ROBERT WRIGLEY  grew up in Collinsville, Illinois, a coal mining town. He earned his BA (with honors) in English Language and Literature at Southern Illinois University and his MFA in Poetry from the University of Montana. His collections of poetry include Beautiful Country (Penguin, 2010); Earthly Meditations: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006); Lives of the Animals (Penguin, 2003); Reign of Snakes (Penguin, 1999) – winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award.  He also authored In the Bank of Beautiful Sins(Penguin, 1995) – winner of the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award and Lenore Marshall Award finalist; What My Father Believed (University of Illinois Press, 1991); Moon in a Mason Jar (The University of Illinois Press, 1986); and The Sinking of Clay City (Copper Canyon Press, 1979). Wrigley’s awards and honors include fellowships from: The National Endowment for the Arts; The Idaho State Commission on the Arts; The Guggenheim Foundation; The J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize; The Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry Magazine; The Wagner Award from The Poetry Society of America, The Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, and two Pushcart Prizes. He was the State of Idaho’s Writer-in-Residence from 1987-1988, and taught at Lewis-Clark College, The University of Oregon, The University of Montana (as the Richard Hugo Chair in Poetry), and at Warren College. He is the Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Idaho.

BRENDA SHAUGHNESSY was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She received her BA in Literature and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and she earned an MFA at Columbia University. She is the author of Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008) – winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999) – which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry.She has also won a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is Our Andromeda, (Copper Canyon Press, September 2012). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Bomb, Boston Review, Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Shaughnessy is the recipient of a Bunting Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She is the Poetry Editor at Tin House Magazine, and currently teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University and The Eugene Lang College at the New School.

MOLLY PEACOCK‘s collections of poetry include The Second Blush: Poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008); Cornucopia (W. W. Norton & Co., 2002); Original Love (W. W. Norton & Co., 1995); Take Heart (Random House, 1989); Raw Heaven (Random House, 1984); and And Live Apart (The University of Missouri Press, 1980). She is also the author of prose, including How to Read a Poem, and Start a Poetry Circle (Riverhead Books, Penguin/ McClelland & Stewart, 1999) and her literary memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece (Riverhead Books, Penguin/ McClelland & Stewart, 1998). She is the editor of the anthology, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World (Graywolf Press, 2001), and co-editor of Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems from the Subways and Buses (W.W. Norton and Company, 1996). A President Emerita of the Poetry Society of America, she was an originator of Poetry in Motion, a program that places poems on placards in subways and buses. Peacock has been a Writer-in-Residence and teacher at numerous universities, and is currently a member of the graduate faculty of Spalding University’s Brief Residency MFA Program, the Elliston Poet at the University of Cincinnati, and Lecturer at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. She was an Honorary Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and served as Poet-in-Residence at The American Poets’ Corner, Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.  She received awards from The Danforth Foundation, The Ingram Merrill Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The Woodrow Wilson Foundation. Peacock has performed her one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, Off Broadway and throughout North America. She lives in Toronto.

MAURICE MANNING‘s first book of poems, Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions (Yale University Press, 2001) was chosen by W.S. Merwin for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Subsequent books include A Companion for Owls: Being the Commonplace Book of D. Boone, Lone Hunter, Back Woodsman, & c. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004); Bucolics (Houghton Mifflin, 2007); The Common Man (Houghton Mifflin , 2010) – a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; and The Gone and the Going Away (Houghton Mifflin, 2013). He has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Manning is a Professor of English at Transylvania University in Kentucky. He serves on the faculty in the MFA Program at Warren Wilson College and the Sewanee Writing Conference. Born and raised in Kentucky, he often writes about the land and culture of his home. [read a recent article in the Kentucky Herald, for more about Maurice Manning.

LINDA GREGERSON grew up in Illinois and received a BA from Oberlin College.  She went on to earn an MA from Northwestern University, an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, and her PhD from Stanford University. Her books of poetry include The Selvage (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012); Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Waterborne (Houghton Mifflin, 2002) – winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep (Houghton Mifflin, 1996) – a finalist for both The Poet’s Prize and the Lenore Marshall Award; and Fire in the Conservatory (Dragon Gate, 1982). She is also the author of literary criticism, including Negative Capability: Contemporary American Poetry (The University of Michigan Press, 2001); and The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Her awards and honors include The Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, The Consuelo Ford Award from The Poetry Society of America, The Isabel MacCaffrey Award from The Spenser Society of America, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Gregerson teaches American Poetry and Renaissance Literature at the University of Michigan, where she also directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

MARY KARR has received numerous honors and awards for her work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Bunting Fellowship from Radcliffe College. She has received a Pushcart Prize, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and Whiting Writer’s Award. She is a sought-after speaker who has given talks and lectures at major universities, libraries, and at the Weil Cornell Medical College, where she lectured during Grand Rounds in the psychiatric department in 2011. In 2012, she released an album of songs she wrote with singer Rodney Crowell, Kin. Her memoir, Lit, is scheduled to become and HBO television series. Karr is the Jesse Truesdell Peck Professor of Literature at Syracuse University.

Reflecting upon her aspirations as an author, Karr told Publishers Weekly: “Public readings and the oral tradition [are] important to me. An aesthetic experience is fine, but unless someone is infused with feeling from a work of art, it’s totally without conviction. My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It’s morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it’s emotionally and spiritually empowering.”

Mary Karr serves on the festival’s Advisory Board.

ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT has published seven volumes of poetry—Claiming Kin (1976), The Forces of Plenty (1983), The Lotus Flowers (1987), Two Trees (1992), Kyrie (1995), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Shadow of Heaven (2002), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Messenger: New and Selected Poems (2007), a finalist for both the NBA and the Pulitzer. She co-edited an anthology of essays, Poets Teaching Poets, and collected her own essays on craft in The Flexible Lyric. Most recently, The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song, was published in the Graywolf Press series of “little books” on craft. Her honors include the Emily Clark Balch Award, Hanes Poetry Award, Teasdale Award, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, three Pushcart Prizes, inclusion in Scribner’s Best American Poetry, the Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and grants from the NEA, Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. Voigt designed and directed the first low-residency MFA Writing Program, and now teaches in its reincarnation at Warren Wilson College. A former Vermont State Poet, she has been inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Follow this link for a terrific interview of Ellen by Steven Cramer in the Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/poetry/voigt.htm

She was a member of the faculty of the 2011 Palm Beach Poetry Festival and her workshop was titled: The Craft of Poetry. She serves on the festival’s Advisory Board.

VIJAY SESHADRI‘s collections of poems include James Laughlin Award winner The Long Meadow (Graywolf Press, 2005) and Wild Kingdom (1996). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Shenandoah, The Threepenny Review, Verse, The Yale Review, the Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Bomb, The San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and three issues of The Best American Poetry. Seshadri’s honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation; The Paris Review‘s Bernard F. Conners Long Poem Prize; and the MacDowell Colony’s Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement. He was educated at Oberlin College and Columbia University, and teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.

Learn more about Vijay in this interview from Poets & Writers: http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_vijay_seshadri

He was a member of the 2011 festival faculty and his workshop was titled: THE PLOT OF THE POEM.

He also serves on the festival’s Advisory Board.

 

STEPHEN DOBYNS has published many books of poems and 20 novels. He has earned a Melville Cane Award, the National Poetry Series, and the Lamont Poetry Prize of The Academy of American Poets. His renowned book of essays, Best Words, Best Order (1996) is now in its 2nd edition. A recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, he has taught in MFA programs at Warren Wilson, Sarah Lawrence, Iowa, Emerson, Syracuse and Boston University.

In January 2010, at the Sixth Annual Festival, his workshop was THE POEM’S INTENTION.

He serves on the festival Advisory Board.

BILLY COLLINS is an American phenomenon. No poet since Robert Frost has managed to combine high critical acclaim with such broad popular appeal. His work has appeared in a variety of periodicals including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The American Scholar, he is a Guggenheim fellow and a New York Public Library “Literary Lion.” His last three collections of poems have broken sales records for poetry. His readings are usually standing room only, and his audience – enhanced tremendously by his appearances on National Public Radio – includes people of all backgrounds and age groups. The poems themselves best explain this phenomenon. The typical Collins poem opens on a clear and hospitable note but soon takes an unexpected turn; poems that begin in irony may end in a moment of lyric surprise. No wonder Collins sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” It is a door that many thousands of readers have opened with amazement and delight.

Billy Collins has published nine collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Picnic, Lightning, Taking Off Emily Dickinson’s Clothes, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, and Ballistics, and most recently, Horoscopes for the Dead. A collection of his haiku, titled She Was Just Seventeen, was published by Modern Haiku Press in fall 2006. He also edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday, was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006, and edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, with paintings by David Allen Sibley.

Included among the honors Billy Collins has received are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize — all awarded by Poetry magazine. In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry.

In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. Billy Collins is a Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, as well as a Senior Distinguished Fellow of the Winter Park Institute at Rollins College.

“Luring his readers into the poem with humor, Mr. Collins leads them unwittingly into deeper, more serious places, a kind of journey from the familiar to quirky to unexpected territory, sometimes tender, often profound.” — The New York Times

LISA RUSS SPAAR is the author of several poetry collections, including Satin Cash, Blue Venus, and Glass Town, for which she received a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers in 2000, Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and most recently, Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted With the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All That Mighty Heart: London Poems (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2008). A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2009 Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, Outstanding Faculty Award of the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (2010), and the Carole Weinstein Poetry Award (2011), and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Spaar serves as poetry editor for the Chronicle of Higher Education Review and is Founder and Director of the Area Program in Poetry Writing at the University of Virginia, where she is Professor of English.

LOLA HASKINS is an American poet and two-time National Endowment for the Arts fellow.  She is author of How Small, Confronting Morning (Jacar, 2016), Desire Lines (BOA Editions, 2004) and The Rim Benders (Anhiga Press, 2001), among other poetry collections. Her collection, Hunger (University of Iowa Press), received the 1992 Iowa Poetry Prize.

She has also written a guide to poetry, titled Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Live (The Backwaters Press, 2007), as well as an illustrated book about women in fables titled, Solutions Beginning with A (Modernbook, 2007), and a nonfiction book titled, Fifteen Florida Cemeteries: Strange Tales Unearthed (University Press of Florida, 2011).

Haskin’s work has appeared in The Atlantic, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mississippi Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.

TRACY K. SMITH is the author of four books of poetry, including Wade in the Water (Graywolf Press, 2018), which is shortlisted for the 2018 T. S. Eliot Prize. and one memoir, Ordinary Light (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction. Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011) was selected as a New York Times Notable Book for 2011 and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Duende (2007) won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question (2003) was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award in 2004 and a Whiting Award in 2005. She teaches Creative Writing at Princeton University and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She has served as the 52nd Poet Laureate of the United States since. 2017. 

LAURA KASISCHKE has published ten poetry collections, ten novels, and one short story collection.  Her most recent book of poetry, Where Now – New and Selected Poems (2017) and was published by Copper Canyon Press. Her 2011 poetry collection, Space, In Chains, received the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Other poetry collections include: The Infinitesimals (2014)  Lilies, Without (2o12), Gardening in the Dark (2004), Dance and Disappear (2002), What It Wasn’t (2002), Fire and Flower (1998), Housekeeping in a Dream (1995) and Wild Brides (1991).  Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.  She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan, and lives with her husband and son in Chelsea, Michigan.

Born on November 19, 1953, in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, TONY HOAGLAND authored witty, poingnant poems that comment on contemporary American life and culture.

 

JANE HIRSHFIELD is an award-winning poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of several collections of verse, including The Beauty (2015), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Come, Thief (Knopf, 2011), as well as a now-classic collection of essays, Nine Gates: Entering The Mind of Poetry (Harper Collins, 1997). She has also edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets of the past. Hirshfield’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, and seven editions of The Best American Poetry. Honors include The California Book Award, The Poetry Center Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, three Pushcart Prizes, finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A frequent presenter at universities and literary festival both in the US and abroad, in 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

TERRANCE HAYES is a 2014 MacArthur Fellow.  Hayes’s poetry collections include American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, How To Be Drawn (Penguin 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry. His first book, Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999) won both a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. His second book, Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Time Book Award and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award finalist, was named one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly.

Hayes’ other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a profile in The New York Times Magazine. He was was guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2014. His poems have appeared in nine editions of the series: “Barberism” in 2016, “Antebellum House Party” in 2015, “New Jersey Poem” in 2013, “The Rose Has Teeth” in 2012, and “Variations on Two Black Cinema Treasures” in 2005. He has read and lectured at Carnegie Hall, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Princeton University, Yale University, The Boys Club of New York, and the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. His poetry has also been featured on The News Hour. A member of the President’s Committee on the Arts & Humanities National Student Poets Program and a contributing editor for Jubilat magazine, he writes, “There are recurring explorations of identity and culture in my work and rather than deny my thematic obsessions, I work to change the forms in which I voice them. I aspire to a poetic style that resists style. In my newest work, I continue to be guided by my interests in people: in the ways community enriches the nuances of individuality; the ways individuality enriches the nuances of community.”

Hayes was born in Columbia, South Carolina, educated at Coker College where he studied painting and English and was an Academic All-American on the men’s basketball team. He received an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, and taught in Japan, Columbus, Ohio, and New Orleans. He returned to Pittsburgh where he taught for twelve years at Carnegie Mellon University. He is now professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

B.H. FAIRCHILD’s most recent book is The Blue Buick (W.W. Norton, 2014), and his poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Sewanee Review, and many other journals and anthologies, including Best American Poems. He is the author of six collections of poetry. Usher, was chosen by the LA Times as one of their favorite 25 books in poetry or fiction published in 2009. Trilogy, (2009 PennyRoyal Press) is a fine press limited-edition, and Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest, (Norton 2003) received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Gold Medal in Poetry from the California Book Awards, the Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Award, and the Bobbitt Award from the Library of Congress. The Art of the Lathe, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and William Carlos Williams Award, the PEN West Poetry Award, California Book Award, and Natalie Ornish Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Fairchild has received numerous fellowships and grants from the NEA, Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and Lannan Foundation and recently received Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and essay. He taught at California State University, San Bernardino, and Claremont Graduate University. He now teaches at the University of North Texas.

CARL DENNIS is the author of twelve poetry collections. The most recent is Another Reason (2014), as well as a collection of essays, Poetry as Persuasion. In 2000 he received the Ruth Lilly Prize for his contribution to American poetry. His 2001 collection Practical Gods won the Pulitzer Prize. He has been a faculty member of the MFA program in creative writing at Warren Wilson College, and is professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

 

 

DENISE DUHAMEL’s most recent book of poetry Blowout (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her other books include Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), Two and Two (Pittsburgh, 2005), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001), The Star-Spangled Banner (winner of the Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 1999) and Kinky (Orchises Press, 1997).  She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored Caprice (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) published in 2015 by Sibling Rivalry Press. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Duhamel is a professor at Florida International University in Miami.

THOMAS LUX 1946-2017
Acclaimed poet and teacher, born in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1946 to working class parents, Thomas Lux attended Emerson College and the University of Iowa. He began publishing haunted, ironic poems that owed much to the Neo-surrealist movement in the 1970s. From his first book Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), Lux’s poetry gradually evolved toward a more direct treatment of immediately available, though no less strange, human experience. Using ironic or sardonic speakers, startlingly apt imagery, careful rhythms, and reaching into history for subject matter, Lux created a body of work that is at once accessible and complex, wildly imaginative and totally relevant. Known for pairing humor with sharp existentialism, Lux commented in the Los Angeles Times, “I like to make the reader laugh—and then steal that laugh, right out of the throat. Because I think life is like that, tragedy right alongside humor.”

Lux’s first collections, including Memory’s Handgrenade and Sunday: Poems (1979), were grounded in the neo-surrealist techniques of contemporaries like James Tate and Bill Knott. Describing his own progress in an interview with the Cortland Review, he said: “I kind of drifted away from Surrealism and the arbitrariness of that. I got more interested in subjects, identifiable subjects other than my own angst or ennui or things like that. I got better and better, I believe, at the craft. I paid more and more attention to the craft. Making poems rhythmical and musical and believable as human speech and as distilled and tight as possible is very important to me. I started looking outside of myself a lot more for subjects. I read a great deal of history, turned more outward as opposed to inward.”

Lux’s other collections include New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995 (1997), The Street of Clocks (2001), The Cradle Place (2004), God Particles (2008), and To the Left of Time (2016). He was also the editor of I Am Flying Into Myself: Selected Poems of Bill Knott (2017). Thomas Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence for over 20 years, as well as at the Warren Wilson MFA program,  and the Georgia Institute of Technology. In the Cortland Review interview, he described teaching’s greatest rewards: “you see people get excited by poetry. You see their lives changed by poetry. You see someone beginning to learn how to articulate and express themselves in this very tight art form, in this very distilled manner. You see all sorts and hear all sorts of really human stuff, really human business.” His many awards and honors include the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Mellon fellowship, an honorary degree from Emerson College, and three grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.

He was Bourne Professor of Poetry at The Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and directed the McEver Visiting Writers Program and Poetry@Tech. Lux published over a dozen books of poetry; including Memory’s Handgrenade (1972), The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems 1970–1975 (1996), God Particles (2008), Child Made of Sand (2012), and most recently, To the Left of Time (2016). See the full bibliography.

Thomas Lux chaired the Advisory Board of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and participated as teaching faculty in every festival until his death in February 2017. His signature workshop, Word by Word, Line by Line, was always among the first choices of applicants through these years. He lent unfailing and generous support to the festival’s founder, board, to all of our staff, and to all of the festival faculty. We miss him, and we will continue to read his work and hear his voice always.

 

GINGER MURCHISON together with Thomas Lux, founded POETRY at TECH, where she served as associate director five years and has been one of its McEver Visiting Chairs in Poetry since 2009. A three-time Pushcart nominee, she is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s M.F.A. Program for Writers and Editor-in-Chief of the acclaimed Cortland Review. Her first chapbook of poems, Out Here, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2008. She has published interviews with A.E. Stallings and Stephen Dobyns, and has poems published in Atlanta Review, Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine, Poetry Kanto, and Mead, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and Connotations online. Her latest collection, A Scrap of Linen, A Bone, is a Tom Lombardo selection for the Poetry Series at Press 53, and was published in Spring, 2016.

 

CAROL FROST’s books include Pure, Love and Scorn, Honeycomb, winner of the Florida Book Awards Gold Medal, and Entwined: Three Lyric Sequences (2014). She has received awards and honors from The National Endowment for the Arts, The Elliston Award, Poets’ Prize, and the PEN Syndication Fiction Project Awards.  Her poems have been anthologized in four Pushcart Prize anthologies, and New Anthology of American Poetry, Postmodernisms, and Breaking the Jaws of Silence: 60 American Poets. Her work appears in many journals inThe Atlantic, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times. She is the Theodore Bruce and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Professor of English at Rollins College and directs Winter With the Writers.

TOM SLEIGH‘s books include Station Zed, Army Cats, winner of the American Academy of Arts and Letters John Updike Award, and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Award. Far Side of the Earth won an AAAL Academy Award, The Dreamhouse, a finalist for the LA Times Book Award, and The Chain a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Prize. His work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Pushcart Anthology. He’s received the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Prize, and awards from the American Academy in Berlin, Civitella Ranieri, the Lila Wallace Fund, the Guggenheim, two NEAs, among others. He teaches at Hunter College and works as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa.

MARY SZYBIST is most recently the author of Incarnadine, winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.  She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.  Her first book Granted was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the GLCA New Writers Award.  She lives in Portland, Oregon where she teaches at Lewis & Clark College.

Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s poems have appeared the New York Times, Paris Review, PBS NewsHour, Plume, Poetry London, Prairie Schooner, RATTLE, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Her third book, Echolocation, was published by Plume Editions/MadHat Press in March of 2018 and was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Award, a longlist finalist for the Julie Suk Award and Runner Up for the Poetry By the Sea Best Book Award. She is an Associate Editor-at-Large for Plume.

KEVIN YOUNG is the author of ten books of poetry and prose. His most recent poetry collections are Book of Hours, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels; and Dear Darkness. Jelly Roll: A Blues was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness, won Graywolf’s Nonfiction Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book for 2012, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and won the PEN Open Award. He is the editor of several collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink. He is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Creative Writing & English and curator of Literary Collections & the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University, and served as the Holmes Visiting Poet at Princeton University for spring 2015.

ROBERT HASS is a poet of great eloquence, clarity, and force, whose work is rooted in the landscapes of his native Northern California. He brings the kind of energy in his poetry to his work as an essayist, translator, and activist on behalf of poetry, literacy, and the environment. In his tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate, he spent two years battling American illiteracy, armed with the mantra, “imagination makes communities.”

His many books of poetry include Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, and Sun Under Wood, a book of essays on poetry, Twentieth Century Pleasures. Hass translated Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986 by Tomas Transtromer, The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp). His collection of poems Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.

As US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), his deep commitment to environmental issues led him to found River of Words (ROW) , an organization that promotes environmental and arts education in affiliation with the Library of Congress Center for the Book. He was chosen as Educator of the Year by the North American Association on Environmental Education and, in 2005, elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He received the MacArthur “Genius” award, twice the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He is a professor of English at UC Berkeley.

“Hass has significantly broadened the role of poet laureate to include not only his love for poetry but also his concern for literacy and his passion for environmentalism.”  — Los Angeles Times

NICK FLYNN is the author of Some Ether‚ winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, Blind Huber, and The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands (Graywolf, 2011). He has written three memoirs, his most recent The Reenactments (Graywolf, 2013). His memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, and has been translated into fifteen languages. The Ticking is the Bomb, a memoir of deciding to become a father while the country is engaged in two wars, was published by Norton in 2010. He has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Amy Lowell Trust, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems, essays, and non-fiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Paris Review, NPR’s This American Life, and The New York Times Book Review. Being Flynn, a film based on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, was released in 2012 and stars Robert DeNiro, Julianne Moore and Paul Dano. Nick teaches at the University of Houston.

CAROLYN FORCHÉ is a poet, translator, essayist and human rights activist. She is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, winner of the LA Times Book Award, and Blue Hour, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translations include Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, Selected Poems of Robert Desnos, and other works. She edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness. She has received fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and Lannan Foundation, and the Robert Creeley Award, the Levinson Prize, among others. She is a trustee of the Griffin Trust. She co-edited The Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001, published in 2014, along with a memoir, a book of essays, and a poetry collection. She teaches and is Director of the Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice at Georgetown University.

LINDA GREGG has published eight collections of poetry, including Too Bright to See (1981); Alma (1985); Things and Flesh (1999), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2008, and winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. She has edited the Complete Gregg, and received a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Sara Teasdale Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, and numerous Pushcart Prizes. She has been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Literary Foundation. Gregg has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of California, Berkeley, Columbia University, UNC Greensboro, Princeton, and most recently at the Michener Center for Writers, University of Texas, Austin. She lives in New York.

MARY RUEFLE’s latest poetry collections are Dunce (Wave Books 2019), finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and 2020 Pulitzer Prize, My Private Property (Wave Books 2016) and Trances Of The Blast (Wave Books 2013).  Her Selected Poems won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. In addition to eleven books of poetry, she has published The Most of It, a book of prose, a book of her erasure, A Little White Shadow, a collection of her lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey (Wave Books 2012), and most recently, On Imagination (Sarabande Books 2017). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2010 Jerome J. Shestack Prize from the American Poetry Review, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont, and teaches in the MFA program at Vermont College.

NATASHA TRETHEWEY is the 19th United States Poet Laureate (2012-2014). In his citation, Librarian of Congress James Billington wrote “Her poems dig beneath the surface of history—personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago—to explore the human struggles that we all face.” She is the author of Monument: Poems New and Selected (Hougton Mifflin, 2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in Poetry; Thrall (2012), Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin), for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (Graywolf, 2002), which was named a Notable Book for 2003 by the American Library Association, and Domestic Work (Graywolf, 2000). She is also the author of Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (University of Georgia Press). A memoir is forthcoming in 2013. Her first collection of poetry, Domestic Work (2000), was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. In her introduction to the book, Dove said, “Trethewey eschews the Polaroid instant, choosing to render the unsuspecting yearnings and tremulous hopes that accompany our most private thoughts—reclaiming for us that interior life where the true self flourishes and to which we return, in solitary reverie, for strength.”

Trethewey is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Study Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review, Gettysburg Review, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. At Emory University she is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of English and Creative Writing. In addition to being United States Poet Laureate, she is the State Poet Laureate of Mississippi, from 2012-2016.

View the Interview Video of Natasha Trethewey by Chard deNiord at the 10th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

World Literature Today Transcript Article of the Natasha Trethewey Interview recorded at the 10th Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival

US Poet Laureate Interview on PBS News Hour
New Yorker article on Trethewey’s Laureateship
The New Yorker Book Bench Interview on Beyond Katrina

TAYLOR MALI is one of the few people in the world to have no job other than that of “poet.” Articulate, accessible, passionate, and downright funny, Mali studied drama in Oxford with members of The Royal Shakespeare Company and was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and played the “Armani-clad villain” of the documentary film SlamNation. His poem “What Teachers Make” has been viewed over 4 million times on YouTube. Mali is vocal advocate of teachers and the nobility of teaching, having spent nine years in the classroom teaching everything from English and history to math and S.A.T. test preparation. He has performed and lectured for teachers all over the world and in 2012 he reached his goal of creating 1,000 new teachers through “poetry, persuasion, and perseverance.” His book of essays, What Teachers Make: In Praise of the Greatest Job in the World, is his passionate defense of teachers drawing on his own experiences, both in the classroom and as a traveling poet. Taylor Mali is is the author of two books of poetry, The Last Time As We Are (Write Bloody Books 2009) and What Learning Leaves (Hanover 2002), and four CDs of spoken word. Mali received a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant in 2001 to develop “Teacher! Teacher!” a one-man show about poetry, teaching, and math winner of best solo performance at the 2001 U. S. Comedy Arts Festival. Formerly president of Poetry Slam Incorporated, the non-profit organization that oversees all poetry slams in North America, Taylor Mali makes his living entirely as a spoken-word and voiceover artist, traveling around the country performing and teaching workshops.

GLENIS REDMOND is a poet, educator, performer, and counselor. She presents her poetry in performances that cause the printed word to spring from the page and dance, sing, weep, and laugh. Glenis tells stories with poetry – from her life, her family, her African-American heritage, and her sensitive observations of the world around her – inspiring audiences of all ages. In her workshops and performances, she encourages participants to know themselves and their origin, thereby finding their own inspiration and their own stories. She has won numerous awards including The Carrie McCray Literary Award in Poetry, a study fellowship from Vermont Writing Center, study scholarships to the Atlantic Center for the Arts among others. She is the 1997 and the 1998 Southeast Regional Individual Poetry Slam Champion and placed in the Top 10 for the National Individual Slam Championship. Her recently released second CD is “Monumental, ” which follows “Glenis On Poetry” her first CD exploring her philosophy of poetry and education. She has published three chapbooks: Naming It, If I Ain’t African, and a children’s chapbook Word Power. Her full-length book of poetry is Backbone (Underground Epics). She has released a video of performance poetry, “Mama’s Magic”, and an audio tape of poetry entitled “Coming Forth”. Glenis performs throughout the United States, England, and Italy.

DOMINIQUE CHRISTINA is an award-winning writer, performer, educator, and activist. She holds five national poetry slam titles, including the 2014 & 2012 Women of the World Slam Champion and 2011 National Poetry Slam Champion. She has performed and conducted workshops for hundreds of colleges/universities, schools, community art spaces, nonprofit organizations, and conferences across the country. She has opened for Cornel West, appeared in Season 3 of Verses and Flow on TV One, performed for the Trayvon Martin and Emmett Till families at the Shiloh Baptist Church, and was a keynote speaker at the Emerging Women Conference and others. She also has created branding and marketing language for companies like Lotus Wei and Gaia Herbs. Her work has been published in: Huffington Post, Alight Literary Journal, Dead Animal Handbook, Hysteria Literary Magazine, Tandem Anthology, Pedestal Magazine, Heart and Soul Magazine, and Amulet Magazine. Her work is greatly influenced by her family’s legacy in the Civil Rights Movement and by the idea that worlds make worlds. Her first full-length poetry book, The Bones, The Breaking, The Balm: A Colored Girl’s Hymnal, published by Penmanship Books, is available now. Her second book, This Is Woman’s Work, is set for publication in October 2015.

 

MARC KELLY SMITH is creator/founder of the international Poetry Slam movement for which he received the nickname Slam Papi. A “strand of new poetry began at Chicago’s Green Mill Tavern in 1987 when Marc Smith found a home for the Poetry Slam.” Performance poetry has spread throughout the world, to over 1000 cities in the US, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

After more than a 3000 performances in nightclubs, concert halls, libraries, universities, Smith continues to host and perform every Sunday night at the Green Mill Jazz Lounge in Chicago. He has staged poetry events such as Chicago’s National Poetry Slams, Slam Dunk Poetry Day at Chicago’s Field Museum, Summer Solstice Poetry Shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, The Poetry Hot Dog Cart for Chicago’s “Stirring Things Up Festival,” Ted Talks, the Kennedy Center, and numerous high school and college events Author and editor of The Spoken Word Revolution series, two of the most important and best-selling book/CD anthologies of spoken word artists and performance poets, Crowdpleaser, and his CDs It’s About Time, Quarters in the Juke Box, and Love & Politics. His new book, Ground Zero: Poems from Chicago, is due out in 2015.

According to Smith, “We need people to talk poetry to each other. That’s how we communicate our values, our hearts, the things that we’ve learned that make us who we are.”