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.

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.

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.

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.

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://annemariemacari.com

GREGORY ORR is the author of more than 10 collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir, Gregory Orr is a master of the short, personal lyric. His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into at least 10 languages. Observes critic Hank Lazer, “From Burning the Empty Nests (1973) to the present, Orr gradually developed the ability to fuse his incredible skill at visual precision—the signature of his image-based work in his very first book—with an insistent musical quality, joining visual precision with a beauty of sound.”

When Orr was 12, he accidentally killed his brother in a hunting accident, an event his family was never able to talk about. His mother died soon thereafter, and Orr found in poetry the transformative power of language. His near-death experience as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement, in which he was jailed and severely beaten, contributes to the urgency with which his poems seek transformation. In an NPR story on his craft, Orr states, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions, and traumatic events that come with being alive.”

Orr has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He has also been a Fulbright Scholar and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, and he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. City of Salt (1995) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for Poetry.

Orr received his B.A. from Antioch College and his MFA from Columbia University. He founded the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 1975, and was the poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1978 to 2003.

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.

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.

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.

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.