Michelle Bitting + Ewa Chrusciel

Michelle Bitting’s first collection, Good Friday Kiss (2008, C&R Press) was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the DeNovo First Book Award. Her second collection, Notes to the Beloved (2012, SPC Press), won the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award and received a starred review from Kirkus Reviews. A third collection, The Couple Who Fell to Earth (2016, C&R Press), received a starred and featured review from Kirkus. She has won the Beyond Baroque Foundation, Virginia Brendemuehl, and Glimmer Train poetry contests and been a finalist for the Poet’s & Writer’s Magazine California Exchange, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Julia Peterkin, among others – and most recently, The Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize (2016). Michelle’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The Paris-American, Narrative, River Styx, The L.A. Weekly, Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, diode, Linebreak, among many others. Individual poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily and have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University, Oregon. Michelle is currently pursuing a Ph.D in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute.

Ewa Chruscielhas three books in Polish: Furkot , Sopilki, and Tobolek, and two books in English: Strata, which won the 2009 international book contest and was published with Emergency Press in 2011, and Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn, 2014). Her poems have appeared in many books and magazines in Poland, England, Italy, and the United States, including Jubilat, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Aufgabe. She has translated Jack London, Joseph Conrad, I.B. Singer as well as some contemporary American poets into Polish. She is an associate professor of humanities at Colby-Sawyer College.