Elizabeth Alexander is a leading American poet whose work has been inspired by a wide range of influence, from history, literature, art and music, dreams and stories to the ‘rich infinity’ of the African American experience. She was born in New York City and grew up in Washington, DC. She is a poet, essayist, playwright, teacher and scholar of African-American literature and culture, and has given readings and lectures on African-American literature and culture in many countries.

She has published four collections in the States: The Venus Hottentot (1990), Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001) and American Sublime (2005), as well as a collection of essays on African American artistic life through literature, painting, film and popular media, The Black Interior (Graywolf, 2004). Her first British publication, American Blue: Selected Poems 2006), draws on all these. The anthology Bloodaxe Poetry Introductions: 1 (2006) includes a selection of her poems with extracts from an interview and an essay on African American poetry. Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies & Little Misses of Color, a collaboration with poet Marilyn Nelson and artist Floyd Cooper, was published by Worksong in 2007. She has been filmed reading a selection of her work for the DVD-anthology In Person: 30 Poets (Bloodaxe, 2008).

Elizabeth Alexander lives in New Haven, Connecticut, and is Professor of African-American Studies at Yale University. In January 2009 she read the inaugural poem for the swearing-in of President Barack Obama.

Joseph Allen, also known as Gary Allen, was born in Ballymena, County Antrim in 1961.

His first poetry collection, Languages was published in 2002, and a second poetry collection, Landscaping , was published in 2003.

Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent much of her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne, and now lives in Co. Durham. Her collections Nantucket and the Angel and Lintel were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and Lintel was a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her Bloodaxe retrospective, How the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems (2007), draws on six published books plus a new collection, Wolflight, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her latest collection is indwelling (2013). She has also published Berthing: A Poetry Workbook (NEC/Virago, 1991), and was co-editor of The New British Poetry (Paladin, 1988) and formerly poetry editor of City Limits. She received the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award in 2005.

Maram al-Masri was born in Latakia, Syria, in 1962, and has lived in France since 1982. She has published three collections in Arabic, and her poems have been translated into many languages, with books published in French and Spanish.