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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ilya Kaminsky (born April 18, 1977 in Odessa, Soviet Union, now Ukraine) is a Russian-American poet, critic, translator and professor. He began to write poetry seriously as a teenager in Odessa, publishing a chapbook in Russian entitled The Blessed City. His first published poetry collection in English was a chapbook, Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). His second collection in English, Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), earned him a 2005 Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Metcalf Award, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Dorset Prize, and was named the 2005 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year in Poetry. In 2008, he was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The Kenyon Review, New Republic, Harvard Review, and Poetry.  His latest book is Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019) which is a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award.

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.

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.