Tracy K. Smith

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  Harryette Mullen

  Harryette Mullen is an American poet, short story writer, and literary scholar. She was born in Florence, Alabama, grew up in Fort Worth, Texas, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin and attended graduate school at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As of 2008, she lives in Los Angeles, California. She wrote poems such as Land of the Discount Price, Home of the Brand Name.
  
  Mullen began to write poetry as a college student in a multicultural community of writers, artists, musicians, and dancers in Austin, Texas. As an emerging poet, Mullen received a literature award from the Black Arts Academy, a Dobie-Paisano writer’s fellowship from the Texas Institute of Letters and University of Texas, and an artist residency from the H

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  Claudia Rankine

  Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.
  
  Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobb

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  Louise Glück

  American poet Louise Elisabeth Glück served as poet laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004.
  
  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

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  Robert Bly

  Robert Bly was an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.
  Robert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
  Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and othe

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  Adrienne Rich

  Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
  
  A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
  
  In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up polit

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  Elizabeth Willis

  Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book is Alive: New and Selected Poems (New York Review Books, 2015). Her other books of poetry include Address (Wesleyan University Press, 2011), recipient of the PEN New England / L. L. Winship Prize for Poetry; Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006); Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003); The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995); and Second Law (Avenue B, 1993). She also writes about contemporary poetry and has edited a volume of essays entitled Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place (University of Iowa Press, 2008). A recent Guggenheim fellow, she has held residencies at Brown University, the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and the Centre International de Poésie, Marseille,

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  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.
  
  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.

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  Gary Snyder

  Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.

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  Charles Simic

  U.S. Poet Laureate, 2007-2008
  
  Dušan Charles Simic was born in Belgrade, former Yugoslavia, on May 9, 1938. Simic’s childhood was complicated by the events of World War II. He moved to Paris with his mother when he was 15; a year later, they joined his father in New York and then moved to Oak Park, a suburb of Chicago, where he graduated from the same high school as Ernest Hemingway. Simic attended the University of Chicago, working nights in an office at the Chicago Sun Times, but was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1961 and served until 1963.
  
  Simic is the author of more than 30 poetry collections, including The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems (1989), which received the Pulitzer Prize; Jackstraws (1999); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), which

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  Jennifer Givhan

  Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and Indigenous poet and novelist from the Southwestern desert and the recipient of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices. Her novel Salt Bones is coming this July 22, 2025 from Mulholland/Little, Brown.
  
  She holds a Master’s degree from California State University Fullerton and a Master’s in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Rosa’s Einstein (University of Arizona Press), and the novels Trinity Sight and Jubilee (Blackstone Publishing), which were finalists for the Arizona-New Mexico Book Awards and won The Southwest Book Award. Her newest poetry collection Belly to the Brutal (We

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  Namwali Serpell

  NAMWALI SERPELL is a Zambian writer who teaches at UC Berkeley. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award in 2011 and was selected for the Africa 39 in 2014. She won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing.
  
  THE OLD DRIFT is her first novel. The chapter entitled "The Falls" is derived from The Autobiography of An Old Drifter, by the historical figure, Percy M. Clark (1874-1937).
  
  

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  Clint Smith

  Clint Smith is the author of the narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, which was a #1 New York Times bestseller, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, the Hillman Prize for Book Journalism, the Stowe Prize and selected by the New York Times as one of the 10 best books of 2021. He is also the author of the poetry collection Counting Descent, which won the 2017 Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association and was a finalist for an NAACP Image Award. His is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

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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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  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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  Sarah Kay

  Sarah Kay is an American poet. Known for her spoken word poetry, Kay is the founder and co-director of Project V.O.I.C.E., a group dedicated to using spoken word as an inspirational tool.
  
  Sarah Kay, a graduate of Brown University, was born in New York to a Japanese American mother and a Jewish American father. She began performing poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club in the East Village at the age of 14, joining their Slam Team in 2006.[5] That year, she was the youngest person competing in the National Poetry Slam in Austin, Texas. In 2007 Kay made her television debut, performing the poem "Hands" on HBO's Def Poetry Jam.[6] She has performed at events and venues like the Lincoln Center, the Tribeca Film Festival, and at the United Nations wher

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  Nikki Giovanni

  Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
  Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Mov

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  Mary Oliver

  Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.
  
  Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information.

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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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  Claudia Rankine

  Claudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City.
  
  Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry, including "Citizen: An American Lyric" and "Don’t Let Me Be Lonely"; two plays including "The White Card," which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson and American Repertory Theater) and will be published with Graywolf Press in 2019, and "Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue"; as well as numerous video collaborations. She is also the editor of several anthologies including "The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind." In 2016, she cofounded The Racial Imaginary Institute. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobb

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  Ilya Kaminsky

  Ilya Kaminsky is the Poetry Editor of Words Without Borders. His awards include a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from Poetry magazine and first place in the National Russian Essay Contest. He is the author of Dancing in Odessa which won the Dorset Prize.

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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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  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.
  
  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.

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  Jericho Brown

  Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown teaches at the University of San Diego where he is the Director of the Cropper Center for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and several other journals and anthologies. PLEASE, his first book, won the 2009 American Book Award.

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  Diane Seuss

  Diane Seuss was born in Indiana and raised in Michigan. She earned a BA from Kalamazoo College and an MSW from Western Michigan University. Her work has appeared in Poetry, the Georgia Review, Brevity, Able Muse, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Missouri Review, as well as The Best American Poetry 2014. She was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Department of English at Colorado College in 2012, and she has taught at Kalamazoo College since 1988.

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  Solmaz Sharif

  Born in Istanbul to Iranian parents, Solmaz Sharif holds degrees from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied and taught with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, and New York University. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and others. The former managing director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, her work has been recognized with a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, scholarships the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, a winter fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an NEA fellowship, and a Stegner Fellowship. She has most recently been selected to receive a 2014 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent R

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  Danez Smith

  Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (2014, YesYes Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Their 2nd collection will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Their work has published & featured widely including in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Buzzfeed, Blavity, & Ploughshares. They are a 2014 Ruth Lilly - Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and a recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, placing 2nd in 2014. They edit for The Offing & are a founding member of 2 collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club. They live in the midwest most of the time.
  
  Danez

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  Ian Williams

  Ian Williams is the author of Personals, shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award; Not Anyone’s Anything, winner of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for the best first collection of short fiction in Canada; and You Know Who You Are, a finalist for the ReLit Prize for poetry. He was named as one of ten Canadian writers to watch by CBC.
  
  Williams completed his Ph.D. in English at the University of Toronto and works as an English professor.
  
  In 2014-2015, Williams was the Canadian Writer-in-Residence for the Calgary Distinguished Writers Program at the University of Calgary. He has also held residencies or fellowships at the Leighton Artists’ Colony at the Banff Centre, Vermont Studio Center, Cave Canem, Ki

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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.
  
  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.

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  Mosab Abu Toha

  Mosab Abu Toha is the winner of a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, Walcott Poetry Prize, and also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
  
  He is a Palestinian poet, scholar, and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. He is the founder of the Edward Said Library, Gaza’s first English-language library. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is his debut book of poems. It won a 2022 Palestine Book Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
  In 2019-2020, Abu Toha was a Visiting Poet in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.
  Abu Toha is a columnist for Arrowsmith Press, and his writings from Gaza have also appeared in The Nati

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  Natasha Trethewey

  Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who was appointed United States Poet Laureate in June 2012; she began her official duties in September. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and she is the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
  
  She is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
  
  Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, on April 26, 1966, Confederate Memorial Day, to Eric Trethewey and Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough, who were married illegally at the time of her birth, a year before the U.S. Supreme Court struck down anti-miscegenation laws with Loving v. Virginia. Her birth certificate noted the race of her mother

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  Mary Szybist

  Mary Szybist is the author of a Granted, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College and lives in Portland, Oregon.

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  Jorie Graham

  Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950, the daughter of a journalist and a sculptor. She was raised in Rome, Italy and educated in French schools. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris before attending New York University as an undergraduate, where she studied filmmaking. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Iowa.
  
  Graham is the author of numerous collections of poetry, most recently: Place (2012), Sea Change (2008), Overlord (2005), Never (2002), Swarm (2001), The Errancy (1997), and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994, which won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
  
  Her many honors include a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from The American A

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  Desiree C. Bailey

  Desiree C. Bailey is the author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the 2020 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize and was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Poetry. She is also the author of the fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O'clock Press, 2016) and has short stories and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, the Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. Desiree is from Trinidad and Tobago, and Queens, New York. She lives in Providence, RI.
  
  

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  Sejal Shah

  Sejal Shah is the author of the debut essay collection This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, 2020) and the short story collection How to Make Your Mother Cry: fictions (West Virginia University Press, 2024). Her essays and stories have appeared in Brevity, the Kenyon Review, Lit Hub, and the Rumpus, among others. She is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, an award from the New York State Council for the Arts and residencies from Blue Mountain Center, The Millay Colony, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches creative writing and lives in Rochester, New York. Finder her online at www.sejal-shah.com and @sejalshahwrites on Instagram and @sejalshah on blues

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  Lucille Clifton

  Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from New York. Common topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African American heritage, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the female body.
  
  She was the first person in her family to finish high school and attend college. She started Howard University on scholarship as a drama major but lost the scholarship two years later.
  
  Thus began her writing career.
  
  Good Times, her first book of poems, was published in 1969. She has since been nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and has been honored as Maryland's Poet Laureate.
  
  Ms. Clifton's foray into writing for children began with Some of the Days of Everett Anderson, published in 1970.
  
  In 1976, Generation

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  Ellen Bass

  Ellen Bass is an American poet and author.

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  Morris Day

  Morris E. Day is an American musician, composer, and actor. He is best known as the leader of legendary funk band the Time and for his role in the Prince film Purple Rain (1984).

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  Rio Cortez

  Rio Cortez is the New York Times bestselling author of picture books The ABCs of Black History (Workman, 2020) and The River Is My Sea (S&S, 2024). Her debut poetry collection, Golden Ax, is forthcoming from Penguin Poets this August, 2022.
  
  

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  Ted Kooser

  Ted Kooser lives in rural Nebraska with his wife, Kathleen, and three dogs. He is one of America's most noted poets, having served two terms as U. S. Poet Laureate and, during the second term, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his collection, Delights & Shadows. He is a retired life insurance executive who now teaches part-time at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. The school board in Lincoln, Nebraska, recently opened Ted Kooser Elementary School, which Ted says is his greatest honor, among many awards and distinctions. He has published twelve collections of poetry and three nonfiction books. Two of the latter are books on writing, The Poetry Home Repair Manual and Writing Brave and Free, and a memoir, Lights on a Ground of Dark

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  Sonia Sanchez

  Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Benita Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. After her mother died in childbirth a year later, Sanchez lived with her paternal grandmother and other relatives for several years. In 1943, she moved to Harlem with her sister to live with their father and his third wife.
  
  She earned a B.A. in political science from Hunter College in 1955. She also did postgraduate work at New York University and studied poetry with Louise Bogan. Sanchez formed a writers' workshop in Greenwich Village, attended by such poets as Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), and Larry Neal. Along with Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, and Etheridge Knight, she formed the "Broadside Quartet" of young poets, intr

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  Juan Felipe Herrera

  Juan Felipe Herrera is the only son of Lucha Quintana and Felipe Emilio Herrera; the three were campesinos living from crop to crop on the roads of the San Joaquín Valley, Southern California and the Salinas Valley. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work, such as the children's book Calling the Doves, which won the Ezra Jack Keats award in 1997. He is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist who draws from real life experiences as well as years of education to inform his work. Community and art has always been part of what has driven Herrera, beginning in the mid-seventies, when he was director of the Centro Cultural de la Raza, an occupied water tank in Balboa Park converted

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  Cathy Park Hong

  Cathy Park Hong’s book of creative nonfiction, Minor Feelings, was published in Spring 2020 by One World/Random House (US) and Profile Books (UK). She is also the author of poetry collections Engine Empire, published in 2012 by W.W. Norton, Dance Dance Revolution, chosen by Adrienne Rich for the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Translating Mo'um. Hong is the recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in Poetry, A Public Space, Paris Review, McSweeney's, Baffler, Yale Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is the poetry editor of the New Republic and is a professor at Rutgers-Newark University.

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  Sally Wen Mao

  Sally Wen Mao is the author of Mad Honey Symposium (Alice James Books, 2014), the winner of the 2012 Kinereth Gensler Award. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2013 and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. She has a forthcoming book, Oculus, out from Graywolf Press in 2019.

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  Edward Hirsch

  Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
  bio-img
  Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from N

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  Threa Almontaser

  Threa Almontaser holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her debut, The Wild Fox of Yemen, was nominated for a National Book Award and won the Walt Whitman Award from The Academy of American Poets.

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  Safiya Sinclair

  Safiya Sinclair was born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, the Kenyon Review, Boston Review, Gulf Coast, the Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Sinclair received her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and is a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow at the University of Southern California.

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  Joy Harjo

  Bio Joy Harjo
  Joy Harjo was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma and is a member of the Mvskoke Nation. She has released four award-winning CD's of original music and won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year. She performs nationally and internationally solo and with her band, The Arrow Dynamics. She has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, in venues in every major U.S. city and internationally. Most recently she performed We Were There When Jazz Was Invented at the Chan Centre at UBC in Vancouver, BC, and appeared at the San Miguel Writer’s Conference in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Her one-woman show, Wings of Night Sky, Wings of Morning Light, which features guitarist Larry Mitchell premiered in Los Angeles in 2009, w

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  Mary Karr

  Mary Karr is an American poet, essayist and memoirist. She rose to fame in 1995 with the publication of her bestselling memoir The Liars' Club. She is the Peck Professor of English Literature at Syracuse University.
  
  Karr was born January 16, 1955, in Groves, a small town in East Texas located in the Port Arthur region, known for its oil refineries and chemical plants, to J. P. and Charlie Marie (Moore) Karr. In her memoirs, Karr calls the town "Leechfield." Karr's father worked in an oil refinery while her mother was an amateur artist and business owner.
  
  The Liars' Club, published in 1995, was a New York Times bestseller for over a year, and was named one of the year's best books. It delves vividly and often humorously into her deeply trouble

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  Maxine Kumin

  Maxine Kumin's 17th poetry collection, published in the spring of 2010, is Where I Live: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010. Her awards include the Pulitzer and Ruth Lilly Poetry Prizes, the Poets’ Prize, and the Harvard Arts and Robert Frost Medals. A former US poet laureate, she and her husband lived on a farm in New Hampshire. Maxine Kumin died in 2014.

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  Douglas Coupland

  Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961. In 1965 his family moved to Vancouver, Canada, where he continues to live and work. Coupland has studied art and design in Vancouver, Canada, Milan, Italy and Sapporo, Japan. His first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991. Since then he has published nine novels and several non-fiction books in 35 languages and most countries on earth. He has written and performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford, England, and in 2001 resumed his practice as a visual artist, with exhibitions in spaces in North America, Europe and Asia. 2006 marks the premiere of the feature film Everything's Gone Green, his first stor

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  Greg Tate

  Greg Tate is a music and popular culture critic and journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, The Wire, and Downbeat. He is the author of Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, and the editor of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Tate, via guitar and baton, also leads the Conducted Improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber who tour internationally.

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  Jericho Brown

  Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a BA from Dillard University. The recipient of the Whiting Writers Award, the Bunting Fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, and two travel fellowships to the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland, Brown teaches at the University of San Diego where he is the Director of the Cropper Center for Creative Writing. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, Oxford American, A Public Space, and several other journals and anthologies. PLEASE, his first book, won the 2009 American Book Award.

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  Matt Rasmussen

  Matt Rasmussen’s poetry has been published in Gulf Coast, Cimarron Review, H_NGM_N, New York Quarterly, Paper Darts, and at Poets.org. He’s received awards, grants, and residencies from The Bush Foundation, The Minnesota State Arts Board, Jerome Foundation, Intermedia Arts, The Anderson Center in Red Wing, MN, and The Corporation of Yaddo. He is a 2012 McKnight Artist Fellow, a former Peace Corps Volunteer, and Assistant Professor of English at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. His first book of poems, Black Aperture, won the 2012 Walt Whitman Award.

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  Laurence Ralph

  Laurence Ralph is a Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University. Before that, he was a Professor of African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University, where he taught for nearly a decade. He earned his Ph.D. (2010) and Masters of Arts degrees (2006) in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Science degree (2004) from Georgia Institute of Technology, where he majored in History, Technology and Society. His research and writing explores how police abuse, mass incarceration, and crime make disease, disability, and premature death seem like natural outcomes for people of color, who are often seen as expendable by “polite” society.
  
  Ralph is known for using careful and deliberate description rather than

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  Andrew Delbanco

  Andrew H. Delbanco (born 1952) is Director of American Studies at Columbia University and has been Columbia's Julian Clarence Levi Professor in the Humanities since 1995. He writes extensively on American literary and religious history.

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  Layli Long Soldier

  Layli Long Soldier is the author of WHERREAS, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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  Roy DeCarava

  Over the course of six decades, American artist Roy DeCarava (1919–2009) produced a singular collection of black-and-white photographs of modern life that combine formal acuity with an intimate and deeply human treatment of his subject matter. Grounded by a unified theory of the visual plane, his work displays a subtle mastery of tonal and spatial elements and devotion to the medium of photography as a means of artistic expression.

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  Danez Smith

  Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (2014, YesYes Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Their 2nd collection will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Their work has published & featured widely including in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Buzzfeed, Blavity, & Ploughshares. They are a 2014 Ruth Lilly - Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and a recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, placing 2nd in 2014. They edit for The Offing & are a founding member of 2 collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club. They live in the midwest most of the time.
  
  Danez

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  Forrest Gander

  Born in the Mojave Desert, Forrest Gander grew up in Virginia and spent significant periods in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas before moving to Rhode Island. He holds degrees in literature and in geology, a subject that recurs in his writing and for which his work has been connected to ecological poetics.
  
  Collaboration has been an important engagement for Gander who, over the years, has worked with artists such as Ann Hamilton, Sally Mann, Eiko & Koma, Lucas Foglia, Ashwini Bhat, Richard Hirsch & Michael Rogers. He also translates extensively and has edited several anthologies of contemporary poetry from Latin America, Spain, and Japan.
  
  He writes across the genres. A recent project with the Chilean poet

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  Carl Phillips

  Carl Phillips is the highly acclaimed author of 10 collections of poetry.
  
  He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.
  
  His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National

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  Mark Strand

  Mark Strand was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, essayist, and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990. He was a professor of English at Columbia University and also taught at numerous other colleges and universities.
  
  Strand also wrote children's books and art criticism, helped edit several poetry anthologies and translated Spanish poet Rafael Alberti.
  
  He is survived by a son, a daughter and a sister.

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  Camonghne Felix

  Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie, and cultural worker. She received an MA in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl from the Future You Should Know.”

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  Evie Shockley

  Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, poet Evie Shockley earned a BA at Northwestern University, a JD at the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English literature at Duke University.
  
  (from http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/e...)

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  Jane Hirshfield

  Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Ledger (Knopf, March 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), longlisted for the National Book Award, Come Thief (Knopf, August 23, 2011), After (HarperCollins, 2006), which was named a “Best Book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times and shortlisted for England’s T.S. Eliot Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award); as well as two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. She has also edited and co-translated three books collecting the work of women poets from the distant past,

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  Paige Lewis

  Paige Lewis is the author of Space Struck (Sarabande Books, 2019). Their poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2017, and elsewhere. Paige is the curator of Ours Poetica. They currently live and teach in Indiana.

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  Joe Dunthorne

  Joe Dunthorne was born and brought up in Swansea, and is a graduate of the University of East Anglia's Creative Writing MA, where he was awarded the Curtis Brown prize.
  
  His poetry has been published in magazines and anthologies and has featured on Channel 4, and BBC Radio 3 and 4. A pamphlet collection, Joe Dunthorne: Faber New Poets 5 was published in 2010.
  
  His first novel, Submarine, the story of a dysfunctional family in Swansea narrated by Oliver Tate, aged 15, was published in 2008.
  

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  No‘u Revilla

  Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet, performer, and educator. She is the author of Ask the Brindled, a National Poetry Series winning collection, selected by Rick Barot. Born and raised in Waiʻehu on the island of Maui, she currently lives and loves in the valley of Pālolo on the island of Oʻahu. Her work has been featured in Poetry, Literary Hub, Anomaly, Beloit, the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. She has performed throughout Hawaiʻi and abroad. She is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi-Mānoa, where she teaches creative writing with an emphasis on ʻŌiwi literature, spoken word, and decolonial poetics.

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  Airea Dee Matthews

  Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.” Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner US and Picador UK, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that is a bold poetic reckoning with the realities of class and race and their intergenerational effects.
  
  For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew

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  Rita Dove

  Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

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  Philip Schultz

  Philip Schultz is the author of seven collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Failure. He is the founder and director of the Writers Studio and lives in East Hampton, New York.

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  Dorothy Parker

  Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
  
  Dorothy Parker was an American writer, poet and critic best known for her caustic wit, wisecracks, and sharp eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left-wing politics led to a place on the Hollywood blacklist.
  Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker." Neverth

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  John Tannhauser

  John Tannhauser grew up around the Central Coast region of New South Wales, Australia and received a late education at Macquarie University, as well as life in general. He likes to “go bush” every so often and has done a bit of travelling around Australia, but mostly hangs around Sydney these days. Some of his poetry has appeared in the From One Line anthologies. His first (rather short) novel, Nocturnal Adventures, was published in 2016.

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  Tony Barnstone

  Tony Barnstone is the Albert Upton Professor of English at Whittier College and has a Masters in English and Creative Writing and Ph.D. in English Literature from UC Berkeley. His books of poems include Tongue of War: From Pearl Harbor to Nagasaki (BKMK Press, 2009, winner of the John Ciardi Prize in Poetry), The Golem of Los Angeles (Red Hen Press, 2008, winner, Benjamin Saltman Award); Sad Jazz: Sonnets (Sheep Meadow Press, 2005); and Impure: Poems by Tony Barnstone (University Press of Florida, 1998), in addition to the chapbook Naked Magic (Main Street Rag). He is also a distinguished translator of Chinese poetry and literary prose and an editor of literary textbooks. His books in these areas include Chinese Erotic Poetry (Everyman, 200

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  Kate Durbin

  Kate Durbin is a writer and artist from Los Angeles, California. Her books include Hoarders (Wave Books), E! Entertainment (Wonder), The Ravenous Audience (Akashic Books), and ABRA (1913 Press). ABRA is also an iOS app that is "a living text," which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize for electronic literature. In 2015 and in 2020, she was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia.
  
  Kate's writing has been published in Art in America, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Flaunt, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Her website is www.katedurbin.la.
  
  

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  Glyn Maxwell

  Glyn Maxwell is a poet and playwright. He has also written novels, opera libretti, screenplay and criticism.
  
  His nine volumes of poetry include The Breakage, Hide Now, and Pluto, all of which were shortlisted for either the Forward or T. S. Eliot Prizes, and The Nerve, which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He was one of the original ‘New Generation Poets’ in 1993, along with Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy and Don Paterson. His poetry has been published in the USA since 2000. His Selected Poems, One Thousand Nights and Counting, was published on both sides of the Atlantic in 2011. He has a long association with Derek Walcott, who taught him in Boston in the late 1980s, and whose Selected Poems he edited in 2014.
  
  On Poetry, a guidebook

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  W.S. Merwin

  William Stanley Merwin was an American poet, credited with over fifty books of poetry, translation and prose.
  
  William Stanley Merwin (September 30, 1927 – March 15, 2019) was an American poet who wrote more than fifty books of poetry and prose, and produced many works in translation. During the 1960s anti-war movement, Merwin's unique craft was thematically characterized by indirect, unpunctuated narration. In the 1980s and 1990s, his writing influence derived from an interest in Buddhist philosophy and deep ecology. Residing in a rural part of Maui, Hawaii, he wrote prolifically and was dedicated to the restoration of the island's rainforests.
  
  Merwin received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1971 and 2009; the Nationa

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  Robert Hass

  Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations. He is married to the poet Brenda Hillman.

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  Suzan Colon

  I'm the author of Cherries in Winter: My Family's Recipe for Hope in Hard Times, published in hardcover by Doubleday in November, 2010; normally a happy holiday time of year, but that particular November was one of the worst in this economic downfall--kind of timely, since my book was part Recession therapy, part comfort food recipes. Cherries in Winter is out now in paperback with added chapters and recipes.
  
  I've written for O, the Oprah Magazine, Jane, Harper's Bazaar, Details, Rolling Stone, and tons of other magazines. I love magazines; I hope they don't go away.
  
  I've also written three young adult novels based on the Smallville TV series, and a few children's books based on Batman.
  
  I live in New Jersey with my husband, two cats, and an

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  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.)
  
  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

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  Major Jackson

  Major Jackson is an American poet and professor. He is the author of four collections of poetry: Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn (2002), winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle.
  
  His poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poetry, and Tin House. His poetry has received critical attention in The Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, Parnassus, Philadelphia Inquirer, and on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His work has been included in anthologies such as The Best American Poetr

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  Bonnie Wheeler

  Bonnie Wheeler is associate professor and Director of Medieval Studies at the Southern Methodist University, Dedman College of Humanities & Sciences (Dallas, Texas).

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  Saul Williams

  Saul Williams is an acclaimed American poet, musician, actor, and filmmaker whose work fuses raw political insight, lyrical intensity, and a bold disregard for genre boundaries. Widely recognized for his dynamic presence in both spoken word and alternative hip hop, Williams emerged in the mid-1990s as a vital voice in contemporary poetry before expanding into music, theater, film, and literature.
  Born in Newburgh, New York, Williams studied acting and philosophy at Morehouse College and later earned an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was in New York's vibrant poetry scene that he honed his distinctive voice—fusing personal narrative, political urgency, and rhythmic precision. His breakout came in 1996 when he was named Grand Slam

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  Yusef Komunyakaa

  Yusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world.
  
  His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
  
  (from Wikipedia)

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  Paisley Rekdal

  Rekdal grew up in Seattle, Washington, the daughter of a Chinese American mother and a Norwegian father. She earned a BA from the University of Washington, an MA from the University of Toronto Centre for Medieval Studies, and an MFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is the author of the poetry collections A Crash of Rhinos (2000), Six Girls Without Pants (2002), and The Invention of the Kaleidoscope (2007) as well as the book of essays The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee: Observations on Not Fitting In (2000).
  
  In reviewing The Invention of the Kaleidoscope for Barn Owl Review, Jay Robinson observed that it’s “the razor’s edge that always accompanies eros that makes the poems of Paisley Rekdal fresh, intense and ultimately irres

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  Tomas Moniz

  TOMAS MONIZ is a latinx writer living in Oakland, CA. His debut novel, Big Familia, was a finalist for the 2020 PEN/Hemingway, the LAMBDA, and the Foreward Indies Awards. He edited the popular Rad Dad and Rad Families anthologies. He’s the recipient of the prestigious SF Literary Arts Foundation’s 2016 Award, the 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts, and the 2023 Lucas Artists Residency Program Fellow. Among the residencies he's attended the 2022 UCross Residency, the 2020 Caldera Residency, the 2018 SPACE on Ryder Farm and others. He teaches creative writing at Berkeley City College, Ariel Gore’s Literary Kitchen, and the Antioch MFA program. He has stuff on the internet but loves penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He

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  Ai

  Ai Ogawa (born Florence Anthony) was an American poet who who described herself as 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw, 1/4 Black, 1/16 Irish and as well as Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. She is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. While her poems often contain sex, violence, and other subjects for which she received criticism, she stated during a 1978 interview that she did not view her use of them as gratuitous. About the poems in her first collection, Cruelty, she said: "I wanted people to see how they treated each other and themselves." In 1999 she won the National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.

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  Tishani Doshi

  Tishani Doshi (born 1975) is an Indian poet, journalist and dancer based in Chennai. Born in Madras, India, to a Welsh mother and Gujarati father, she received an Eric Gregory Award in 2001. Her first poetry collection, Countries of the Body, won the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize for best first collection.[1] She has been invited to the poetry galas of the Guardian-sponsored Hay Festival of 2006 and the Cartagena Hay Festival of 2007. Her first novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was published by Bloomsbury in 2010 and was long-listed for the Orange Prize in 2011,[2] and shortlisted for The Hindu Best Fiction Award in 2010.
  
  She writes a blog titled "Hit or Miss" on Cricinfo,[3] a cricket-related website. In the blog which she started writing in April 2

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  Otis Moss III

  Otis Moss III (1970–) is the pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ.
  
  He is a graduate of Morehouse College (1992) and Yale Divinity School (1995).

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  Linda Gregg

  Linda Gregg is the author of several collectios of poetry: In the Middle Distance, Things and Flesh, Chosen by the Lion, The Sacraments of Desire, Alma,Too Bright to See and All of It Singing. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Literary Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She won 2006 PEN/Voelcker Award winner for Poetry and has won a Whiting Award.
  
  Librarian's note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

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  Cedar Sigo

  Born in 1978 on the Suquamish Indian Reservation in Washington State, Cedar Sigo studied at the Naropa Institute with Anne Waldman, Lisa Jarnot, Alice Notley, Joanne Kyger, and Allen Ginsberg, among others. His first book, Selected Writings (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2003), was reprinted in a revised edition in 2005. A writer on art, literature, and film, Sigo has collaborated with many visual artists and recently blogged for SFMOMA's Open Space. In June 2009, he gave a reading at New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in conjunction with its Kenneth Anger retrospective.

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  Dustin Pearson

  Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). In 2019, The Root named Dustin one of nine black poets working in “academic, cultural and government institutions committed to elevating and preserving the poetry artform.” The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, and The Anderson Center at Tower View, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a Director of the Clemson Literary Festival. The recipient of the Katherine C. Turner and John Mackay Shaw Academy of American Poets Awards and a 2021 Pushcart Prize, his work also

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  Shelley Wong

  SHELLEY WONG is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), longlisted for the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry and winner of the Pamet River Prize, and the chapbook RARE BIRDS (Diode Editions, 2017). Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry 2021, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.

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  Theodore W. Allen

  Theodore William "Ted" Allen (1919–2005) was an anti–white supremacist, working-class intellectual and activist who began his pioneering work on "white skin privilege" and "white race" privilege in 1965. He co-authored the influential White Blindspot (1967), authored Can White Workers Radicals Be Radicalized? (1969), and wrote the ground-breaking Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race (1975) before publication of his seminal two-volume classic The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997).

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  Gil Scott-Heron

  Gilbert Scott Heron was born in 1949. His mother was a librarian and his father a soccer player from Jamaica. In his youth Heron displayed both sporting prowess and academic ability (he won a place at Pennsylvania Lincoln University, like his role model Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance man). But he quit college after the first year to write his first novel, The Vulture (1970). While Heron was writing this the ferment of black politics and student radicalism was coming to a head, and his second novel The Nigger Factory (1972) reflects these developments.
  Heron has been more adventurous in his work as a musician and rapper.

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  Amy Gerstler

  Known for its wit and complexity, Amy Gerstler's poetry deals with themes such as redemption, suffering, and survival. Author of over a dozen poetry collections, two works of fiction, and various articles, reviews, and collaborations with visual artists, Gerstler won the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for Bitter Angel (1990). Her early work, including White Marriage/Recovery (1984), was highly praised. Gerstler's more recent works include Nerve Storm (1993), Medicine (2000), Ghost Girl (2004), Dearest Creature (2009), which the New York Times named a Notable Book of the Year, and Scattered At Sea (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
  
  Born in 1956, Gerstler is a graduate of Pitzer College and holds an M.

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  Dorothy Scarborough

  Emily Dorothy Scarborough was an American writer who wrote about Texas, folk culture, cotton farming, ghost stories and women's life in the Southwest.
  
  Scarborough was born in Mount Carmel, Texas. At the age of four she moved to Sweetwater, Texas for her mother's health, as her mother needed the drier climate. The family soon left Sweetwater in 1887, so that the Scarborough children could get a good education at Baylor College.
  
  Even though Scarborough's writings are identified with Texas, she studied at University of Chicago and Oxford University and beginning in 1916 taught literature at Columbia University.
  
  While receiving her PhD from Columbia, she wrote a dissertation, "The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction (1917)". Sylvia Ann Grider w

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  Gregory Pardlo

  Gregory Pardlo’s first book, Totem, received the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize in 2007. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Nation, Ploughshares, Tin House, as well as anthologies including Angles of Ascent, the Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and two editions of Best American Poetry. He is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a fellowship for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts. An associate editor of Callaloo, he is currently a teaching fellow in Undergraduate Writing at Columbia University.

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  Alena Graedon

  Alena Graedon's first novel, The Word Exchange, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and Paperback Row pick, and selected as a best novel of 2014 by Kirkus. It has been translated into eight languages. Graedon’s nonfiction has been published in The New York Times Book Review, newyorker.com, The Believer magazine, and Guernica, among other places, and her short fiction has appeared in VICE magazine.
  
  Graedon has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The Corporation of Yaddo, The Ucross Foundation, The Jentel Artist Residency, VCCA, and The Vermont Studio Center. A native of North Carolina, Graedon is a graduate of Brown University and Columbia University's MFA program. She has taught at Columbia and Monmouth universities, and she liv

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  Martheaus Perkins

  
  Martheaus Perkins was born to a single mother in Center, Texas. After a childhood in and out of homes in Houston, he graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University as a first-generation student.
  
  He is the recipient of the Robert Creeley Memorial Award judged by John Keene, the President's Award by Voices, the GMU Rinehart Fiction Award, and the Robert Raymond Scholarship. He co-edits BRAWL Lit and teaches literature at George Mason University. Currently, he lives in the DMV with fellow writers of the "International House of Poets." The name "Martheaus" is a collection of each woman who raise him: "Mar-" for his grandmother's nickname, "-Thea-" for his mother's name, and "-us" for his big aunties.
  
  Martheaus writes poetry, fiction, and non-f

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  Basil Williams

  The son of a barrister, Basil Williams was educated at Marlborough College and at New College, Oxford, where he read classics. After military service and a number of administrative positions in South Africa, he served as Kingsford Professor of History at McGill University in 1921, and then professor of History at Edinburgh University from 1925 to 1937 when he retired. In 1935 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy.

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