Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems

Kelli Russell Agodon is an American poet from the Pacific Northwest and co-founder of Two Sylvias Press. She is the author of several collections, including Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014), and Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), which won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her work engages the natural world, grief, female experience, and the digital present with wit and lyric grace. She has received fellowships from the Hedgebrook Foundation and the Jack Straw Foundation and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.

Susan Rich (born in Boston, Massachusetts) is a poet and teacher whose work engages travel, diplomacy, global justice, and the intersections of place and identity. She has worked as an election supervisor in Bosnia-Herzegovina and as a human rights trainer with Amnesty International in Gaza and Nigeria. Her collections include The Cartographer's Tongue / Poems of the World (2000), Cures Include Travel (White Pine Press, 2006), and Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine, 2014). She received an Arts Innovator Award from the Artist Trust of Washington State, Fulbright Senior Specialist designation, and a PEN/USA Literary Award. She teaches at Highline College in Washington State.