MARK DOTY is the author of the nine collections of poetry, most recently Deep Lane (W.W. Norton, 2015) and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008), which received the National Book Award. His collection, My Alexandria (HarperCollins, 1993), won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry. His other awards include a 1994 Whiting Award, a 1994 Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, the T.S. Eliot Prize, and three Lambda Literary Awards for Gay Men’s Poetry for Atlantis (1995), Source (2001), and Fire to Fire (2008). Doty also has published three memoirs. His most recent memoir, Dog Years (HarperCollins, 2005), received the 2007 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography as well as the 2008 Stonewall Book Award. Doty wrote the book-length essay, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon. In 2012, Doty served as guest editor for The Best American Poetry 2012 (Scribners, 2012). He currently serves as Distinguished Professor of English and Director of Writers House at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2018, he was awarded The Robert Creeley Award.

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)

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.

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.

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:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.