Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney), The Feel Trio and The Little Edges. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Moten’s field is black study, where he works at the intersection of poetry, critical theory, and literary and performance studies. He is interested in the poetics of black social life and the social life of art.

Michael Palmer, poet and translator, has lived in San Francisco since 1969. He has worked with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company for over forty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. His most recent collections are Active Boundaries (Selected Essays and Talks), (New Directions, 2008), Madman With Broom (selected poems with Chinese translations by Yunte Huang, Oxford University Press, 2011), and Thread, (New Directions, 2011). His new book of poems, The Laughter of the Sphinx, is scheduled for publication from New Directions in 2015. He has taught at various universities in the United States, Europe and Asia, and in May of 2012 received the Arts and Letters Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Previously, among other awards, he received the Shelley Memorial Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the Wallace Stevens Prize from the Academy of American Poets and a Guggenheim Fellowship. From 1999 to 2004 he was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His work has been translated into over thirty languages.