Poetry Chairs

David Bottoms

David Bottoms' first book, Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump, was chosen by Robert Penn Warren as winner of the 1979 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets.  His poems have appeared widely in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper's, Poetry, and The Paris Review, as well as in sixty anthologies and textbooks.  He is the author of seven other books of poetry, two novels, and a book of essays and interviews.  His most recent book of poems, We Almost Disappear, was released in the fall of 2011.  Among his other awards are the Frederick Bock Prize and the Levinson Prize, both from Poetry magazine, an Ingram Merrill Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.  He has given readings at over 250 colleges and universities across the country, as well as the Guggenheim Museum, the Library of Congress, and the American Academy in Rome.  He has served as the Richard Hugo Poet-in-Residence at the University of Montana, the Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer at Mercer University, and the Chaffee Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Johns Hopkins University.  He lives with his wife and daughter in Atlanta, where he holds the Amos Distinguished Chair in English Letters at Georgia State University.  A book of essays on his work, David Bottoms: Critical Essays and Interviews edited by William Walsh, was published in 2010.  He is the recipient of a 2011 Governor’s Award in the Humanities, sponsored by the Georgia Humanities Council, and he served for twelve years as Poet Laureate of Georgia.  A new book of poems, Otherworld, Underworld, Prayer Porch, will be released by Copper Canyon Press in the spring of 2018.

Katie Chaple

Katie Chaple is the author of Pretty Little Rooms (Press 53, August 2011), winner of the 2012 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Poetry through Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is editor of Terminus Magazine, published through Georgia Tech and also serves as the McEver Chair in Community Outreach with Poetry @ TECH. Her work has appeared in such journals as Antioch Review, Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, Mead, New South, Passages North, StorySouth, The Rumpus, Washington Square, and others. She teaches at the University of West Georgia.

Theresa Davis

Theresa Davis is one of Atlanta's best known performance poets, giving voice to the things that you've been thinking but never could articulate. Theresa has forged an impressive career as a solo performer, winning poetry slams and featuring at spoken word venues around Atlanta and the nation, as well as leading writing and performance workshops and headlining conferences across the southeast. She is a member of The Word Diversity Collective/Art Amok and represented Atlanta as a member of the 2006 - 2011 Art Amok Slam Team. In March of 2011 Theresa was ranked #1 female slam poet in the world as the winner of the Women of the World Poetry Slam.

Travis Wayne Denton

Travis Wayne Denton lives in Atlanta where he is the Associate Director of Poetry @ TECH as well as McEver Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech. He is also founding editor of the literary arts publication, Terminus Magazine. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and anthologies, such as Five Points, Ghost Town, MEAD: a magazine of literature and libations, The Atlanta Review, The Greensboro Review, Washington Square, Forklift, Rattle, Birmingham Poetry Review, and the Cortland Review. His second collection of poems, When Pianos Fall from the Sky, was published by Marick Press.


Travis Denton’s Books:

  1. The Burden of Speech (C & R Press, 2009)
  2. When Pianos Fall from the Sky (Marick Press, 2012)
  3. My Stunt Double (C & R Press, 2017)
  4. Aliens, Cyborgs, Zombies and the Ongoing Apocalypse: Sci-Fi Poems for the 20th Century and Beyond (C & R Press, Anthology 2017)

 

Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) and co-editor and co-translator of many other books, including The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Harper Collins, 2010) and Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva (Alice James Books, 2012).

His work won The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, Lannan Fellowship, Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, NEA Fellowship, Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).

Deaf Republic was The New York Times’ Notable Book for 2019, and was also named Best Book of 2019 by dozens of other publications, including Washington Post, Times Literary Supplement, The Telegraph, Publishers Weekly, The Guardian, Irish Times, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Library Journal, and New Statesman.

Ilya's poems have been included in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies, and translated into over twenty languages. His books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.”

Ilya's Website

Thomas Lux

In addition to having been on the writing faculties of the country's most prestigious M.F.A. and Creative Writing Programs (Columbia University, Boston University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of Houston, and the University of California, Irvine, among others), Thomas Lux taught at Sarah Lawrence College for twenty-seven years, the last nineteen of which, he was director of its M.F.A. Program in Poetry. Lux has published fourteen books of poems, most recently To the Left of Time, and several limited edition books that have earned him, among other awards and prizes, the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Prize, four Pushcart Prizes, and grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and three from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lux was also awarded the Robert Creeley Award. He has been further honored with the Bank of New York Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2003, Lux was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Emerson College, Boston. He's recently edited and written the introduction for Bill Knott's I Am Flying into Myself: Selected Poems 1960-2014 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017.)

Books of Poetry by Thomas Lux

  1. Memory's Handgrenade (Pym-Randall, 1972)
  2. The Glassblower's Breath (Cleveland State, 1976)
  3. Sunday (Houghton Mifflin, 1979)
  4. Half Promised Land (Houghton Mifflin, 1986)
  5. The Drowned River: New Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1990)
  6. Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994)
  7. The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems 1970 - 1975 (Adastra Press, 1996)
  8. New and Selected Poems: 1975 - 1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997)
  9. The Street of Clocks (Houghton Mifflin, 2001)
  10. The Street of Clocks, British Edition (Arc Publishing, 2003)
  11. The Cradle Place (Houghton Mifflin, 2004)
  12.  God Particles (Houghton Mifflin, 2008)
  13. Child Made of Sand (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012)
  14. To the Left of Time (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016)