Kay Ryan
Born in California in 1945 and acknowledged as one of the most original voices in the contemporary landscape, Kay Ryan is the author of several books of poetry, including Flamingo Watching (2006), The Niagara River (2005), and Say Uncle (2000). Her book The Best of It: New and Selected Poems (2010) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Ryan's tightly compressed, rhythmically dense poetry is often compared to that of Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore; however, Ryan’s often barbed wit and unique facility with “recombinant” rhyme has earned her the status of one of the great living American poets, and led to her appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 2008. She held the position for two terms, using the appointment to champion community colleges lik
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Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire is a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally - including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, 'TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH' (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology 'The Salt Book of Younger Poets' (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian,
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Kate Baer
Kate Baer is the 3x New York Times bestselling author of What Kind Of Woman, I Hope This Finds You Well, & And Yet. Her work has also been published in The New Yorker, Literary Hub, Huffington Post and The New York Times.
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Chencia C. Higgins
Chencia C. Higgins is just a girl from Texas who has made it her mission to create stories in which sassy, southern Black women are loved out loud. Her Carina Adores debut, D’Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding, was a New York Times best romance of 2022. When she isn't hunkered down in her writing cave, Chencia can be found with her nose in a book, saving recipes on Pinterest for things she’ll never make, and dreaming about travelling even further south for the winter.
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Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, A Public Space, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the founder and editor of Divedapper, a home for dialogues with vital voices in contemporary poetry.
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His first full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, was published in 2017.
Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Iowa. He was a visiting professor at Purdue University in Indiana in Fall 2017. -
Louise Glück
American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.
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Parents of Hungarian Jewish heritage reared her on Long Island. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and later Columbia University.
She was the author of twelve books of poetry, including: A Village Life (2009); Averno (2006), which was a finalist for The National Book Award; The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), which was awarded The New Yorker's Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Librar -
Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire is a 24 year old Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer and educator based in London. Born in 1988, Warsan has read her work extensively all over Britain and internationally - including recent readings in South Africa, Italy, Germany, Canada, North America and Kenya- and her début book, 'TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH' (flipped eye), was published in 2011. Her poems have been published in Wasafiri, Magma and Poetry Review and in the anthology 'The Salt Book of Younger Poets' (Salt, 2011). She is the current poetry editor at SPOOK magazine. In 2012 she represented Somalia at the Poetry Parnassus, the festival of the world poets at the Southbank, London. She is a Complete Works II poet. Her poetry has been translated into Italian,
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Natalie Díaz
Natalie Díaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012. Her second poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poems is published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Díaz teaches at the Arizona State Un
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Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith is the author of the national bestseller Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster 2020); Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017); The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press 2015), winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Kimiko Hahn; and Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press 2005), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and three prizewinning chapbooks.
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Smith's poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, Image, The Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, AGNI, Guernica, Brevity, the Washington Post, The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, and many other journals and anthologies. In 2016 her poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally and has been translated into -
Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collections Night Sky with Exit Wounds and Time is a Mother, as well as the New York Times bestselling novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the American Book Award and the MacArthur “Genius Grant," he has also worked as a line cook, tobacco harvester, nursing home volunteer, and fast-food server, the latter becoming inspiration for The Emperor of Gladness. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently splits his time between Northampton, Massachusetts and New York City.
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Fady Joudah
Joudah was born in Austin, Texas in 1971 to Palestinian refugee parents, and grew up in Libya and Saudi Arabia. He returned to the United States to study to become a doctor, first attending the University of Georgia in Athens, and then the Medical College of Georgia, before completing his medical training at the University of Texas. Joudah currently practices as an ER physician in Houston, Texas. He has also volunteered abroad with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders.
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Joudah's poetry has been published in a variety of publications, including Poetry, The Iowa Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Kenyon Review, Drunken Boat, Prairie Schooner and Crab Orchard Review.
In 2006, he published The Butterfly's Burden, a collection of r -
Ross Gay
Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
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His honors include being a Cave Canem Workshop fellow and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Tuition Scholar, and he received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.
He is an associate professor of poetry at Indiana University and teaches in Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry. He also serves on the board of the Bloomington Community Orchard. -
Vicki Baum
Vicki Baum (penname of Hedwig Baum) was born in a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. She moved to the United States in 1932 and when her books were banned in the Third Reich in 1938, she started publishing in English. She became an American citizen in 1938 and died in Los Angeles, in 1960.
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Ada Limon
Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from New York University. Limón has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and was one of the judges for the 2013 National Book Award in Poetry. She works as a creative writing instructor and a freelance writer while splitting her time between Lexington, Kentucky and Sonoma, California (with a great deal of New York in between). Her new book of poems, Bright Dead Things is forthcoming from Milkweed Editions in 2015.
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Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections, including American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, How to Be Drawn, and Lighthead, which won the National Book Award. He is a MacArthur Fellow and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.
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John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman committed suicide in 1972.
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A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was publi -
Frank O'Hara
Collections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual arts mark works of the New York School, an active group that included O'Hara during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his fi -
Federico García Lorca
Born in Fuente Vaqueros, Granada, Spain, June 5 1898; died near Granada, August 19 1936, García Lorca is one of Spain's most deeply appreciated and highly revered poets and dramatists. His murder by the Nationalists at the start of the Spanish civil war brought sudden international fame, accompanied by an excess of political rhetoric which led a later generation to question his merits; after the inevitable slump, his reputation has recovered (largely with a shift in interest to the less obvious works). He must now be bracketed with Machado as one of the two greatest poets Spain has produced in the 20th century, and he is certainly Spain's greatest dramatist since the Golden Age.
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Anne Carson
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator and professor of Classics. Carson lived in Montreal for several years and taught at McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980 to 1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also won a Lannan Literary Award.
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Carson (with background in classical languages, comparative literature, anthropology, history, and commercial art) blends ideas and themes from many fields in her writing. She frequently references, modernizes, and translates Ancient Greek literature. She has published eighteen books as of 2013, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue -
Thomas King
Thomas King was born in 1943 in Sacramento, California and is of Cherokee, Greek and German descent. He obtained his PhD from the University of Utah in 1986. He is known for works in which he addresses the marginalization of American Indians, delineates "pan-Indian" concerns and histories, and attempts to abolish common stereotypes about Native Americans. He taught Native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and at the University of Minnesota. He is currently a Professor of English at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. King has become one of the foremost writers of fiction about Canada's Native people.
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Michelle Tea
Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, prostitution, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their views into the queercore community. In 2012 Tea partnered with City Lights Publishers to form the Sister Spit imprint.
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Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski (born as Heinrich Karl Bukowski) was a German-born American poet, novelist and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles.It is marked by an emphasis on the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books
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Charles Bukowski was the only child of an American soldier and a German mother. At the age of three, he came with his family to the United States and grew up in Los Angeles. He attended Los Angeles City College from 1939 to 1941, then left school and moved to -
Jacqueline Harpman
Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929. Being half Jewish, the family moved to Casablanca when the Nazis invaded, and returned home after the war. After studying French literature she started training to be a doctor, but could not complete her medical studies when she contracted tuberculosis. She turned to writing in 1954 and her first work was published in 1958. In 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. She had given up writing after her fourth book was published, and resumed her career as a novelist only some twenty years later. She wrote twelve novels and won several literary prizes, most recently the Médicis for the present novel. She was married to an architect and had two children.
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Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg was a groundbreaking American poet and activist best known for his central role in the Beat Generation and for writing the landmark poem Howl. Born in 1926 in Newark, New Jersey, to Jewish parents, Ginsberg grew up in a household shaped by both intellectualism and psychological struggle. His father, Louis Ginsberg, was a published poet and a schoolteacher, while his mother, Naomi, suffered from severe mental illness, which deeply affected Ginsberg and later influenced his writing—most notably in his poem Kaddish.
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As a young man, Ginsberg attended Columbia University, where he befriended other future Beat luminaries such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and Neal Cassady. These relationships formed the core of what bec -
Billy Collins
William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York, retiring in 2016. Collins was recognized as a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library (1992) and selected as the New York State Poet for 2004 through 2006. In 2016, Collins was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. As of 2020, he is a teacher in the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton.
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John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman (originally John Allyn Smith) was an American poet, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and often considered one of the founders of the Confessional school of poetry. He was the author of The Dream Songs, which are playful, witty, and morbid. Berryman committed suicide in 1972.
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A pamphlet entitled Poems was published in 1942 and his first proper book, The Dispossessed, appeared six years later. Of his youthful self he said, 'I didn't want to be like Yeats; I wanted to be Yeats.' His first major work, in which he began to develop his own unique style of writing, was Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, which appeared in Partisan Review in 1953 and was publi -
Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. (Gioia is pronounced JOY-uh.)
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Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
Gioia's reviews have appeared -
Kat Lehmann
Kat Lehmann is a founding co-editor of Whiptail: Journal of the Single-Line Poem (2021 - present). She is a winner of the 2024 Rattle Chapbook Prize, The Haiku Foundation Touchstone Award for an Individual Poem, and a nominee for The Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net. Her contemporary haiku and haibun, more than 600 of which have been published internationally, are informed by a connection with natural cycles and her training as a Ph.D. biochemist. Kat served on the panel for The Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Distinguished Book Awards (book years 2021-2023) and is a co-founding panelist of the Trailblazer Awards. Visit her online at www.katlehmann.weebly.com or on Bluesky / Instagram @SongsOfKat.
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