Jeannine Dobbs has a Ph.D. in English and an M.A. in Language and Linguistics from the University of New Hampshire. She has taught ESL at all levels in university, public school and adult education programs. Her articles on teaching ESL have appeared in the TESOL Journal and College ESL, and her book Using the Board in the Language Classroom was published by Cambridge University Press.

Kinereth Gensler grew up in Chicago and Jerusalem. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago and her M.A. from Columbia University. She lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts and taught in the Radcliffe Seminars for more than twenty years. In addition to her three volumes of poetry with Alice James Books, she was co-author with Nina Nyhart of The Poetry Connection, a text for teaching poetry writing to children.

Elizabeth Knies is the author of five collections of poetry, including The New Year & Other Poems (1975); Streets After Rain (1980); From the Window (1985); White Peonies (2001); Going and Coming Back (2007). A native of Pennsylvania, she won the Sarah Homer Prize for Creative Writing from Allegheny College, her undergraduate alma mater. After completing a master's degree in English Language and Linguistics at the University of New Hampshire, she taught for two and a half years at Shoin Women's University in Kobe, Japan. Subsequent teaching positions took her to Missouri and Colorado. Her reviews of film, drama, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in The Boston Globe, Kirkus Reviews, The Missouri Review, and Portfolio. In 1998 - 99, as a teaching fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University, she earned a master's degree in Creative Writing. From 2007-2009, as the Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, her current home, she created a multi-faceted project called “Surprised  by Joy.”