Sasha West was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her first book, Failure and I Bury the Body, won the National Poetry Series and the Texas Institute of Letters First Book of Poetry Award. It was also selected as one of the top ten debut poetry books for 2013 by Victoria Chang for Poets & Writers. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Forklift Ohio, Third Coast, West Branch, American Poet, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. 

Her awards include a Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a Houston Arts Alliance grant, Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. She has served as lead editor for and, later, board president of Gulf Coast: A Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. 

Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, TX, where she lives with her husband and daughter. 

Jonathan Lowell is a geographer and poet living in Austin, TX since 2011. His chapbook, Postcard Habitats, came out in 2014 from Raw Paw Press. In the preface he writes, “he collection grew out of pondering the relationships between movement and place: the pains and pleasures of each, the way our bodies and identities shift and change as we constantly remake our habitats in this world. For a while these poems were journeys, constantly in motion and swirling around me. Now that they are fixed and bound to a page, they are, for me at least, a place. I feel both pain and relief for that.” His poems have also appeared in Analecta, Echo, and the anthology Texas Emerging Poets (Z Publishing). In 2017, he was a James Cody Fellow at the annual Round Top Poetry Festival. He finished his PhD in geography in 2018 from the University of Texas. He is currently working as the community liaison for Planet Texas 2050, a transdisciplinary research initiative at UT focused on climate and community resilience in Texas, where he is striving to connect the worlds of data science, the environmental humanities, urban planning, and community building, among many others.