A painter, sculptor, printmaker, novelist, and memoirist, as well as the author of two books of poetry, Dorothea Tanning was known as a ceaselessly inventive visual artist first inspired by the Dada and Surrealist movements of the 1930s. Taking to poetry only in her late 80s, Tanning, according to the Washington Post, jokingly dubbed herself "the oldest living emerging poet." Her poems appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, and "The Best American Poems of 2000." She published two volumes of poetry, "A Table of Content" and "Coming to the That," which The New Yorker called one of the best books of 2011.

Born in Galesburg, Illinois, she attended Knox College there. Tanning lived much of her life in Europe amongst a veritable pantheon of 20th century artists. She was married for 30 years to the painter Max Ernst and counted among her friends and sometimes collaborators such figures as Marcel Duchamp, Dylan Thomas, John Cage, and Andre Breton. Her late-blooming love of poetry was further confirmed in 1994 when she created and endowed the Wallace Stevens Award, which each year grants $100,000 to an American poet.

Artist Joan Linder created "The Flora of Bensonhurst" for the 71st Street subway station in Brooklyn. Best known for her labor-intensive drawings that transform mundane subjects into conceptually rich images, Linder has exhibited throughout the United States and in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, and South Korea at venues including White Columns, New York; the Queens Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Kunsthallen Brandts, Denmark; and the Gwangju Art Museum, South Korea. Awards include residency fellowships at Smack Mellon Studios, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony; The Foundation of Jewish Culture’s Ronnie Heyman Award; and a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation.

Born in New York, Linder attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and received an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Tufts University. Linder is an Assistant Professor of Visual Studies Studies the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is represented by Mixed Greens Gallery in New York City.