awards: the Forward Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Whitbread Poetry Award. She was also shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize for her 2001 collection, Bunny, which won her the Whitbread Poetry Award. Her work has been recognised numerous times by the Poetry Book Society; her collections Violet (1997) and Bunny (2001) were both Poetry Book Society Choices, and her collections Lou Lou (2004) and The Hat (2008) were also Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Her pamphlet collection Advice on Wearing Animal Prints (2010) won the Michael Marks Awards for Poetry Pamphlets, and her 2012 collection People Who Like Meatballs was also shortlisted for the Forward Prize and Costa Poetry award. Two of her latest collections, Jutland (2015) and The Magnitude of My Sublime Existence (2016) have also been shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and she received a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation for Jutland.
Selima has held various posts related to her work as a poet. In 1991, she was awarded a Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia, and was writer-in-residence at the Royal Festival Hall in 1992, and at the Science Museum in London in 1996. She has taught creative writing courses at hospitals and at HMP Norwich, and also been a tutor at Exeter and Devon Arts Centre in the 1990s. Selima taught at the Poetry School and Poetry Library in London's Southbank Centre in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and edited the collection Jumping Over Trees: Poems From the Poetry Library, London, published by the Poetry Library and Royal Festival Hall Education in 2000. During 2003–2006, Selima was awarded a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Exeter.
Selima also has undertaken various collaborative ventures during her career, exhibiting multimedia works at the Imperial War Museum, and working on projects with the Royal Ballet, Welsh National Opera, BBC Bristol, and British Council amongst others. Selima has regularly exhibited with artists, and in 2007, she worked with composer James Barrett and sculptor Bill Woodrow on an OperaGenesis project entitled Beekeeper, which took the form of a multimedia dance opera for which she wrote the libretto.

Rita Ann Higgins was born in 1955 in Galway, where she still lives. One of 13 children, she left school at 14, and was in her late 20s when she started writing poetry. She has since published nine books of poetry, including Sunny Side Plucked (Poetry Book Society Recommendation) (1996), An Awful Racket (2001), Throw in the Vowels: New & Selected Poems (2005) and Ireland Is Changing Mother (2011) from Bloodaxe, and Hurting God: Prose & Poems (2010) from Salmon. Throw in the Vowels was reissued in 2010 with an audio CD of her reading her poems. Her plays include Face Licker Come Home (1991), God of the Hatch Man (1992), Colie Lally Doesn’t Live in a Bucket (1993), Down All the Roundabouts (1999), The Plastic Bag (2008) and The Empty Frame (2008). Her many awards include a Peadar O’Donnell Award in 1989 and several Arts Council bursaries, and she is a member of Aosdána.