More biographical and publication information is available at https://annemariemacari.com

David Kirby’s collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” Kirby’s other collections of poetry include Get Up, Please (2016), A Wilderness of Monkeys (2014), The Biscuit Joint (2013), Talking About Movies With Jesus (2011), and The Ha-Ha (2003), short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. He teaches at Florida State University, where he has won five university teaching awards and is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. Kirby has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and recently the Florida Humanities Council presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing. He is married to the poet and fiction writer Barbara Hamby, and his latest poetry collection is More Than This.

We were pleased to host Galway Kinnell at the 2nd Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

An archive of his Festival Reading is available at: https://youtu.be/zWDKQ4qrp8c

More biographical and publication information is available at https://poets.org/poet/galway-kinnell

 

 

Born in Rochester, New York, Marie Howe attended Sacred Heart Convent School and the University of Windsor. She earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied with Stanley Kunitz, whom she refers to as “my true teacher.”

Her first collection, The Good Thief (1988), was chosen for the National Poetry Series by Margaret Atwood, who praised Howe’s “poems of obsession that transcend their own dark roots.” In that collection, Howe’s oracular yet self-doubting speakers often voice their concerns through Biblical and mythical allusions. Kunitz, on selecting the book for the Lavan Younger Poets Prize from the American Academy of Poets, observed, “Her long, deep-breathing lines address the mysteries of flesh and spirit, in terms accessible only to a woman who is very much of our time and yet still in touch with the sacred.”

In 1989, Howe’s brother John died of an AIDS-related illness. As Howe states in an AGNI interview, “John’s living and dying changed my aesthetic completely.” What the Living Do (1997), an elegy to John, was praised by Publishers Weekly as one of the five best poetry collections of the year. Stripping her poems of metaphor, Howe composed the collection as a transparent, accessible documentary of loss.

In The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (2008), Howe distanced herself from the personal narrative and returned to, as she describes in the AGNI interview, her “obsess[ion] with the metaphysical, the spiritual dimensions of life as they present themselves in this world.” In these poems Howe “makes metaphor matter and material metaphysical,” according to Brenda Shaughnessy in Publishers Weekly.

Howe has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, and NYU. She coedited (with Michael Klein) the essay anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1994). She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She was the Poet Laureate of New York State from 2012 to 2014. She lives in New York City.

JAY HOPLER is an American poet, born in Puerto Rico. He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a Ph.D. from Purdue University in American Studies.

His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, The New Republic, and The New Yorker. Hopler’s many awards and honors include a 2016 Florida Book Award in Poetry, a 2009 Whiting Award, and a 2010/2011 Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

VANESSA HIDARY is an internationally acclaimed Spoken Word Artist, solo performer, author, actress, writer, director. Her nationally toured solo show, “Culture Bandit” chronicles Vanessa’s coming of age during the golden age of Hip-Hop. In 2011, Hidary published her book,  The Last Kaiser Roll in the Bodega (Penmanship Books, 2011).

Hidary has aired three times on “Russell Simmons Presents ‘Def Poetry Jam’ on HBO, and is featured in the award winning film  The Tribe, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, The Tribeca Film Festival, and The Jewish Motifs International Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland. She has also developed and directed the show MONOLOGUES: an evening of solo performances by 15 young adults, exploring their Jewish identity, inspired by a 10-day trip through Israel. In July 2015, Hidray created The Kaleidoscope Project, a narrative-arts driven initiative. In partnership with UJA, the 14th Street Y, and Be’chol Lashon, Kaleidoscope presented the Kaleidoscope Monologue Showcase to sold out audiences over a three-day period in mid-July 2015.
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MICHAEL HETTICH’s collection, Systems of Vanishing (University of Tampa Press, 2014) won the 2013 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. His collection The Measured Breathing (Swan Scythe Press, 2011) won the 2011 Swan Scythe Press Award. Hettich is also the author of many poetry collections, including: The Animals Beyond Us (New Rivers Press, 2011), Like Happiness (Anhinga Press, 2010), Many Loves (Yellow Jacket Press, 2007), Flock and Shadow (New Rivers Press, 2005), Swimmer Dreams (Turning Point Press, 2005), among others.

Hettich is the winner of three Florida Individual Artists fellowships. His work has been featured in Orion Poetry East, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Sun, and elsewhere. He resides in Florida.

BARBARA HAMBY is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Bird Odyssey (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Her poetry collection, Delirium (University of North Texas Press, 1995) won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from Poetry Society for America, and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her short story collection, Lester Higata’s 20th Century (2010), won the Iowa Short Fiction Prize/John Simmons Award.

Other awards of Hamby’s include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts as well as the New York University Poetry Prize (1998), the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry (2003). Hamby currently resides in Tallahassee, Florida with her husband and fellow poet, David Kirby, both professors at Florida State University.

ARACELIS GIRMAY is the author of three books of poems: The Black Maria (BOA, 2016), Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007) and Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), the winner of the Isabella Gardner Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. She is also the author/illustrator of the collage-based picture book changing, changing. Current collaborations include an interview with Emmy Pérez and a poetry translation project with visual artist and writer Rosalba Campra. She has received grants, training, and fellowships in support of her projects from the NEA, The Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the Cave Canem Foundation, and the Community~Word Project. Girmay is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund.

 

KIMIKO HAHN is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Brain Fever (W.W. Norton, 2014); The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996); and Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; among others.

Hahn’s many awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), Pen/Voelcker Award (2008), American Book Award (2008), Shelley Memorial Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the N.Y. Foundation for the Arts. Hahn was elected President of the Board of Governors, Poetry Society of America in 2016.

KELLE GROOM is the author of four poetry collections and the memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl  (Simon & Schuster, 2012),  a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice selection, a Library Journal Best Memoir, Barnes & Noble Best Book of the Month, Oprah O Magazine selection, and Oxford American Editor’s Pick.

Her four poetry collections are Spill, (forthcoming from Anhinga Press), Five Kingdoms (Anhinga Press, 2010), Luckily (Anhinga, 2016), and Underwater City (University Press of Florida, 2004). Her work has appeared in AGNI, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, New York Times, Ploughshares, and Poetry, among others.

ANDREA GIBSON is a poet and activist, currently residing in Colorado. They are the author of four poetry collections and seven full-length albums of spoken word performances. Their most recent album, Hey Galaxy (Tender Loving Empire, 2018) is a social justice oriented project inspired, in part, by the 2016 election.

Gibson is a four-time Denver Grand Slam Champion.  With Kelsey Gibb, Gibson launched the website Stay Here With Me in 2013.

MARTÍN ESPADA is a prolific poet, essayist, and editor. Some titles among his many poetry collections include: Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (Curbstone Press, 1990), Alabanza (W.W. Norton, 2003), Crucifixion in the Plaza de Armas (Smokestack Books, 2008), and most recently, Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W.W. Norton, 2016).

Espada’s many awards and recognitions include two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1986 & 1992), the Pushcart Prize (1999), Pen/Revson Foundation Fellowship in Poetry (1989), National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist (1997), Robert Creeley Award (2004), Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2006), Pulitzer Prize Finalist (2007), National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award (2008), among others. In 2018, Espada won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, in recognition of his outstanding lifetime contributions to poetry.

In 2001, Espada served as Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts. He still resides in Massachusetts where he works as professor of poetry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

CORNELIUS EADY has published seven volumes of poetry, including, most recently,  Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2008),  as well as  Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), which was a National Book Award finalist. His collection, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze(1985), won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and his collection,  The Gathering of My Name (1991), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

With Toi Derricotte, Eady co-founded Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. Eady’s awarded honors include Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

STEPHEN DUNN (1938-2021), is the author of fifteen collections of poetry. His 2001 collection, Different Hours, won the Pulitzer Prize and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Foundations Fellowship, and three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships.

Dunn’s work also appeared in The New Yorker, The Georgia Review,The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic and American Poetry Review, among other publications. Dunn serves as Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. (June 24, 1939 – June 24, 2021)

MARY CORNISH is the author of the poetry collection, Red Studio  (Oberlin College Press, 2006), winner of the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize.

A graduate of the Sarah Lawrence MFA program, and a former Wallace Stegner fellow, Cornish currently teaches at Western Washington University.

KURT BROWN (1944-2013) authored several volumes of poetry including I’ve Come This Far to Say Hello  (Tiger Bark Press, 2014), Time-Bound (Tiger Bark Press, 2012),  No Other Paradise (Red Hen Press, 2010),  Future Ship (Red Hen Press, 2008), Fables from the Ark (WordTech Communications, 2004),  More Things in Heaven and Earth  (Four Way Books, 2002), and  Return of the Prodigals (Four Way Books, 1999).  In addition, Brown authored six chapbooks. In 2012, he published his memoir,  Lost Sheep: Aspen’s Counterculture in the 1970s (Conundrum Press, 2012).

Brown founded the Aspen Writers’ Conference, now called Summer Words. He also taught poetry workshops at Sarah Lawrence College and Georgia Tech. He was a founding director of AWP’s Writers’ Conferences and Centers. In Kurt Brown’s name, AWP now offers three annual scholarships to emerging writers, The Kurt Brown Prizes.

ELLEN BASS is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, Like A Beggar (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award. Previous books include The Human Line (Copper Canyon Press, 2007) and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002) which won The Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973).

Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun and hundreds of other journals and anthologies. She was awarded Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council and received the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’s Larry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes.

Her non-fiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins, 1996), I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse(Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages.

Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency MFA writing program at Pacific University.

RACHEL McKIBBENS is a Chicana poet, essayist, activist, and two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. Her most recent collection of poetry is  Blud (Copper Canyon Press, 2017). Her previous works include: Pink Elephant (Cypher Books, 2009), Into the Dark & Emptying Field (Small Doggies Press, 2013) and the chapbook Mammoth (Organic Weapon Arts, 2013).

STUART DISCHELL is the author of Good Hope Road, a National Poetry Series Selection (Viking 1993), Evenings & Avenues (Penguin 1996) Dig Safe (Penguin 2003) Backwards Days (Penguin 2007) and most recently, Children With Enemies (University of Chicago Press), the pamphlets Animate Earth and Touch Monkey, and the chapbook Standing on Z. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, Pushcart Prize, and Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

CAMPBELL McGRATH is the author of ten books of poetry, including XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century (Ecco Press, 2016), In The Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys (Ecco Press, 2012), Shannon (Ecco Press, 2009), and Seven Notebooks (Ecco Press, 2007). His third book, Spring Comes to Chicago (Ecco Press, 1996), won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Nouns  & Verbs, New and Selected Poems is forthcoming in 2019.

He has received many of America’s major literary prizes for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship, a USA Knight Fellowship, and a Witter-Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress. His poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic and on the op-ed page of the New York Times, as well as in scores of literary reviews and quarterlies. Born in Chicago, he lives with his family in Miami Beach and teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.

GREGORY PARDLO’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts; his first collection, Totem, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is also the author of Air Traffic, a memoir in essays forthcoming from Knopf. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review.

ELEANOR WILNER has published seven books of poems, most recently Tourist in Hell (2010, University of Chicago Press); The Girl with Bees in Her Hair and Reversing the Spell; New & Collected Poems (Copper Canyon). Her publications include a translation of Euripides’ Medea, and a book on visionary imagination, Gathering the Winds. Her poems appear in over 40 anthologies; her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, teaches peripatetically at various colleges and universities, and perennially in the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College.

TYEHIMBA JESS is the author of two books of poetry,  Leadbelly and Olio, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.  Olio was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.  Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

His fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

SHARON OLDS is the author of eleven volumes of poetry. Her poetry, says Michael Ondaatje, is “pure fire in the hands,” and David Leavitt in the Voice Literary Supplement describes her work as “remarkable for its candor, its eroticism, and its power to move.” With sensuality, humor, sprung rhythm, and remarkable imagery, she expresses truths about domestic and political violence, sexuality, family relationships, love, and the body. Often compared to “confessional” poets, she has been much praised for the courage, emotional power, and extraordinary physicality of her work. A reviewer for The New York Times hailed her poetry for its vision: “Like Whitman, Ms. Olds sings the body in celebration of a power stronger than political oppression.”

Born in San Francisco, Sharon Olds studied at Stanford University and Columbia University. Her numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant; a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship; the San Francisco Poetry Center Award for her first collection, Satan Says (1980); and the Lamont Poetry Selection and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Dead and the Living (1983). Her other books of poetry are Strike Sparks: Selected Poems 1980-2002 (2004), Blood, Tin, Straw (1999), The Gold Cell (1997), The Wellspring (1995), One Secret Thing (2008), The Unswept Room (2002) and The Father (1992). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry, Atlantic Monthly, and New York Times. Her most recent book is entitled Odes (September 2016, Knopf).

Named New York State Poet Laureate (1998 – 2000), Olds teaches graduate poetry workshops at New York University and the writing workshop she helped found at a 900-bed state hospital for the severely disabled (now in it’s 30th year). She is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science. Her poetry collection, One Secret Thing, was a finalist for the T. S. Eliot Prize & the Forward Prize, and her collection, Stag’s Leap (2012), was named one of Oprah’s Favorite Reads of 2012 and won both the T.S. Eliot Prize, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2014, Sharon Olds was awarded the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. In 2015 she was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016 Sharon Olds received the Wallace Stevens Award, given annually to recognize outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.

Sharon Olds lives in New York City.

Bibliography:
Odes, (Alfred A. Knopf, 2016)
Stag’s Leap (Alfred A. Knopf, 2012)
One Secret Thing (Random House, 2008)
Strike Sparks: Selected Poems (Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
The Unswept Room (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)
Blood, Tin, Straw (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999)
The Gold Cell (Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)
The Wellspring (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
The Father (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992)
The Dead & the Living (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)
Satan Says (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980)

Lorna Knowles Blake is author of Green Hill, her most recent book of poetry and recipient of the 2017 Able Muse Award. She serves on the editorial board at the journal Barrow Street and on the advisory committee for WCAI’s Poetry Sundays radio program. She teaches creative writing in Brewster, on Cape Cod and in New Orleans.

STEPHEN GIBSON is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, selected by Billy Collins, University of Arkansas Press), The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press, 2016), Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize, Story Line Press, West Chester University), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist University of Arkansas Press, 2011), Frescoes (Lost Horse Press book prize, 2010), Masaccio’s Expulsion (MARGIE/IntuiT House book prize, 2008), and Rorschach Art (Red Hen Press, 2001). He has been a recipient of Individual Artist Fellowships from the State of Florida in both poetry and fiction. His poetry and fiction have appeared in such journals as Able Muse, American Arts Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Gargoyle, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, Lake Effect, Louisiana Literature, Nimrod, North American Review, The Paris Review, Per Contra, Pleiades, Poetry, Quiddity, River Styx, Salamander, The Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, The Southern Review, Southwest Review, The Texas Review, Unsplendid, and The Yale Review. He taught for thirty-two years at the Belle Glade campus of Palm Beach State College.

 

DANA GIOIA is the current Poet Laureate of California and author of five full-length collections of poetry, most recently 99 Poems: New & Selected (Graywolf Press, 2016). Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, he 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.

His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia’s 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.

In 2014 he won the Aiken-Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in American poetry.

ELIZABETH ACEVEDO’s poetry is infused with her Dominican parents’ bolero and her beloved city’s tough grit. She holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and a MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. With over twelve years of performance experience, Acevedo has been a featured performer on BET and Mun2, as well as delivered several TED Talks and is well known for her poetry videos which have gone viral and been picked up by PBS, Latina Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post and Upworthy. Acevedo is a National Poetry Slam Champion and her poetry manuscript, Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths, was published in September 2016 and her young adult novel forthcoming.

 

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing, which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books and co-curates the multi-media maker’s space Voluble. The recipient of awards and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, Civitella di Ranieri, The Paris Review, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation, among others, Calvocoressi’s poems have appeared in POETRY, The New York Times, Boston Review and other magazines and journals. She sits on the poetry boards of The Rumpus and From the Fishouse. She is working on memoir about suicide entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself. Her third book, Rocket Fantastic, was released September 2017.

BETH ANN FENNELLY, Poet Laureate of Mississippi, teaches poetry and nonfiction writing at the University of Mississippi. Her first book of poetry, Open House, won the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize and the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and was a Book Sense Top Ten Poetry Pick. It was reissued by W.W. Norton in 2009. Her second poetry collection, Tender Hooks, and her third, Unmentionables, were published by W.W. Norton in 2004 and 2008. She also published a book of nonfiction, Great with Child: Letters to a Young Mother (Norton), in 2006. The Tilted World, the novel she wrote with her husband, Tom Franklin, was published by Morrow in the fall of 2013. Her current book, Micro-Memoirs, was published in October 2017.

ROSS GAY was born on August 1, 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio. He received a BA in English/Art from Lafayette College, an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College, and a PhD in English from Temple University. He is the author of three collections of poetry: Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), winner of the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2015 NAACP Image Awards, all in poetry categories; Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), and Against Which (Cavankerry Press, 2006). Gay is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin’, and an editor of the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. His honors include fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and the Guggenheim Foundation. He currently teaches at Indiana University and in Drew University’s Low-Residency MFA Program.

RODNEY JONES’s most recent book of poetry is Imaginary Logic (2011).  Salvation Blue, his eighth book of poetry, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, 2007. Previous collections include Kingdom of the Instant: Poems (2004); Elegy for the Southern Drawl (1999); Things That Happen Once (1996); Apocalyptic Narrative (1993); Transparent Gestures (1989); The Unborn (1985); and The Story They Told Us of Light (1980). He was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the winner of the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter I.B. Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Southeast Booksellers Association Award, and a Harper Lee Award. Rodney Jones is a professor of English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, and has taught at the Warren Wilson Low-Residency MFA Program.

COLEMAN BARKS, born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, went to school at the University of North Carolina and the University of California, Berkeley. He taught poetry and creative writing at the University of Georgia for thirty years. After meeting Robert Bly in 1976, he began translating the 13th Century mystic, Rumi. His first publication of the Rumi work, Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, was awarded the Pushcart Writer’s Choice Award by William Stafford. His Rumi translations were collected in a definitive best-selling anthology, The Essential Rumi, and re-issued in 1997. His work with Rumi was the subject of a segment in Bill Moyers’ Language of Life series on PBS, and a special, Fooling with Words, aired on PBS in 1999. A selection of the Rumi translations appears in the prestigious 7th edition of the Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. The father of two grown children and grandfather of three, he is now retired in Athens, Georgia.

Originally from Philly, raised in Willingboro, and currently living in Queens NYC, MASON GRANGER has been a full-time member of the performance poetry trio The Mayhem Poets since 2005.  With a style that’s equal parts smart and smile, Mason gets his points across in a way that leaves audiences hopefully a little more knowledgeable and feeling a little better than when they arrived.  Mason is also the creator of SlamFind, the world’s first mobile app dedicated to performance poetry that allows poetry fans to discover and connect with live poetry venues and individual poets all over North America.  SlamFind poetry videos have been featured by The Huffington Post, Upworthy, Buzzfeed, Cosmo and many more.  Mason himself has been featured in magazines such as Vibe, Complex, Fader and Rolling Stone as a spokesperson for New Era Caps.

A graduate of Rutgers University with a double degree in Acting and Journalism, SCOTT RAVEN co-founded The Mayhem Poets. His performance work has been featured by Fiat, Purina, CNN, and The Today Show.  His written work has appeared in the New York Times and New York Post.  He is the author of Sconnettts, a collection of poems based on his past romantic relationships, his family, and his athletic background; The Polygons, Surrealist Poems: Volume 1; and the upcoming “6 Piece Chicken (performable poems and stories from on tour).”  He’s also an actor in commercials, plays and films and proud new member of the Screen Actor’s Guild (SAG). Scottt grew up in Edison, NJ, and currently lives in Harlem, NYC, where he runs and puns with his imaginary man’s best friend, Spott.

 

TINA CHANG was raised in New York City. She is the first female to be named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn and is the author of the collections of poetry Of Gods & Strangers (2011) and Half-Lit Houses (2004). She is also the co-editor of the W.W. Norton anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). She is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Van Lier Foundation among others. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and she is also a member of the international writing faculty at the City University of Hong Kong.

LYNN EMANUEL is the author of five books of poetry: Hotel Fiesta, The Dig, Then, Suddenly—, Noose and Hook, and most recently, The Nerve of It:  New and Selected Poems.   Her work has been featured in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, Best American Poetry and is anthologized in The Oxford Book of American Poetry.  She has served as a poetry editor for the Pushcart Prize Anthology, on the Literature Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts, and as a judge for the National Book Awards. Emmanuel has received numerous awards including the Eric Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a fellowship from the Ranieri Foundation and the National Poetry Series. She has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Bennington Writers’ Conference, The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing, and has been the Elliston Distinguished Poet-in-Residence in  the PhD program at University of Cincinnati.  She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh where she founded and directs the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series.

 

DAISY FRIED is the author of three books of poetry: Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice (University of Pittsburgh, 2013), named by Library Journal one of the five best poetry books of 2013, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again (University of Pittsburgh, 2006), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It, (University of Pittsburgh, 2000), which won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Award. For her poetry, she’s received Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships, as well as a Pushcart Prize and the Cohen Award from Ploughshares. Recent poems have been published in the London Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, Poetry, The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry 2013. She reviews books of poetry for The New York Times, Poetry and the Threepenny Review, and won the Editors Award from Poetry for “Sing, God-Awful Muse,” an essay about reading Paradise Lost and breastfeeding. She is on the faculty of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.

DORIANNE LAUX is the author of Only as the Day Is Long: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2019), a finalist of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, The Book of Men, (2012) winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and Facts about the Moon, winner of the Oregon Book Award. She is the co-author of The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Among Laux’s awards are two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship among others. Laux’s poems have been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Korean, Romanian, Dutch, Afrikaans, and Brazilian Portuguese. Widely anthologized in America, her work has appeared in the Best of APR, The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Laux lives in Raleigh, where she directs the Program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University. She is a founding faculty member at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA Program.

Reading, Signing and in the audience with Stephen Dunn at the 2007 Festival:

CHARLES SIMIC, the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States (2007-2008), was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in 1938, and immigrated to the United States in 1953 at the age of 15. He has lived in New York, Chicago, the San Francisco area, and for many years in New Hampshire. He is professor emeritus at the University of New Hampshire.

A poet, essayist, and translator, Simic has been honored with the Frost Medal, the Wallace Stevens Award, a Pulitzer Prize, two PEN Awards for his work as a translator, and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 2014, he was awarded the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award, which recognizes outstanding artistic and intellectual literary achievements that uphold the values of Zbigniew Herbert’s work. Edward Hirsch, a member of the international Jury, points out that Simic “specializes in tragicomedy. Like Zbigniew Herbert, he has a keen historical awareness, a sardonic sense of humor, and a powerful consciousness of human tragedy. He speaks out against human venality. His way of attacking a poem has inspired poets world-wide. He also inspires readers because he reminds people of their humanity.”

He is the author of numerous collections of poems, among them, The Lunatic (2015), Master of Disguises; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Classic Ballroom Dances, which won the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Award. A collection entitled Sixty Poems was released in honor of his appointment as US Poet Laureate. Simic has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano, and many translations of poets from former Yugoslavia as well as an anthology of Serbian poetry entitled The Horse Has Six Legs. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.

CARL PHILLIPS is the author of thirteen books of poems, most recently Reconnaissance (FSG, 2015) and Silverchest (FSG, 2013).  Phillips has also published two books of prose, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination, and Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry; and he is the translator of Sophocles’s Philoctetes.  His awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the Academy of American Poets.  A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as the judge for the Yale Younger Poets Series, Phillips is Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.

 

ALAN SHAPIRO is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has published ten books of poetry, most recently, Old War (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). He has been the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award, an LA Times Book Award, and a finalist in poetry and nonfiction for the National Books Critics Circle Award. In 2011, fall, he will publish two books: Night of the Republic, a book of poems, from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Broadway Baby, a novel, from Algonquin Books. A recipient of two awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Sarah Teasdale Award from Wellesley College, and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Shapiro teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

 

MARTY McCONNELL is the author of two poetry collections: winner of the 2017 Michael Waters Poetry Prize,  when they say you can’t go home again, what they mean is you were never there (Southern Indiana University Press, 2018) and winner of the Silver Medal in Independent Publishers Award,  Wine for a Shotgun (EM Press, 2012). She also authored the nonfiction book, Gathering Voices: Creating a Community-Based Poetry Workshop (YesYes Books, 2018).

McConnell is also a seven-time National Poetry Slam team member, the 2012 National Underground Poetry Individual Competition (NUPIC) Champion, and appeared twice on HBO’s “Def Poetry Jam.” Her work has been published in numerous anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2014; Bullets & Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry; A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry; City of the Big Shoulders: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry; and Word Warriors: 35 Women Leaders in the Spoken Word Movement, as well as journals including Bellevue Literary Review, Willow Springs, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Crab Orchard, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among many others.

 

PATRICIA SMITH is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson.  Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children’s book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series. Her work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays and Best American Mystery Stories. She co-edited The Golden Shovel Anthology—New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir.

She is a Guggenheim fellow, a Civitellian, a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, a finalist for the Neustadt Prize, a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, a former fellow at both Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam, the most successful poet in the competition’s history. Patricia is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, as well as an instructor at the annual VONA residency and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program.

Spencer Reece is a poet and priest. His first collection, The Clerk’s Tale, won the Bakeless Prize in 2003, and he followed it with the collection The Road to Emmaus (2014). He has received an NEA grant, a Guggenheim grant, the Witter Bynner Prize from the Library Congress, and the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship. His poems have been published in The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Scholar, and The New Republic. Last year, he served as the chaplain to the Bishop of Spain for the Reformed Episcopal Church, Iglesia Español Reformada Episcopal. Currently he is completing a book of prose, The Little Entrance, about his decision to become a priest in middle age.

 

CLAUDIA EMERSON (1957-2014) won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, Late Wife (LSU Press, 2005). She also published the poetry collections:    Secure the Shadow (LSU Press, 2012),  Figure Studies (LSU, 2008),  Pinion: An Elegy (LSU Press, 2002), and  Pharaoh, Pharaoh (LSU Press, 1997).

In 2008, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia and served until 2010. Other honors and awards of Emerson’s include an AWP Intro Award (in 1991), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (in 1994),Witter Bynner Fellowship from Library of Congress (in 2005) and a Guggenheim fellowship (in 2011).