Kazim Ali is a poet, novelist, and essayist whose work explores themes of identity, migration, and the intersections of cultural and spiritual traditions. His poetry is known for its lyrical and expressive language, as well as its exploration of themes such as love, loss, and the search for meaning in a rapidly changing world. "Sukun" means serenity or calm, and a sukun is also a form of punctuation in Arabic orthography that denotes a pause over a consonant. This Sukun draws a generous selection from Kazim's six previous full-length collections, and includes 35 new poems. It allows us to trace Ali's passions and concerns, and take the measure of his art: the close attention to the spiritual and the visceral, and the deep language play that is both musical and plain spoken. 

Maggie Millner is the author of Couplets: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), named one of the top ten books of 2023 by The Atlantic and a New York Times Editor's Choice. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and the Best American Poetry Series. Maggie was the 2020–'21 Olive B. O'Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–'20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–'18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where she received her MFA. She is also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Community of Writers, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She is a lecturer of writing at Yale and a senior editor at The Yale Review. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. 

Darius Stewart is a poet and writer from Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the author of the poetry collection Intimacies in Borrowed Light (EastOver Press 2022) and Be Not Afraid of My Body: A Lyrical Memoir (Belt Publishing 2024). His poems and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Arkansas International, The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Salamander, Verse Daily, and others. He holds MFAs from the Michener Center for Writers and the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program. Currently, he is a Lulu "Merle" Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English at the University of Iowa. 

Christopher Merrill has published eight collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; many edited volumes and translations; and six books of nonfiction, among them, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain, The Tree of the Doves: Ceremony, Expedition, War, and Self-Portrait with Dogwood. His writings have been translated into nearly forty languages; his journalism appears widely; his honors include a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, numerous translation awards, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations. As director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa since 2000, Merrill has conducted cultural diplomacy missions to more than fifty countries. He served on the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO from 2011-2018, and in April 2012 President Barack Obama appointed him to the National Council on the Humanities.