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.

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

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.

We were pleased to host Marilyn Nelson at the 2nd Annual Palm Beach Poetry Festival.

An archive of her Festival Reading is available at: https://youtu.be/lroJ6Bl1woI

More biographical and publication information is available at https://marilyn-nelson.com/

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)

Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001, and of A New Hunger, an ALA Notable Book. Four Way Books published her latest collection: These Many Rooms. Her poetry was featured on Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ website, and in reviews such as Orion, Georgia Review, Five Points, Ploughshares and Harvard Review. Garrison Keillor read four of her poems on NPR’s A Writer’s Almanac. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she was also awarded the James Dickey Poetry Prize for 2020. She is the editor of four anthologies and taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, UCSB, and is a member of the founding faculty at the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program.

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.