Maxe Crandall is the director and co-producer of the 2024 San Francisco Poets Theater Festival. His performance novel The Nancy Reagan Collection (Futurepoem) made the New York Public Library’s Best 10 Poetry Books of 2020, LitHub’s 65 Favorite Books of 2020, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. As a poet, playwright, and director, Crandall has received fellowships and grants from MacDowell, The Poetry Project, The Lambda Literary Foundation, and Onassis USA. Recent shows include Bacchae Before and Before Bacchae Before; STOP PLAY, a commission from SFMOMA Open Space and the Merce Cunningham Foundation; and a national tour of Robert Chesley’s Jerker presented for free in queer community spaces. Two scripts have been published as chapbooks Together Men Make Paradigms (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs) and Emoji for Cher Heart (belladonna). For the last seven years, he was the Associate Director of the Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stanford University.

Aaron Shurin the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently The Blue Absolute, from Nightboat Books. A pioneer in both LGBTQ+ studies and innovative verse, Shurin was a member of the original Good Gay Poets collective in Boston, and later the first graduate of the storied Poetics Program at New College of California. He has written numerous critical essays about poetic theory and compositional practice, as well as personal narratives on sexual identity, gender fluidity, and the AIDS epidemic. He’s the former director and currently Professor Emeritus for the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

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Robert Glück is a poet, fiction writer, critic, and editor. In the late 70’s, he and Bruce Boone founded New Narrative, a literary movement of self-reflexive storytelling that combines essay, lyric, and autobiography in one work. Glück is the author of the story collections, Elements and Denny Smith, the novels, Jack the Modernist, Margery Kempe, and About Ed, and a volume of collected essays, Communal Nude. His books of poetry include La Fontaine with Bruce Boone, Reader, In Commemoration of the Visit with Kathleen Fraser, and I, Boombox. With Camille Roy, Mary Burger and Gail Scott, he edited the anthology Biting the Error: Writers Explore Narrative. Glück was co-director of Small Press Traffic and associate editor at Lapis Press. He served as director of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, where he is an emeritus professor. Glück is a potter as well as a writer, and he has shown his ceramics in the USA and in Europe. He lives in San Francisco.

Photo credit: Xavi Permanyer

Matt Sussman has written for Art in America, SFMOMA's Open Space, Wire, and the late San Francisco Bay Guardian, among other publications. He is also one third of the Other Stranger DJ crew, who threw a night devoted to mutant electronics at The Stud between 2019 and 2020. He proudly sits on SPT's advisory board.