Ciara Reyes-Ton is a biologist, science writer and editor who is passionate about science communication to faith communities. She has a Ph.D. in Cell & Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan. She has served as Managing Editor for the American Scientific Affiliation’s God & Nature Magazine, and previously taught Biology at Belmont University and Nashville State Community College. She is currently the Digital Content Editor for BioLogos and an Adjunct Professor at Lipscomb University. Outside science, she enjoys singing as part of her band Mount Carmell and drinking coffee. She recently released a new single “To Become Human,” a song that explores the biology and theology of what it means to be human. She is also the author of Look Closely, a science and faith devotional that explores the life of Christ by bringing scripture in conversation with science, from water walking lizards to dividing cells and resurrecting corals.

Aubrey Kleinfeld serves as a Licensed Professional Counselor at her alma mater, Messiah University. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Business from Messiah and a Master’s degree in Counseling from Shippensburg University. She has been honored to practice counseling for the last 14 years, the last three at Messiah and the other eleven at a local community agency. She lives with her partner, Josh and their three daughters in York, Pennsylvania. They enjoy reading, hiking, cycling, and watching the sun rise and set.

Jeanne Petrolle holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Illinois. She is the author of Religion without Belief: Contemporary Allegory and the Search for Postmodern Faith and Dancing with Ophelia: Reconnecting Madness, Creativity, and Love. She has published essays about literature, religion, and culture in Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Film Quarterly, Image: A Journal of Art and Religion,Issues in Integrative Studies, and Hektoen International Journal. An Associate Professor of English at Columbia College Chicago, she lives with her husband and son in the Chicago area.

A native of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two poetry collections, From the Tongues of Brick and Stone (Momotombo Press, 2005) and Boomerang (Bilingual Review Press, 2009), as well as the coeditor of Between the Heart and the Land / Entre el corazon y la tierra: Latina Poets in the Midwest. She writes in a blend of English and Spanish, which she has said reflects her interest in “the interconnectedness and juxtapositions of difference and similarity between seemingly disparate peoples, events, places, and experiences.” While Cárdenas often writes in free verse, she also experiments with a variety of forms, and, as Craig Santos Perez has noted, “This syncretic formal impulse reflects the polyphonic texture of Cárdenas’s language-scape.” Her poetry has appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century (2007) and The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (2007). She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and was Milwaukee’s poet laureate from 2010 to 2012.

Ada Limón is the author of, most recently, The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, and Bright Dead Things, which was named a finalist for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kingsley Tufts Award, and was named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2015 by The New York Times. Her previous collections include Sharks in the Rivers, Lucky Wreck, and This Big Fake World. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and American Poetry Review, among others. She serves on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency MFA program, and the 24Pearl Street online program for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer and lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

Tania Runyan is the author of the poetry collections What Will Soon Take Place, Second Sky, A Thousand Vessels, Simple Weight, and Delicious Air, which was awarded Book of the Year by the Conference on Christianity and Literature in 2007. Her guides How to Read a Poem, How to Write a Poem, and How to Write a College Application Essay are used in classrooms across the country. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Image, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, The Christian Century, Saint Katherine Review, and the Paraclete book Light upon Light: A Literary Guide to Prayer for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Tania was awarded an NEA Literature Fellowship in 2011.

Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of more than 20 books and chapbooks for adults and children. Her critically acclaimed books for young adults include A Wreath for Emmett Till and the ground breaking Carver: A Life in Poems, a Newbery Honor Book. Of Marilyn’s nine poetry collections for adults, The Homeplace won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award; and The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems received the 1998 Poets’ Prize, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. A three-time finalist for the National Book Award, her many honors include the Frost Medal, the Poetry Society of America’s award for “distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry,” and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. A professor emerita of English at the University of Connecticut, she served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and was Poet Laureate of Connecticut, 2001– 2006.

Angela Narciso Torres is the author of Blood Orange (Willow Books), To the Bone (Sundress Publications, 2020) and What Happens Is Neither (Four Way Books, 2021). Her work appears in POETRY, Cortland Review, and TriQuarterly. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program and Harvard Graduate School of Education, she is a senior and reviews Editor for the literary journal, RHINO. You can find her at angelanarcisotorres.com.

Jeanne Murray Walker (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is a poet and playwright whose work has been widely published and performed. She heads the creative writing program at the University of Delaware, where she has been a professor of English for forty years. She also serves as a mentor in the low-residency M.F.A. program at Seattle Pacific University and on the boards of Shenandoah and Image magazines.

Her poems and essays have been published in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, The Christian Century, Blackbird, Image and several hundred other journals. Her scripts have been performed in theaters across the United States. They are published by Dramatic Publishing Company, and they are archived in North American Women's Drama. Walker is coeditor (with Daryl Tippens) of Shadow and Light: Literature and the Life of Faith and author of a memoir, The Geography of Memory. She is the author of seven books of poetry in addition to Helping the Morning: New and Selected Poems.

Walker's work has been honored with a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, eight Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships, the Glenna Luschei-Prairie Schooner Prize, many Pushcart nominations, inclusion in Best American Poetry, and inclusion in the 100-year anniversary anthology of Poetry magazine.

Photo by Vondel Stevens

Dr. Quyen Ngo-Metzger, a Professor in the Health Systems Science Department at the Kaiser Permanente Bernard J. Tyson School of Medicine. She teaches and mentors students and junior faculty in prevention, population health, health disparities, and evidence-based medicine.