Hugh Martin grew up in northeast Ohio and served six years in the Army National Guard as an M1A1 Tanker. A veteran of the Iraq War, Hugh is the author of In Country (BOA Editions, 2018), The Stick Soldiers (BOA Editions, 2013, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize) and So, How Was the War (Kent State University Press, 2010). He carries degrees from Muskingum University and Arizona State University. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, a Sewanee Writers’ Conference Fellowship, and a Yaddo Residency, he was the inaugural winner of the Iowa Review Jeff Sharlet Award for Veterans. His essays and poetry have appeared in PBS NewsHour, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Grantland, American Poetry Review, and The Kenyon Review. He was the 2014-15 Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College and is currently teaching at Ohio University where he’s completing a Ph.D in creative writing.
Cornelius Eady is a poet, playwright and musician born in Rochester, NY. He is Co-founder of Cave Canem and is Professor of English and Chair of Excellence in Poetry at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (winner of the Lamont Prize), The Gathering of My Name, Hardheaded Weather and Brutal Imagination, (finalist for The National Book Award in Poetry). He has collaborated with jazz composer Deidre Murray in the production of several works of theater, including You Don’t Miss Your Water, Running Man (finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999), Fangs, and Brutal Imagination (winner of the Oppenheimer Award). His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and he was The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.
