Charles Simic (b. 1938), U.S. Poet Laureate (2007) and a MacArthur Fellow, is the author of more than sixty books including "The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems" (1989), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; "Selected Poems, 1963-2003," winner of the Griffin International Prize; and "A Fly in the Soup: Memoirs" (2000).

Derek Lerner is a NYC-based artist whose work explores systems: their creation, control, use, and experience of them. Lerner's abstract ink on paper drawings commingle representations of human-made and natural systems and the tensions between those forces. From an aerial vantage point, his compositions grow, line by line, through an additive, extemporaneous process into fictional spaces that juxtapose these systems, signs, and symbols. They encompass dualities that vacillate between micro and macro scales, dark and light, creation and destruction, human-made and nature-made; functioning as metaphors for ambivalence.

In 2015, the MTA commissioned Lerner to create permanent public art for the Avenue X subway station in Brooklyn. He has exhibited worldwide and his work is represented by Robert Henry Contemporary in New York.