Michael McClure (1932-2020) was an award-winning American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving San Francisco as a young man, he was one of the five poets who participated in the Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg's landmark poem "Howl." A key figure of the Beat Generation, McClure is immortalized as Pat McLear in Jack Kerouac's novels The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He also participated in the 60s counterculture alongside musicians like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. He taught for many years at California College of the Arts and lived with his wife, Amy, in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Garrett Caples is a poet who lives in San Francisco and is an editor at City Lights, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series. He is the author of several books of poetry, most recently Power Ballads (2016), and a book of essays, Retrievals (2014). His editorial projects include Poems from the Greenberg Manuscripts (2019), Arcana: A Stephen Jonas Reader (2019), Preserving Fire: Selected Prose by Philip Lamantia (2018), Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New & Selected Poems by Frank Lima (2016), and The Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013).