The granddaughter of a Harlan County coal miner, Julia Thacker was raised in Dayton Ohio. She first came to Massachusetts as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute, the Corporation of Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poems appear in Bennington Review, Gulf Coast, The Massachusetts Review, The New Republic and Pleiades. A portfolio of her work is included in the 25th anniversary issue of Poetry International. Julia has taught writing at Tufts University, Radcliffe Seminars and as poet-in-residence in public schools throughout the state. In 2024, she was an Edith Wharton Writer-in-Residence at The Mount. She lives outside of Boston.

Hannah Louise Poston, whose Julia Hungry was awarded the eighteenth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize by the judge of that year’s contest, Linda Gregerson, is a poet, essayist, and online content creator whose writing has appeared in several places, including Poetry Daily, Longreads, and The New York Times. She has an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan and a BFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which she attended as the Thomas Wolfe Scholar in Creative Writing. Hannah has taught poetry and writing as the Writer-in-Residence at St. Albans School, at The Pennsylvania Governor’s School of the Arts, and at the University of Michigan, and she has taught Argentine tango in studios all over the country. For work she reviews makeup on YouTube and writes grants for climate activists. She is from the mountains of North Carolina and she currently lives in Maryland.