Poet Bios 2008-2009
Kim Addonizio is the author of three books
of poetry from BOA Editions: The Philosopher's Club, Jimmy &
Rita, and Tell Me, which was a finalist for the 2000 National
Book Award. Her latest collection, What Is This Thing Called Love,
was published by W.W. Norton in January 2004. A book of stories, In the
Box Called Pleasure, was published by Fiction Collective 2. She is also
co-author, with Dorianne Laux, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures
of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton). With Cheryl Dumesnil she co-edited Dorothy
Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos (Warner Books).
Her first novel, Little Beauties, was published
by Simon & Schuster in August 2005 and came out in paperback in July 06.
Her new novel, My Dreams Out in the Street, has just been published
by Simon & Schuster (July 07).
She also has a word/music CD with poet Susan Browne, "Swearing,
Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing," available from cdbaby.
Her awards include two fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship,a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club
Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.
Her poetry and fiction have appeared widely in anthologies and literary journals including Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Chick-Lit, Dick for a Day, Gettysburg Review, Paris Review, Penthouse, Poetry, and Threepenny Review. She teaches private workshops in Oakland, CA.
Roger Bonair-Agard is a native of Trinidad and Tobago, a Cave Canem fellow and author of two collections of poetry, tarnish and Masquerade (Cypher Books 2006) and GULLY (Cypher Books 2009). Artistic Director and co-founder of the louderARTS Project, Roger is a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion. He is poet in residence with VisionIntoArt, an inter-disciplinary arts ensemble. Roger has featured at major music and literary festivals, and universities throughout the world. He has appeared on HBO's Def Poetry Jam and the Mac-Neil Lehrer NewsHour. He lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Katie Chaple is editor of Terminus Magazine and teaches writing at the University of West Georgia. Her poems have recently appeared in such journals as 32 Poems, Antioch Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review, and others. Katie recently won Southern Humanities Review's Theodore Christian Hoepfner Award for poetry.
Travis Wayne Denton is the Associate Director of Poetry @ TECH. The pushcart prize nominated poet is also editor of the literary arts publication Terminus Magazine, as well as a contributing editor for The Chattahoochee Review. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines and journals.
Travis Denton Links
www.Terminusmagazine.com
Jonida Beqo a.k.a. Gypsee Yo is a native of Tirana, Albania, currently residing in Atlanta, Ga. She received her B.A. in Theatre from the University of Alabama in Birmingham, where she founded Lighthouse Productions, an independent theatre company dedicated to original works that educate about and empower communities in crisis. In 2003 the American College Theatre Festival and the Kennedy Center for the Arts recognized Jonida’s one-woman show “The Women I Know” with the Dell’Arte Diversity Award. She has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Mehr Licht!, Java Monkey Speaks Anthology, Her Circle Ezine , Estrology, as well as in a series of periodicals in Albanian. Jonida is the author of three poetry collections in her native tongue, and of four audio CD collections in English, including Kitchensinkdrama, and Firstborn Daughters. As Gypsee Yo , she performs internationally as a spoken word artist, and has competed in slams worldwide, including National Poetry Slam 2006 and 2007, Individual World Poetry Slam 2006, and the first ever Women of the World Poetry Slam 2008. Jonida is a devoted wife, a doting mother, and a passionate teacher.
Karen Head is the author of Sassing
(WordTech Press, forthcoming 2009), My ParisYear (All Nations Press,
forthcoming 2008) and Shadow Boxes (Nations Press, 2003). Her poetry
appears, or is forthcoming, in a number of national and international journals
and anthologies, and she has been invited to present her work in the U.S. and
Europe. As a scholar of contemporary American poetry, she has begun to explore
the connections between traditional text-based poetry and digitally-enhanced
poetry, an exploration that involves her in a number of creative projects being
conducted in the Wesley Center for New Media at Georgia Tech. Her first digital
poetry project, Poetic Rub, was featured at the E-Poetry 2007 festival
in Paris. Head is the Graduate Communication Coordinator and Special Advisor
to the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech.
Additionally she serves on the Poetry Atlanta Board, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting poets and promoting poetry in the Atlanta area. She founded and is developing The Peachtree Review as a venue for both traditional and digital poetry.
Andrew Hudgins has published five books
of poetry with Houghton Mifflin: Babylon in a Jar (1998), The Glass
Hammer (1995), The Never-Ending (1991), After the Lost War
(1988), and Saints and Strangers (1985). Ecstatic in the Poison
was published by The Overlook Press/Sewanee Writers’ Series in 2003. He’s
also the author of a collection of literary essays, The Glass Anvil,
which was published by the University of Michigan Press in 1997. Saints
and Strangers was one of three finalists for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize in
Poetry; After the Lost War received the Poets’ Prize in 1989,
and The Never-Ending was one of five finalists for the National Book
Award in 1991.
His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including
The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The
Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review,
The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New England Review,
The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Slate,
and The Southern Review. His literary and personal essays have appeared
in The American Scholar, The Chicago Review, The Hudson
Review, The Missouri Review, The New England Review,
The Southern Review, The South Atlantic Quarterly, The
Washington Post Magazine, and other journals.
Hudgins was a Guggenheim Fellow is 2004, as well as a Wallace
Stegner fellow at Stanford University (1983-84) and the Alfred C. Hodder fellow
at Princeton University (1989-90), and he has received fellowships from the
National Endowment for the Arts (1986, 1992) and the Ingram Merrill Foundation
(1987). In 1997, he received both the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry and the
Ohioiana Poetry Award for lifetime contribution to poetry in Ohio. He was awarded
the Hanes Prize for poetry from The Fellowship of Southern Writers in 1995,
and in 1988 he received the Witter Bynner Prize from the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters.
Andrew Hudgins joined the faculty of Ohio State University
in 2001 as a professor of English. He is currently Humanities Distinguished
Professor in English. Prior to coming to Ohio State, Hudgins taught at the University
of Cincinnati from 1985 to 200, and in 1999 he was named Distinguished Research
Professor. In 1996, he served as the Coal Royalty Professor of English at the
University of Alabama. In 1999 and 2000 he was a Visiting Professor of Creative
Writing in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He has also taught
at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Ropewalk Writers’ Conference,
the West Chester Writers’ Conference, and the Indiana Writers’ Conference.
Hudgins received an A.B. in English and history from Huntingdon College in 1969, an M.A. in English from the University of Alabama in 1976, and a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in 1983.
Mark Jarman is Centennial Professor of
English at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. A graduate of the
University of California, Santa Cruz (B.A., 1974) and the University of Iowa
(M.F.A., 1976), he is the author of nine books of poetry: North Sea
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1978), The Rote Walker (Carnegie-Mellon
University Press, 1981), Far and Away (Carnegie-Mellon University Press,
1985), The Black Riviera (Wesleyan University Press, 1990), Iris
(Story Line Press, 1992), Questions for Ecclesiastes (Story Line Press,
1997), Unholy Sonnets (Story Line Press, 2000), To the Green Man,
(Sarabande Books, 2004), and Epistles (Sarabande Books, 2007). With
David Mason, he has edited Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the New Formalism
(Story Line Press, 1996).
Jarman's awards include a Joseph Henry Jackson Award for
his poetry in 1974, three NEA grants in poetry in 1977, 1983, and 1992, and
a fellowship in poetry from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation for
1991-1992. His book The Black Riviera won the 1991 Poets' Prize.
Questions for Ecclesiastes was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics
Circle Award in poetry and won the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the
Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine.
His poetry and essays have been published widely in such periodicals and journals as The American Poetry Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Southern Review. During the 1980's he and Robert McDowell founded, edited, and published the controversial magazine The Reaper. The Reaper Essays, published by Story Line Press in 1996, collects the essays they wrote together for The Reaper. Two collections of Jarman's own essays have been published: The Secret of Poetry from Story Line Press in 2001 and Body and Soul: Essays on Poetry from the University of Michigan's Poets on Poetry series in 2002.
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former
Soviet Union, now Ukraine, in 1977, to Jewish parents who had prospered against
long odds: His paternal grandfather had been killed by Stalin, his grandmother
sent to Siberia, and his father stolen from an orphanage and raised by an uncle.
Kaminsky lost his homeland at age 16, after the collapse of the Soviet Union,
when rampant crime, inflation and anti-Semitism forced the family to seek political
asylum in the United States. They arrived in Rochester, New York in 1993, not
speaking a word of English. Six years later, Ilya was a Georgetown University
graduate and the youngest writer-in-residence ever appointed at Phillips Exeter
Academy in New Hampshire.
Kaminsky is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), which won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Walt Whitman Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Series. Dancing In Odessa was named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2005 by ForeWord Magazine. Kaminsky, a recipient of the 2005 Whiting Writer's Award, given to emerging writers with one published book. In 2001 Kaminsky was awarded the Ruth Lilly Fellowship by Poetry magazine. He has also received the Florence Kahn Memorial Award, the Milton Center's Award for Excellence in Poetry, and the Southeast Review's first annual chapbook award for Musica Humana. His poems have appeared in the New Republic, American Literary Review, Salmagundi, Southwest Review, Tikkun, Southeast Review, and numerous other publications.
Taylor Mali is a teacher and voiceover artist. A classically trained Shakespearian actor, Mali was one of the original poets to appear on the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry. He is a four-time national champion of the national poetry slam and the author of What Learning Leaves and several spoken word CDs and DVDs. He lives and writes in New York City. For more information, visit www.taylormali.com.
Marty McConnell received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a director of the louderARTS Project, a New York City-based literary nonprofit. She appeared on the second and fifth seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, is one-fourth of the all-female performance poetry troupe The Piper Jane Project, and has represented New York City on six National Poetry Slam teams. She performs and facilitates workshops at schools and festivals around the country, including the Dodge Poetry Festival, Connecticut Poetry Festival, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Cornell University, the University of Utah, James Madison University, University of Connecticut, University of Arkansas, DePaul University, and more. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies including Women of the Bowery, Word Warriors, Homewrecker: An Adultery Reader, Bullets and Butterflies: Queer Spoken Word Poetry, Will Work for Peace, In Our Own Words: Poetry of Generation X, Fucking Daphne and the forthcoming Women.Period (Spinster’s Ink) and Appleseeds (Sacred Fools Press) anthologies, as well as journals including Rattle, Rattapallax, Fourteen Hills, Boxcar Poetry Review, Thirteenth Moon, 2River View, Lodestar Quarterly, and Blue Fifth Review. Her poem “marrying the violence” was selected as one of twenty poems to comprise the 2007 “Best of the Net” Anthology.
Ed Pavlic’s next book is a prose-poetic photo essay set on a dhow amid the islands off the coast of Kenya, but here are small clear refractions (Kwani? Books, Nairobi, 2008). His other books of poems are Winners Have Yet to be Announced : A Song for Donny Hathaway, an epic poem centered in the life and music of soul singer Donny Hathaway (UGA Press, 2008), Labors Lost Left Unfinished (UPNE, 2006) which was short listed for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Paraph of Bone & Other Kinds of Blue which won The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Award in 2001. He’s also author of the critical study of African-American modernism, Crossroads Modernism (U Minn P, 2002). For years he traveled the country working as an itinerant construction laborer; he was the founding managing editor of The Madison Times, Madison Wisconsin’s weekly newspaper devoted to the black community. He has taught literature and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Indiana University, St. John’s College (York, UK), and Union College as well as in poetry workshops at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia and at the Kwani? Literary Festival in Kenya. His awards include the Darwin Turner Memorial Prize from African American Review, the The American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize, and the Meralmikjen Fellowship in Poetry from the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference. He now lives in Athens, Georgia where he directs the MFA / PhD Program in Creative Writing and teaches at the University of Georgia.
Chelsea Rathburn's first full-length collection
of poetry, The Shifting Line, received the 2005 Richard Wilbur Award
and was published by the University of Evansville Press. Her poems have appeared
in The Atlantic Monthly, The Hudson Review, the Cincinnati
Review, and Barrow Street, among other journals and anthologies.
She is also author of a poetry chapbook, Unused Lines, published by
Aralia Press in 2003. A native of Miami, Florida, she holds an MFA from the
University of Arkansasand lives in
Decatur.
John Skoyles has published four books of poems, A Little Faith; Permanent Change; Definition of the Soul and most recently, The Situation. His work has appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Harvard Review, Slate, Yale Review and The Poetry Anthology, 1912 – 2002, among others. He is also the author of two books of prose, Generous Strangers, a collection of personal essays, several of which were broadcast on public radio; and a memoir, Secret Frequencies: A New York Education. His awards include two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts as well as fellowships from the New York and North Carolina Arts Councils. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, and Warren Wilson College, where he directed the MFA program. He is currently Professor in the Writing, Literature and Publishing Department of Emerson College, and the poetry editor of Ploughshares.
David St. John has been honored, over the course of his career, with many of the most significant prizes for poets, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, both the Rome Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the O. B. Hardison Prize (a career award for teaching and poetic achievement) from The Folger Shakespeare Library, and a grant from the Ingram Merrill Foundation. His work has been published in countless literary magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Harper's, Antaeus, and The New Republic, and has been widely anthologized. He has taught creative writing at Oberlin College and The Johns Hopkins University and currently teaches at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he served as Director of The Ph. D. Program in Literature and Creative Writing. David St. John is the author of nine collections of poetry (including Study for the World’s Body, nominated for The National Book Award in Poetry), most recently The Face: A Novella in Verse, as well as a volume of essays, interviews and reviews entitled Where the Angels Come Toward Us. He is presently completing a new volume of poems entitled, The Auroras.
Born in 1970, Kevin Young is widely regarded
as one of the leading poets of his generation, one who finds meaning and inspiration
in African American music, particularly the blues, and in the bittersweet history
of Black America. Lucille Clifton says of Young, “[His] gift of storytelling
and understanding of the music inherent in the oral tradition of language re-creates
for us an inner history which is compelling and authentic and American."
His newest book is For the Confederate Dead, published in January 2007.
His earlier collection, Black Maria: Poems Produced and Directed by Kevin
Young is a "film noir in verse," a playful homage to the language
and imagery of Hollywood detective films. The title, Black Maria, is
vintage street slang for "police van" and "hearse," as well
as the name of Thomas Edison's first film studio. The poems follow the adventures
of two characters, the private eye A. K. A. Jones, and the femme fatale Delilah
Redbone, through "a maze of aliases and ambushes, sex and suspicions, fast
talk and hard luck…"
Young was a 1993 National Poetry Series winner for Most
Way Home, a volume of meditations on racism, slavery, poverty, and the
meaning of "home" in the collective memory of African Americans. Most
Way Home also received the John C. Zacharis First Book Award of Ploughshares
magazine. Other collections include To Repel Ghosts: Five Sides in B Minor
(2001), a poetic tribute to painter and graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat,
and a finalist for the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets;
and Jelly Roll: A Blues (2003), a finalist for both the National Book
Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Young's poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. His awards include a Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. He is currently a Professor of Poetry at Emory University.