Kim Addonizio is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection is Now We’re Getting Somewhere (W.W. Norton). Her memoir-in-essays, Bukowski in a Sundress, was published by Penguin. She has received NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her poetry has been widely translated and anthologized. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Poetry, The Sun, the Times Literary Supplement (UK), and numerous literary journals.  Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. She performs and teaches internationally at colleges, universities, festivals and conferences, and currently lives in Oakland, CA, where she teaches private workshops. Visit her at https://www.kimaddonizio.com

CORNELIUS EADY has published seven volumes of poetry, including, most recently,  Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Penguin, 2008),  as well as  Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2001), which was a National Book Award finalist. His collection, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze(1985), won the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and his collection,  The Gathering of My Name (1991), was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

With Toi Derricotte, Eady co-founded Cave Canem Foundation in 1996. Eady’s awarded honors include Fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

CLAUDIA EMERSON (1957-2014) won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection, Late Wife (LSU Press, 2005). She also published the poetry collections:    Secure the Shadow (LSU Press, 2012),  Figure Studies (LSU, 2008),  Pinion: An Elegy (LSU Press, 2002), and  Pharaoh, Pharaoh (LSU Press, 1997).

In 2008, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia and served until 2010. Other honors and awards of Emerson’s include an AWP Intro Award (in 1991), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (in 1994),Witter Bynner Fellowship from Library of Congress (in 2005) and a Guggenheim fellowship (in 2011).

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.

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.

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.

CHASE TWICHELL has published eight books of poetry, most recently Things as It Is (Copper Canyon, 2018). Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2010) won both the 2011 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1997 she won the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America for The Snow Watcher. Twichell was educated at Trinity College (Hartford, CT (BA, 1973) and the University of Iowa (MFA, 1976), and in 2010 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from St. Lawrence University. After teaching for many years (Hampshire College, The University of Alabama, and Princeton University), she started Ausable Press, a not-for-profit publisher of poetry, which was acquired by Copper Canyon Press in 2009. She is currently on the faculty at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers.

ELEANOR WILNER has published seven books of poems, most recently Tourist in Hell (2010, University of Chicago Press); The Girl with Bees in Her Hair and Reversing the Spell; New & Collected Poems (Copper Canyon). Her publications include a translation of Euripides’ Medea, and a book on visionary imagination, Gathering the Winds. Her poems appear in over 40 anthologies; her awards include a MacArthur Fellowship, the Juniper Prize, three Pushcart Prizes, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She has a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, teaches peripatetically at various colleges and universities, and perennially in the MFA Program for Writers, Warren Wilson College.

VANESSA HIDARY is an internationally acclaimed Spoken Word Artist, solo performer, author, actress, writer, director. Her nationally toured solo show, “Culture Bandit” chronicles Vanessa’s coming of age during the golden age of Hip-Hop. In 2011, Hidary published her book,  The Last Kaiser Roll in the Bodega (Penmanship Books, 2011).

Hidary has aired three times on “Russell Simmons Presents ‘Def Poetry Jam’ on HBO, and is featured in the award winning film  The Tribe, which was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, The Tribeca Film Festival, and The Jewish Motifs International Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland. She has also developed and directed the show MONOLOGUES: an evening of solo performances by 15 young adults, exploring their Jewish identity, inspired by a 10-day trip through Israel. In July 2015, Hidray created The Kaleidoscope Project, a narrative-arts driven initiative. In partnership with UJA, the 14th Street Y, and Be’chol Lashon, Kaleidoscope presented the Kaleidoscope Monologue Showcase to sold out audiences over a three-day period in mid-July 2015.
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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.

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.