With his book Estate Sale, Dan Murphy won the 2024 Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry at the University of Utah Press. A writer with Lowell roots, he lives in the region with his family. Former US Poet Laureates Natasha Trethewey and Robert Pinsky call the book “a lovely trove” and “heartfelt.”

Praising his work, the press writes: “In a house full of stanzas found in Estate Sale, Dan Murphy opens the door on the objects of his life: accumulated experience and imagination, trauma, personal and political history, inheritances that subtly unearth the forces of the world. Loss becomes a possession, language an act of reclamation, and form appears as the wearing of a dead man’s clothes.”

Nina Palisano (she/they) is a poet, editor, and arts administrator. Prior to joining MIT’s Art, Culture, & Technology program, Nina worked at MIT’s Picower Institute and Colgate University. She received a BA in Creative Writing/Religious Studies from Hampshire College and an MFA in Poetry from Boston University, where she won the Academy of American Poets prize.

Her book Axiom for When the Stars Go Out won the 2025 Tomaž Šalamun Prize of Factory Hollow Press and is translated into Slovenian. Their work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, Jewish Currents, and the Best New Poets anthology series, selected by former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith.

Writer and publisher Paul Marion is the author of Union River: Poems and Sketches and Lockdown Letters & Other Poems as well as the editor of Jack Kerouac’s early writing Atop an Underwood. His recent book is Portraits Along the Way, 50 profiles of memorable people he has encountered in person, on stage, in books, through history, and otherwise, some of them well-known persons and others who are not household names. With his wife Rosemary Noon, he lives in Amesbury, Mass.