Past Visiting Poets

Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet and critic from the east side of Columbus, Ohio. His latest book, A Little Devil In America, is forthcoming in March 2021. His work has been published in various journals, from PEN American to New York Times. His third book, Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest (University of Texas Press, 2019) became a New York Times best seller, was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. His second collection of poems, A Fortune for Your Disaster, was released in 2019 by Tin House and won the 2020 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Poet's Website

Poet, novelist, and National Poetry Slam Champion, Elizabeth Acevedo was born and raised in New York City, the only daughter of Dominican immigrants. Her poetry is infused with Dominican bolero and her beloved city’s tough grit. She is the author of Clap When You Land (Quill Tree Books, 2020); With the Fire On High (Harper, 2019); The New York Times-best selling and award-winning novel, The Poet X (HarperCollins, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Young Adult Fiction, the 2019 Michael L. Printz Award, and the Carnegie Medal; and the poetry chapbook Beastgirl & Other Origin Myths (YesYes Books, 2016), a collection of folkloric poems centered on the historical, mythological, gendered and geographic experiences of a first generation American woman. From the border in the Dominican Republic, to the bustling streets of New York City, Acevedo considers how some bodies must walk through the world as beastly beings. How these forgotten myths are both blessing and birthright.

Acevedo is the winner the Horn Book Prize for Fiction and Poetry for The Poet X. The Horn Book Magazine review of the novel calls Acevedo’s debut verse novel “an arresting portrait of a young poet coming into her own.” They write:

Fifteen-year-old Xiomara, whose name means “one who is ready for war,” has been fighting her whole life.… In nearly every poem, there is at least one universal truth about adolescence, family, gender, race, religion, or sexuality that will have readers either nodding in grateful acknowledgment or blinking away tears. ‘It almost feels like / the more I bruise the page / the quicker something inside me heals.’

In another review, Justina Ireland observes:

This book crackles with energy and snaps with authenticity and voice. Every poem in this stunningly addictive and deliciously rhythmic verse novel begs to be read aloud. Xiomara is a protagonist who readers will cheer for at every turn. As X might say, Acevedo’s got bars. Don’t pass this one by.

Acevedo’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poetry, Puerto Del Sol, Callaloo, Poet Lore, The Notre Dame Review, and others. Acevedo is a Cave Canem Fellow, Cantomundo Fellow, and participant of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. She’s given TED Talks and has been a featured reader nationally and internationally, including appearance at renowned venues such as The Lincoln Center, Madison Square Garden, the Kennedy Center of the Performing Arts, South Africa’s State Theatre, The Bozar in Brussels, the National Library of Kosovo and many others. Acevedo holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She resides in Washington, DC with her husband.

Poet's Website

Kaveh Akbar founded and edits Divedapper, where he interviews major voices in contemporary poetry. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, Paris Review, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, APR, PBS NewsHour, and elsewhere. He is the author of the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017) and full-length collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017). His second full-length collection, Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf, 2021) is upcoming. Akbar has received a Pushcart and a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. In 2016, Akbar was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran, and is currently a professor in the MFA program at Purdue University and in the low-residency programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson.

Poet's Website

Born to a Mexican mother and Jewish father, Rosebud Ben-Oni is the winner of 2019 Alice James Award for If This Is the Age We End Discovery, which received a Starred Review in Booklist and was a Finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Poetry. She is also the author of turn around, BRXGHT XYXS (Get Fresh Books, 2019) and her chapbook 20 Atomic Sonnets, which appears online in Black Warrior Review (2020) as part of a larger future project called The Atomic Sonnets started in honor of the Periodic Table’s 150th Birthday.

She is a recipient of a 2021 City Arts Corps grant, a 2021 Queens Arts Fund grant from the Queens Council for the Arts, a 2014 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry and a 2013 CantoMundo Fellow. Her poem 'Dancing with Kiko on the Moon' was recently featured in Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown. In 2017, her poem 'Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark' was commissioned by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in NYC, and published by The Kenyon Review Online. She lives in New York City where she teaches poetry workshops at Catapult, The Speakeasy Project and UCLA Writers’ Program online. She writes weekly for The Kenyon Review blog.

In May 2022, Paramount commissioned her video essay 'My Judaism is a Wild Unplace' for a campaign for Jewish Heritage Month, which appears on Paramount Network, MTV Networks, The Smithsonian Channel, VH1 and many others.

Rosebud's Website

Poet Wrestling with Angels in the Dark

    Commissioned by the National September 11th Memorial & Museum

& their hearts are shards of stained glass
& their eyes bottle-green & incanting
the whole of this city & the whole of the city i have seen

        in the humidity
                sobering           the great rose window of st. john the divine
                        -ly unfinished              of the city

                                                                                        the whole of the city

        where one cold february in the bronx it was snowing
        & soren & i wrote love poems for garden-goers
        in the conservatory among succulents & palm trees
        & carnivorous plants behind glass whose green hearts dance

                                        in supper clubs of brighton beach
                                        another time the whole of city
                                        in winter stole & long-gloved
                                        the fearless girl of bowling green

                lays her weary head heavy
                in the chapel of temple emanu-el
                where the stained glass speaks
                of a sprawling city dreamed

        but never finished, the whole of this city

                & darelo & i take the second avenue subway
                & still don’t quite believe its existence,
                though third rail, live wire, heartbeat.

                        & 7 train love brings me home, though signal malfunction,
                        though delays, though local turns express midway & doors

                                                                don’t always open
                                                                        without the whole of the city
                                                                                filling us all to the brim.

& i have ridden my beloved 7 carrying post-heartbreak
        jerusalem, when more than once i was broken glass
                shattering in the midharov
                        empty on sabbath morning.

& in these shards are the stained-glass angels
        i have wrestled in the dark,
                wrapped around their soda-lime
                        limbs like potter’s wheel.

& only in my beloved’s arms do each day i awaken
        in the whole of the city
                as lasting & green
                        as the kind of fragment
                                you plant & let broken-be 

Daniel Borzutzky is a poet and translator who lives in Chicago. His most recent book is Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021). His 2016 collection, The Performance of Becoming Human won the National Book Award. Lake Michigan (2018) was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize. His other books include In the Murmurs of the Rotten Carcass Economy (2015); Memories of my Overdevelopment (2015); and The Book of Interfering Bodies (2011). His translation of Galo Ghigliotto's Valdivia won the National Translation Award, and he has also translated collections by Raúl Zurita and Jaime Luis Huenún. The son of Chilean immigrants, Borzutzky's work often addresses immigration, worker exploitation, political corruption, and economic disparity. He teaches in the English and Latin American and Latino Studies Departments at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dream Song #16

     Hay golpes en la vida, tan fuertes    ...    Yo no sé!
                               — César Vallejo

They sniffed us out of the holes with the animals
they had programmed and there are blows in life so
powerful we just don’t know and there were trenches
and there was water and it poured in through our mouths

and out of our ears and there were things we saw in the
sand at that moment of sinking: mountains and daisies
and tulips and rivers and the bodies of the people we
had been and the bodies of the people we had loved

and we felt hooks coming through the trenches and we
felt hooks coming through the sand and I saw hooks coming
through my child’s clothes and I wanted him to know that they
would never be able to scoop us out of the sand but of course

it wasn’t true they had scooped us out of the sand and our
mouths were so full of dirt it is what they do when you’re
dead and they made us spit and they beat us until our mouths
were empty and they paid us for constructing the mountain and

it was me and L and we looked for S and we looked for J and J
and we looked for O and we looked for R and we looked for J
and S in the holes in which the bodies of those we loved were
hiding or dying or sinking or stealing some shelter some little

worm’s worth of cover to keep their bodies from dissolving
into the maniac murmurs of this impossible carcass economy

--Daniel Borzutzky

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. 

David Bottoms 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.

Yevgeniy Breyger was born in Charkow, Ukraine and moved to Magdeburg, Germany with his family in 1999. He studied Creative Writing and Cultural Journalism at the University of Hildesheim, Literature Writing at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig, and Curatorial Studies at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule (Academy of Fine Arts Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main.

His debut collection, 'flüchtige monde' ('ephemeral moons', kookbooks, 2016) was selected among the poetry volumes of the year by the Literaturhaus Berlin and among the best poetry debuts of the year by Haus für Poesie. His second volume of poetry, 'gestohlene luft' ('stolen air') is forthcoming from kookbooks in 2020, and is supported by grants from the German Literature Fund and the Herrenhaus Edenkoben.

Breyger's work has been published in magazines and anthologies such as Jahrbuch der Lyrik, Lyrik von jetzt 3, Bella triste, and Edit. He was an editor of Tippgemeinschaft, the annual anthology of the students at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut, and the anthology Ansicht der leuchtenden Wurzeln von unten (poetenladen, 2017). His awards include the Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger Literature Prize in 2011, the Munich Poetry Prize (2nd Prize) in 2018, and the Leonce and Lena Prize of the City of Darmstadt in 2019. At the end of 2020, Breyger will start a scholarship at the Writer's House in Stuttgart. Breyger is a member of the poets' collective Salon Fluchtentier. He lives and works in Frankfurt.

Jericho Brown is author of the The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

Poet's Website

Victoria Chang’s latest poetry collection, OBIT, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020 and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, long listed for a National Book Award, as well as long-listed for a PEN-Voeckler Award. OBIT was also named a TIME Magazine, Publishers Weekly, NPR, and Boston Globe Best Book of the Year, and a New York Times Notable Book. Her other poetry collections are Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), The Boss (McSweeneys, 2013), Salvinia Molesta (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Circle (SIU Press, 2005). She also edited an anthology, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (University of Illinois Press, 2014), as well as the children’s picture book Is Mommy? (Beach Lane/Simon & Schuster, 2015), and the middle grade verse novel, Love, Love (Sterling Publishing, 2020).

Victoria has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Katherine Min MacDowell Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and other awards. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry. She is a contributing editor at Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, and On the Seawall. She is the Program Chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA Program. She lives in Los Angeles.

Poet’s Website

Mario Chard is the author of Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018), winner of the Dorset Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. Recent poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Boston Review, and elsewhere. Winner of the “Discovery” Poetry Prize and a former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Poet's Website

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, and the GLCA New Writers Award. His most recent collection Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022.

Longlisted for the National Book Award, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities was also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and was named one of the best of 2017 by The Brooklyn Rail, Entropy, Library Journal, and others. About the collection, Stephanie Burt says,

As Chen’s younger self had to escape from constricting familial expectations (become a lawyer, marry a woman, buy a house), the adult writer has to escape from the constrictions of autobiography, into hyperbole, stand-up comedy, fairy tale, twisted pastoral. It’s easy to imagine a young reader seeing himself here as he had not seen himself in poems before.

He is also the author of two chapbooks, Set the Garden on Fire (Porkbelly Press, 2015) and Kissing the Sphinx (Two of Cups Press, 2016).

In an interview with NPR, Chen explained,

"I felt like I couldn’t be Chinese and American and gay all at the same time. I felt like the world I was in was telling me that these had to be very separate things." As someone who was struggling with his sexuality and thinking about identity— with immigrant parents and wondering how to come out, “Poems were a way for those different experiences to come together, for them to be in the same room.”

His work has appeared in many publications, including Poetry, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Best American Poetry, Bettering American Poetry, and The Best American Non-required Reading. Recently, his work has been translated into French, Greek, Spanish, and Russian. Poets & Writers Magazine featured him in their Inspiration Issue as one of “Ten Poets Who Will Change the World.” He has received fellowships from Kundiman, Lambda Literary, and the Saltonstall Foundation.

Chen earned his MFA from Syracuse University and is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing as an off-site Texas Tech University student. He lives in frequently snowy Rochester, NY with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug dog, Mr. Rupert Giles.

Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of five poetry collections, including A Portrait of the Self as Nation (W.W. Norton, 2018), Hard Love Province (W.W. Norton, 2014), Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, and Dwarf Bamboo; and a novel, Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (W.W. Norton, 2009). In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu.

Chin has won numerous honors, including the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 2019 American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, two NEA fellowships, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. Presently, she serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Diego.

Poet's Website

Get Rid of the X

My shadow followed me to San Diego
    silently, she never complained.
No green card, no identity pass,
    she is wedded to my fate.

The moon is a drunk and anorectic,
    constantly reeling, changing weight.
My shadow dances grotesquely,
    resentful she can't leave me.

The moon mourns his unwritten novels,
    cries naked into the trees and fades.
Tomorrow, he'll return to beat me
    blue—again, again and again.

Goodbye Moon, goodbye Shadow.
    My husband, my lover, I'm late.
The sun will plunge through the window.
    I must make my leap of faith.

(from Rhapsody in Plain Yellow)

Julia Cimafiejeva is an award-winning poet, translator and photographer. She is the author of three poetry collections in Belarusian. Her books have also been released in Germany and Poland. She is one of the founders and editors of a journal of translated literature PrajdziSvet. She translates from English and Norwegian and lives in Minsk. At the end of 2020, Swedish PEN Center published her Protest Diary which details daily life under the Belarusian regime.

Billy Collins has published ten collections of poetry, including Questions About Angels, The Art of Drowning, Sailing Alone Around the Room: New & Selected Poems, Nine Horses, The Trouble With Poetry and Other Poems, Ballistics, Horoscopes for the Dead and Picnic, Lightning. He has also published two chapbooks, Video Poems and Pokerface. In addition, he has edited two anthologies of contemporary poetry: Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2006, and edited Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems about Birds, illustrated by David Allen Sibley. His book, Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003 – 2013, was a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book of poetry is titled The Rain in Portugal, (October 2016) and is a New York Times bestseller.

Included among the honors Billy Collins has received are fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has also been awarded the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, the Bess Hokin Prize, the Frederick Bock Prize, and the Levinson Prize — all awarded by Poetry magazine. He has also received the Aiken-Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, The Hall-Kenyon Prize, the Mailer Prize for Poetry, and the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award.

In October 2004, Collins was selected as the inaugural recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Mark Twain Award for Humor in Poetry. In June 2001, Billy Collins was appointed United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003. In January 2004, he was named New York State Poet Laureate 2004-06. He is a former Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York. In 2016 he was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Poet's Website

Christopher Collins earned his M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Murray State University. He is a former Captain having served twelve years in the U.S. Army (Reserve). He completed three combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq as a platoon leader and as a commander. He has published one poetry chapbook entitled Gathering Leaves for War (Finishing Line Press, 2013).

Chris is currently a PhD candidate in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. He taught high school English for more than a decade before pursuing his doctorate. He is married to his high school sweetheart, and they have two children. They live in the rural town of Independence, Kentucky.

My American Night is his first full-length poetry collection to be published.

Eduardo C. Corral's first book, Slow Lightning, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2011. His second book, Guillotine, has been published by Graywolf Press in 2020. He's the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize and the Hodder Fellowship, both from Princeton University. He teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at North Carolina State University.

Kristina Marie Darling is the author of thirty-six books, which include Look to Your Left: A Feminist Poetics of Spectacle, which is forthcoming from the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics at the University of Akron Press; Stylistic Innovation, Conscious Experience, and the Self in Modernist Women’s Poetry, forthcoming from Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group; Daylight Has Already Come: Selected Poems 2014 - 2020, which will be published by Black Lawrence Press; Silence in Contemporary Poetry, which will be published in hardcover by Clemson University Press in the United States and Liverpool University Press in the United Kingdom; Silent Refusal: Essays on Contemporary Feminist Poetry, forthcoming from Black Ocean; Angel of the North, which is forthcoming from Salmon Poetry; and X Marks the Dress: A Registry (co-written with Carol Guess), which will be launched by Persea Books in the United States. Penguin Random House Canada will also publish a Canadian edition.

Her work has been recognized with three residencies at Yaddo, where she has held the Martha Walsh Pulver Residency for a Poet and the Howard Moss Residency in Poetry; a Fundación Valparaíso fellowship to live and work in Spain; a Hawthornden Castle Fellowship, funded by the Heinz Foundation; an artist-in-residence position at Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris; six residencies at the American Academy in Rome; two grants from the Whiting Foundation; a Faber Residency in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities, which she received on two separate occasions; an artist-in-residence position with the Andorran Ministry of Culture; and the Dan Liberthson Prize from the Academy of American Poets, which she received on three separate occasions; among many other awards and honors. Dr. Darling serves as Editor-in-Chief of Tupelo Press & Tupelo Quarterly. Born and raised in the American Midwest, she now divides her time between the United States, Europe, and abroad.

Dr. Darling holds a doctorate from the Poetics Program at S.U.N.Y.-Buffalo, as well as an M.F.A. from New York University.

Poet's Website

Kwame Dawes has authored 35 books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and essays, including, most recently, Bivouac (Akashic Books, 2019) and City of Bones: A Testament (Northwestern, 2017). Speak from Here to There (Peepal Tree Press), co-written with Australian poet John Kinsella, appeared in 2016. He is Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska. He is also a faculty member in the Pacific MFA Program. He is Director of the African Poetry Book Fund and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. Dawes is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Poet's Website

Mai Der Vang is the author of Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She was also the co-editor of the anthology How Do I Begin? A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011). In Fall 2019, she will teach in the Creative Writing MFA Program at Fresno State University.

Poet's Website

Ming Di is a Chinese poet based in the US with six books of poetry in Chinese and four in collaborative translation. Her poetry has been translated into several languages: River Merchant’s Wife (Marick Press, 2012), Luna fracturada (Valparaíso/Spain, 2014), Histoire de famille (Transignum/France, 2015), Livre de sept vies (Recours au Poème éditeurs/France, 2015), and Distracción (forthcoming in Costa Rica).

She has translated many poets from English to Chinese including Marianne Moore, Anne Carson, and Dancing in Odessa—Poems and Essays by Ilya Kaminsky (Shanghai Arts and Literature Publishing House, 2013). She edited and co-translated New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry (Tupelo Press, 2013). She selected and translated with Neil Aitken The Book of Cranes (Vagabond Press, 2015) and with Jennifer Stern Empty Chairs – Poems by Liu Xia (Graywolf Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the Best Translated Book Award in 2016.

Ming Di co-founded Poetry East West journal and serves as the China editor for Poetry International Rotterdam. She has received translation fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation and a translation award (with Jennifer Stern) from the Poetry Foundation. She attended Boston College and Boston University and taught Chinese at BU before moving to California.

Natalie Diaz was born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian community. She earned a BA from Old Dominion University, where she received a full athletic scholarship. Diaz played professional basketball in Europe and Asia before returning to Old Dominion to earn an MFA. Her debut poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) was described by New York Times reviewer Eric McHenry as an "ambitious... beautiful book." Her second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem  (Graywolf Press, 2020) was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Diaz's honors and awards include the 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, the Narrative Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, and a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Her poems and essays have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Guernica, Poetry Magazine, the New Republic, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She serves as an associate professor in the Department of English as Arizona State University and is the youngest poet ever elected as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Poet's Website

Chelsea Dingman is the author of Thaw (University of Georgia Press, 2017), which was selected by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series. She is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I Moved (Madhouse Press, 2018). Dingman has served as a visiting instructor at the University of South Florida, teaching poetry and professional writing. She has won several prizes for her work, including the Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize, Water-stone Review’s Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association’s Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Originally from British Columbia, Canada, Dingman currently resides in Tampa, Florida, with her husband and two young children..

Poet's Website

Stuart Dischell was born in Atlantic City, NJ. He is the author of Good Hope Road, a National Poetry Series Selection, Evenings & Avenues, Dig Safe,Backwards Days and the forthcoming Children With Enemies and the pamphlets Animate Earth and Touch Monkey and the chapbook Standing on Z. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Agni, The New Republic, Slate, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and anthologies including Essential Poems, Hammer and Blaze, Pushcart Prize, and Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. A recipient of awards from the NEA, the North Carolina Arts Council, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Poet's Website

Carolina Ebeid was born in West New York, NJ and grew up in a Cuban and Palestinian family. She is the author of 'You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior' (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series) which was selected as one of ten best debuts of 2016 by Poets & Writers. Dr. Ebeid's work has been supported by fellowships from CantoMundo, the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a residency fellowship from the Lannan Foundation.

Carolina is on faculty at the Mile-High MFA at Regis University, the bilingual MFA at the University of Texas El Paso, and Lighthouse Writer’s Workshop in Denver. She currently edits poetry at The Rumpus, as well as the multimedia zine Visible Binary. She holds an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers and a PhD from the University of Denver.

Poet's Website

Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His latest collection of poems, Floaters (W.W. Norton, 2021) won the 2021 National Book Award. Other books of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (W.W. Norton, 2016), The Trouble Ball (W.W. Norton, 2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006) and Alabanza (2003). He is the editor of What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Northwestern University Press, 2019).

Espada has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays and poems, Zapata’s Disciple (South End, 1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Poet's Website

Tarfia Faizullah was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, New York, and raised in Midland, Texas. She is the author of a previous poetry collection, Seam, winner of a VIDA Award, a GLCA New Writers’ Award, a Milton Kessler First Book Award, Drake University Emerging Writer Award, and other honors. Her poems are published widely in periodicals and anthologies both in the United States and abroad, are translated into Persian, Chinese, Bengali, Tamil, and Spanish, have been featured at the Smithsonian, the Rubin Museum of Art, and elsewhere, and are the recipients of multiple awards, including three Pushcart Prizes, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and others. In 2016, she was recognized by Harvard Law School’s Women Inspiring Change. Faizullah currently teaches in the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program as the Nicholas Delbanco Visiting Professor in Poetry. 

Poet's Website

Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection, Northwestern University Press, 2011) and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, Northwestern University Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including POETRY, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. She has been a participant in the Cave Canem Workshops, a Poet-in-Residence for the Alice Lloyd Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and teaches poetry writing in the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop (USA, UK, and Barbados). In 2009 she received a Rona Jaffe Writer’s Award, and in 2010, a Kresge Fellowship. She serves as an associate editor of Callaloo and an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.

Rachel Galvin is a poet, translator, and scholar. Her newest book of poems, Uterotopia, is forthcoming from Persea Books in Fall 2022. Galvin is the author of Elevated Threat Level, a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and Pulleys & Locomotion. She is the translator of Raymond Queneau’s Hitting the Streets, winner of the Scott Moncrieff Translation Prize, and co-translator of Oliverio Girondo’s Decals: Complete Early Poetry, a finalist for the National Translation Award. Her current translation project is supported by a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Galvin's work appears in journals and anthologies including Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Best American Poetry 2020, Bennington Review, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Fence, Gulf Coast, McSweeney’s, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Ploughshares. She is a co-founder of Outranspo, a creative translation collective (outranspo.com), and is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago, where she also teaches in the Creative Writing Program and is the faculty lead for Translation Studies.

Rachel's U.Chicago Faculty Website

In My Sights, Sister

My eyes are polished smooth by sight, they clot like crystals in storm glass,
like my sister brewing beakers of toxin. If we had seen
what had been done, what the helicopter pilot did in our name,

what the special ops team did in our name, what they did
with their hands in our name. What if it were my sister,
what if it were her, what? If we had seen with our own smooth eyes.

Mark the diacritical, my lovely: we’re all wearing our knee-high boots,
every last one of us, we live in a booted nation. A nation girded and gunning.
This moment, this is precisely all, watching takes work, sight takes hours,

takes my eyeglasses, every last one of them, as if they were yours. You can see
there’s a sigh in our sight. What if it were my sister? What if it were,
what. What we saw ground into our eyes with the photos,

with the newspaper reports. What would I say, what can I say if,
what would I say if it were my sister, my own? With my own
beakers of toxin, my own boots, my own hands in my own name

Forrest Gander is a writer, translator, and editor of several anthologies of writing from Spain and Mexico. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Twice Alive; Be With, which won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; and Core Samples from the World, a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Most recently, Gander collaborated with the photographer Jack Shear to create the collection Knot (Copper Canyon, 2022). His other books include two novels, As A Friend and The Trace; the poetry collections Be With, Eye Against Eye, Torn Awake, Science & Steepleflower; and the essay collection Faithful Existence: Reading, Memory & Transcendence.

Gander’s essays have appeared in The Nation, The Boston Review, and the New York Times Book Review. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Howard, United States Artists, and Whiting Foundations.

Poet's Website

To C

Inside, inside the return, inside, the hero diminishes.
Over her vessel they place a veil, and when it is lifted
the name of the vessel has been lost. Consider
the darkness of the water which has no scent
and neither can it swallow. Yet the ship’s bow
extends over the proscenium like a horse
at a fence and the orchestra stands and files out.
On the long walk home, I long to see your face.

(from Torn Away, New Directions, 1996)

via www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55960/to-c

Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006), Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011), Be Holding (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

Ross is also the co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens, in addition to being co-author, with Rosechard Wehrenberg, of the chapbook, River. He is a founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call it Ballin', in addition to being an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press. Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project. He also works on The Tenderness Project with Shayla Lawson and Essence London. He has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Ross teaches at Indiana University.

Poet's Website

Karolina Golimowska works for Haus für Poesie ('The House of Poetry') in Berlin, Germany, where she is responsible for poetry translation projects, among others, the poetry translation workshop VERSschmuggel/reVERSible. She is the author of short prose and journalistic texts as well as a conference interpreter and translator. Holding a Ph.D. in American Studies, she is also a lecturer at the Freie Universitaet in Berlin.

Poet's Website

Linda Gregerson is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Prodigal (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). She has also written two critical monographs and is co-editor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic (Philadelphia 2011). Her essays on Early Modern English literature and contemporary US literature have been published in many journals and anthologies. Her awards include fellowships and prizes from American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Poetry Society of America, the Modern Poetry Association, the Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim, Mellon und Rockefeller Foundations. She is currently a Professor at the University of Michigan, a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open (Graywolf, 2016). Her fourth poetry collection Still Falling is forthcoming from Graywolf in May 2023. Also a translator from the French and Polish, her newest translation is Everything I Don't Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski, co-translated from the Polish with Piotr Sommer (World Poetry, 2021). Grotz's poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, New York Review of Books, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in five volumes of the Best American Poetry anthology.

The recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, Grotz has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences, she teaches at the University of Rochester.

@jennifergrotz1

Poet's website

Staring into the Sun

What had been treacherous the first time
had become second nature, releasing
the emergency brake, then rolling backwards
in little bursts, braking the whole way down
the long steep drive. Back then
we lived on the top of a hill.

I was leaving—the thing we both knew
and didn’t speak of all summer. While you
were at work, I built a brown skyline of boxes,
sealed them with a roll of tape
that made an incessant ripping sound.
We were cheerful at dinner and unusually kind.
At night we slept under a single sheet,
our bodies a furnace if curled together.

It was July. I could feel my pupils contract
when I went outside. Back then I thought only about
how you wouldn’t come with me.
Now I consider what it took for you to help me go.
On that last day. When I stood
in a wrinkled dress with aching arms.
When there was only your mouth at my ear
whispering to get in the truck, then wait
until I was calm enough to turn the key.

Only then did we know. How it felt
to have loved to the end, and then past the very end.

What did you do, left up there in the empty house?
I don’t know why. I
don’t know how we keep living
in a world that never explains why.
 

--Jennifer Grotz

from Poem-a-Day, 2017
(https://poets.org/poem/staring-sun)

Poet, playwright, nonfiction and literary travel writer, Nathalie Handal was raised in Latin America, France and the Middle East, and educated in Asia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Her poetry collections are Life in a Country Album (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2019), The Republics (U. Pittsburgh Press, 2015), Poet in Andalucía, and Love and Strange Horses, winner of the Gold Medal Independent Publisher Book Award. She is the author of eight plays and editor of two anthologies including the groundbreaking classic The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, winner of the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. She writes the literary travel column The City and the Writer for Words without Borders and resides in New York City. Handal is a professor at Columbia University, and a Visiting Writer at the American University of Rome.

Poet's Website

The Moor

This is what I see:

a grain of wheat in the hand of a small boy

barefoot on the unnamed roads,
sleeping in the dream another is having.

An oud, a violin, a guitar,
a mirror of dew,

a man about to undress,
a woman staring.

A traveler
returning
everywhere

and forgetfulness stealing from itself.

Maktoub, the Moor says,
we hold clouds in our mouth
and imagine God in our breath.

--Nathalie Handal
(from Poet in Andalucia)

Francine J. Harris’ most recent book of poetry is Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said “no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet's voice.”Her second book, play dead (Alice James, 2017) won a LAMBDA Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, and was nominated for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry.

Harris' debut collection, Allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012) was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, Meridian, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Boston Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts,the MacDowell Colony, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Cave Canem.

Harris received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and was writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s taught creative writing at University of Michigan and Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. Originally from Detroit, she is currently associate professor of English at the University of Houston.

@francinejharris

Wetland

The sea is so far from us now. Partly I think because we
are not softspoken desire. There are rude thoroughfares
and abandoned mines that brag. They gather and pile
with ruin and vacancy. It’s an accrual that is in me, it seems.
At best, a wetland. Beautiful and useless in the face of flood.
So that when we walk the perimeter, we can see the ground
starve and crack. But then fear of sinkhole is so self-important.
Truthfully, I am not enough to steer clear of. To fall in love again,
dear, reforested bund, is a matter of preservation. In your expert
opinion, will you tell me how to know you if I am forever meant
to leave you undisturbed. This will not save us, I’m afraid. A brownstone
for hummingbirds is shortsighted too, like picking out honeybees
from the dog’s mouth. Then blowing on her tiny hairs like a breeze.
Love, we can wish it were so; it does not make us fit to survive.

from Poem-a-Day, February 14, 2023 (poets.org/poem/wetland)

Matt Hart is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Radiant Action (H_NGM_N Books, 2016), Radiant Companion (Monster House Press, 2016), and Blue Jay Slayer, an art and poetry collaboration with artist Ken Henson (Aurore Press, 2015). Hart’s poems, reviews, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous print and online journals, including The Academy of American Poets online, Big Bell, Coldfront, Columbia Poetry Review, H_NGM_N, Harvard Review, Jam Tarts Magazine, jubilat, Kenyon Review online, Lungfull!, and POETRY, among others. His awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2013 individual artist grant from The Shifting Foundation, and fellowships from both the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. 

A co-founder and the editor-in-chief of Forklift, Ohio: A Journal of Poetry, Cooking & Light Industrial Safety, Hart lives in Cincinnati where he is Associate Professor in Creative Writing and the Chair of Liberal Arts at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. He plays guitar and shouts in the bands TRAVEL and THE LOUDEST SOUNDER.

Karen Head is the author of Disrupt This!: MOOCs and the Promises of Technology (a nonfiction book about issues in contemporary higher education), as well as four books of poetry (Sassing, My Paris Year, Shadow Boxes, and On Occasion: Four Poets, One Year). She also co-edited the poetry anthology Teaching as a Human Experience: An Anthology of Poetry, and has exhibited several acclaimed digital poetry projects, including her project “Monumental” (part of Antony Gormley’s One and Other Project) which was detailed in a TIME online mini-documentary. Her poetry appears in a number of national and international journals and anthologies. In 2010 she won the Oxford International Women’s Festival Poetry Prize.

Head has held residencies at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts-France. She has also taught in study abroad programs in Barcelona, Spain and Oxford, England.

She serves as Editor of the international poetry journal Atlanta Review, and as secretary for the Poetry Atlanta Board of Directors. On a more unusual note, she is currently the Poet Laureate of Waffle House—a title that reflects an outreach program to bring arts awareness to rural high schools in Georgia, which has been generously sponsored by the Waffle House Foundation. She is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she also serves as the Executive Director of the Naugle Communication Center. For fifteen years, Head has been a visiting artist and scholar at the Institute for American Studies at Technische Universität Dortmund in Germany.

Head grew up as an Army Brat—one reason she loves to travel so much, and has family in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. She is a native of Atlanta, Georgia.

Poet's Website

Jane Hirshfield's poems have been described by the Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters”. Her nine poetry books include Ledger (Knopf, 2020), The Beauty (Knopf, 2015), long-listed for the National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, short-listed for the T.S. Eliot Prize and named a “best book of 2006” by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Financial Times. Her other books include two collections of essays: Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and four books of translations: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court (Vintage Classics, 1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (Vintage Classics, 1994); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (with Robert Bly); and The Heart of Haiku, on Matsuo Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011.

Hirshfield’s work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, and ten editions of The Best American Poetry. Her poems and essays have been translated into over a dozen languages and her work has been set by numerous composers, including John Adams and Philip Glass. Her TED-ED animated lesson on metaphor has received over one million views.

In 2004, Jane Hirshfield was awarded the 70th Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by The Academy of American Poets, an honor formerly held by such poets as Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2022 Hirshfield was appointed Seamus Heaney International Visiting Poetry Fellow at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland. Her other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award, The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry.

Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Bennington College, and elsewhere. Her next collection of poetry, The Asking: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming from Knopf (September 2023).

The Groundfall Pear

It is the one he chooses,
Yellow, plump, a little bruised
On one side from falling.
That place he takes first.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District (Peepal Tree Press, 2010) and House of Lords and Commons (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017). He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, among others. He is a contributing editor to the literary journals The Common and Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art and teaches in the graduate writing program at Cornell University.

Poet's Website

Homage: Vallejo

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice

blessed with a caesarean and now we have a republic,
the bread under arm, water-bearer of the sea: Cetus, Christ.

After the blackbird I put on my herringbone jacket,
the feather hummed gargoyles bearing down buildings,

rain scowled down, Vallejo and Vallejo as I hurried
up Eager Street; Thursday, I remember the white stone

in the flask and wild asterisks hissing; Thursdays, falling
at noon, at Cathedral Street, blackbirds falling quietly at Biddle Street.

(from Poetry Magazine)

Tyehimba Jess was born in Detroit, Michigan, and earned a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from New York University. He is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly (Wave Books, 2005) and Olio (Wave Books, 2016). 

Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. Jess is Poetry and Fiction Editor of African American Review and Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

Anja Kampmann studied at the University of Hamburg and at the Deutsches Literaturinstitut (German Literature Institute) in Leipzig. In 2010, she received a scholarship to the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She then worked for the radio, and on a dissertation on silence and musicality in Samuel Beckett's late work. Her poems have been published in magazines such as Akzente, Neue Rundschau, Wespennest and in the anthology Jahrbuch der Lyrik. She received the 2013 MDR literature award and the 2015 Wolfgang Weyrauch sponsorship award at the Leonce and Lena competition in Darmstadt. Her poetry debut 'Proben von Stein und Licht' ('Samples from Stone and Light') was published by Carl Hanser Verlag in 2016. Her first novel 'Wie hoch die Wasserstieg' ('How high the water rises', translated by Anne Posten) was a 2020 finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, won the Mara Cassens Prize for the best German-language debut novel and the Lessing Promotion Prize, and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the German Book Prize in 2018. Anja was born in Hamburg in 1983, and lives in Leipzig.

Poet's Website

Collin Kelley is the author of the poetry collection Midnight in a Perfect World, recently published by Sibling Rivalry Press. His other poetry collections include Better To Travel (Poetry Atlanta Press), Slow To Burn (Seven Kitchens Press) and Render (Sibling Rivalry Press), chosen by the American Library Association for its 2014 Over the Rainbow Book List. He is also the author of The Venus Trilogy of novels – Conquering Venus, Remain In Light and Leaving Paris – also published by Sibling Rivalry Press. Remain In Light was the runner-up for the 2013 Georgia Author of the Year Award in Fiction and a 2012 finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award and Deep South Festival of Writers Award, Kelley’s poetry, reviews, essays and interviews have appeared in magazines, journals and anthologies around the world. His next project is co-editing Mother Mary Comes To Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology, forthcoming from Madville Publishing.

Poet's Website

Widely regarded as one of Ukraine's most prominent Russian-language poets, Boris Khersonsky was born in 1950 in Chernivtsi and spent most of his life in Odessa, where he practiced medicine at psychiatric hospital at taught psychology at Kiev Institute 0f Contemporary Psychology and Psychotherapy. In Soviet times, Khersonsky was a part of the Samizdat movement, which disseminated alternative, non-conformist literature.

Since the fall of USSR, he has published numerous collections of poetry which have been widely translated and published all over the world.

Born in Tiraspol, Moldova in 1964, Ludmila Khersonsky is an award-winning poet and the author of three collections of poetry. Her work has been honored with the Voloshin Prize and translated into several languages, including German and Lithuanian. A professional translator, she has translated into Russian the poetry of many authors, including Seamus Heaney. In the U.S., her poems have appeared in Poetry International, Plume, and other journals. She lives in Odessa, Ukraine.

In his poems, Ulrich Koch (b. 1966 in Winsen an der Luhe) evokes everyday, remote and solitary places which leave a melancholy echo. He lives to the east of Lüneburg and works in Hamburg. His most recent books are Ich im Bus im Bauch des Wals (Edition Azur, 2015) and Selbst in hoher Auflösung (Jung & Jung, 2017). As well as various fellowships including from the Förderkreis deutscher Schriftsteller in Baden-Württemberg and the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation, he has received the 2007 Promotion Prize of the Stuttgart Writers’ House and the 2011 Hugo Ball Promotion Prize.

Dagmara Kraus was born in Poland and raised there and in Germany. She is the author of seven books of poetry and fiction. Her poetry and translations appear widely, including the poetry collections 'kummerang' (Kookbooks, Berlin, 2012) / 'gloomerang' (Argos Books, New York, 2014) and 'kleine grammaturgie' (Urs Engeler/roughbooks, Solothurn, 2013). She has received various awards for her work as a poet, including the Erlanger Literature Prize for Poetry in Translation 2017, the Kassel Prize for Comedic Literature 2018 and the Basel Poetry Prize 2018. Most recently, she published the children's book 'alle nase diederdase' (kookbooks 2017) and 'Aby Ohrkranf's HUNCH POEM' (Urs Engeler / roughbooks, 2018).

Georg Leß is the author of two full-length collections of poetry, 'Schlachtgewicht' (parasitenpresse, 2013), and 'die Hohlhandmusikalität' (kookbooks, 2019). His work has been published in anthologies and journals, including Akzente, manuskripte, Park and Sprache im technischen Zeitalter, and translated into various languages. Leß received the GWK Prize for Literature in 2014 and the Promotional Prize of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia for Young Artists in 2016. Leß was born in 1981 in Arnsberg, and lives in Berlin.

Dana Levin’s most recent collection of poetry is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon, 2022), a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, praised the book as “luminous.” Her other books include Banana Palace (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), Sky Burial (Copper Canyon, 2011), which the New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.” and Wedding Day (Copper Canyon, 2005). Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award.

Levin’s poetry and essays have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Best American Poetry 2015, The New York Times, Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and The Paris Review. Her fellowships and awards include those from the National Endowment for the Arts, PEN, the Witter Bynner Foundation and the Library of Congress, as well as the Rona Jaffe, Whiting and Guggenheim Foundations.

A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin has served as the Russo Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico (2009–2011), as well as Faculty and Chair of the Creative Writing and Literature Department at College of Santa Fe (1998–2009) and Santa Fe University of Art and Design (2011–2015). She currently serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University in St. Louis.

@danalevinpoet

Poet's Website

Immigrant Song

Bitter Mother

Blue, dead, rush of mothers,
conceal your island, little star.

Trains, hands, note on a thread,
Poland’s dish of salt.

They said, The orphanlands
of America
promise you a father—

The ship’s sorrows, broken daughter,
the ocean’s dark, dug out.

Silent Father

Rain, stars, sewage in the spill,
hush the river.

In your black boat, broken snake,
you hid. You sailed

for the meritlands of America,
dumped your name in the black
water—

In the village they pushed the Rabbi
to the wall—someone
blessed the hunter.

Angry Daughter

One says No and the other
says nothing at all—

Chicago, I will live in your museums
where Europe is a picture on the wall.

Obedient Child

I concealed my island,
my little star.

In my black boat I hid.
I hid in pictures on the wall.

I said, I am here in America,
your hero, your confusion,

your disappointment after all.
They said,

How did you end up so bad
in a country this good and tall.

(from The Nation)

Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Literary Award in Poetry, Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Prize, and most recently, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered, Salmon Press, 2019. Levine’s many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from the Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize (twice), and the American Literary Review poetry prize. His poems have garnered 21 Pushcart nominations. In addition to his own writing, he is translator of Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s epic work of poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is Artistic Director and Publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, now celebrating it’s twentieth year. He also serves as Director of the esteemed Tupelo Press Writing Conferences. Also an accomplished musician, Levine is a concert clarinetist, jazz guitarist and pianist.

Poet's Website

Uladzimir Liankievič is a poet, translator and musician. His debut award-winning poetry collection came out in 2014. He has been a part of several successful musical projects. In the fall of 2020, Uladzimir was detained twice by the authoritarian regime in Belarus and served two sentences. He lives in Minsk.

Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top 5 poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She also works as a freelance writer in Lexington, Kentucky.

Poet's Website

Oksana Maksymchuk is a bilingual Ukrainian-American poet, scholar, and literary translator. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, and other journals.

Judges Cole Swensen, Oliver de la Paz, and Maggie Smith named Oksana’s manuscript Tongue Ties a finalist for Tupelo Press’s Snowbound (2019), Berkshire (2019), and Dorset (2020) prizes, and individual poems had been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In the Ukrainian, she is the author of poetry collections Xenia (2005) and Lovy (2008). She is a recipient of the Ihor-Bohdan Antonych (2005) and Smoloskyp (2007) prizes, two of Ukraine’s top awards for younger poets.

Oksana’s translations were featured in Words Without Borders, Poetry International, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Best European Fiction series from Dalkey Archive Press. With Max Rosochinsky, she co-edited Words for War, a NEH-winning anthology of contemporary Ukrainian war poetry (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute/Academic Studies Press, 2017).

Oksana won first place in the 2004 Richmond Lattimore and 2014 Joseph Brodsky-Stephen Spender translation competitions and was awarded a National Endowments for the Arts Translation Fellowship in 2019. She is the co-translator of Apricots of Donbas, a collection of selected poems by Lyuba Yakimchuk, and The Voices of Babyn Yar, a book of poems by Marianna Kiyanovska, forthcoming with Lost Horse Press and Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute/Harvard University Press, respectively.

Oksana holds a PhD in philosophy from Northwestern University. Most recently, she has been named 2020-2021 Writer in Residence by the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University.

Poet's Website

Maryja Martysevič is a poet, essayist and translator. One of her many literary projects is a book series called Amerykanka which publishes translations of American classics into Belarusian. Maryja is the author of three poetry collections, the latest of which received the Book of the Year Award and the Best Poetry Book of the Year Award in 2018. She lives in Minsk.

Tech BIE, Harvard MBA, exchange student at the Technische Hochschule in Hannover, Germany, and a Lieutenant, USN, on the staff of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, H. Bruce McEver founded Berkshire Capital Corporation in l983, pioneering the concept of providing independent merger, acquisition, and strategic advisory services for investment managers and securities firms. Bruce came to BCC from Paine Webber Group, Inc., where he served as Assistant to the Chairman after Paine Webber acquired Blyth Eastman Dillon, Inc., where he was Vice President for mergers and acquisitions. McEver began his career as a venture capital analyst at Bessemer Securities, Inc., and prior to that was Assistant Vice President, Corporate Finance, at Chemical Bank. A member of the Board of Directors of the Connecticut Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, Bruce is a dedicated conservationist, a passion he demonstrates firsthand in preservation efforts on behalf of natural woodlands, beginning at home on his own 'Utopia Farm' in Salisbury Connecticut. "While industrious and ambitious, a corporate man, he is a great listener, an introspective, quiet, gentle soul--qualities that rarely exist side by side in one person," says longtime friend Jean Robertson, wife of Bruce's Tech roommate, John Robertson.

Bruce started writing in workshops in New York City with Hugh Seidman, Pearl London, Katha Pollitt, Brooks Haxton, David Lehman, and J.D. McClatchy. He has taken writing seminars at Sarah Lawrence College with Thomas Lux and Kevin Pilkington and, most recently, was a summer residency student at the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, where he worked with Stephen Dobyns. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Westview, The Berkshire Review, The Cortland Review, The Connecticut River Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and The Atlanta Review . He works in New York City and lives in Salisbury, Connecticut on Utopia Farm.

Sandra Meek is the author of six books of poems: Still, forthcoming from Persea Books January 14, 2020; An Ecology of Elsewhere (Persea Books, May 2016); Road Scatter (Persea Books, 2012); Biogeography, winner of the Dorset Prize (Tupelo 2008); Burn (2005), and Nomadic Foundations (2002), as well as a chapbook, The Circumference of Arrival (2001). She is also the editor of an anthology, Deep Travel: Contemporary American Poets Abroad (Ninebark 2007), which was awarded a 2008 Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal.

Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Agni, Terrain.org, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Conjunctions, and The Iowa Review, among others. A recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry and the 2015 Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, she has three times been awarded Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry, in 2017 for An Ecology of Elsewhere, in 2006 for Burn, and in 2003 for Nomadic Foundations. She has also twice been awarded the Peace Corps Writers Award in Poetry, for An Ecology of Elsewhere and for Nomadic Foundations.

Meek served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Manyana, Botswana, 1989-1991, where she taught English at Boswelakgosi Junior Secondary School. She is Co-founding Editor of Ninebark Press, Director of the Georgia Poetry Circuit, Poetry Editor of the Phi Kappa Phi Forum, and Dana Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at Berry College. Born in El Paso, Texas, she grew up in Fort Collins, Colorado. She received her BA in English and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University, and a PhD in English, Creative Writing, from the University of Denver. Since 1996, she has lived in Rome, Georgia.

Poet's Website

Erika Meitner is the winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award for Poetry and author of five books of poems: Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018); Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls (Anhinga Press, 2011); Ideal Cities (Harper Perrenial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry series winner; and Inventory at the All-Night Drugstore (Anhinga Press, 2003). Her sixth full-length poetry collection, Useful Junk is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2022.

Meitner's poetry and prose have been widely anthologized. Born and raised in Queens and Long Island, NY, she is a first-generation American: her father is from Israel; her mother was born in a refugee camp in Germany, which is where her maternal grandparents settled after surviving the Holocaust. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech, where she directs the MFA and undergraduate programs in Creative Writing.

Poet's Website

Dunya Mikhail was born in Iraq in 1965 and came to the United States in 1996. Her books include In Her Feminine Sign (2019); The Beekeeper: Rescuing the Stolen Women of Iraq (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Literature in Translation; The Iraqi Nights, Diary of A Wave Outside the Sea; and The War Works Hard. She also edited a pamphlet of Iraqi poetry titled15 Iraqi Poets. Her honors include the Kresge Fellowship, Arab American Book Award, and the United Nations Human Rights Award for Freedom of Writing. The War Works Hard was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize and named one of the New York Public Library’s Twenty-Five Books to Remember from 2005. She is the co-founder of Mesopotamian Forum for Art and Culture in Michigan. She currently works as an Arabic special lecturer at Oakland University in Michigan.

Poet's Website

Judson Mitcham’s poetry has been widely published in literary journals, including Poetry, Harper’s, Georgia Review, Hudson Review, New England Review, and Southern Review. His first poetry collection, Somewhere in Ecclesiastes, earned him the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. He has been awarded an NEA Fellowship in Creative Writing and a Pushcart Prize. Mitcham has twice won the Townsend Prize for Fiction--for his novels The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in 1974 and began teaching psychology at Fort Valley State University, where he taught until his retirement in 2004. He has also served as adjunct professor of creative writing at Mercer University, the University of Georgia, Georgia College & State University, and Emory University, where he directed the Summer Writers’ Institute. His most recent book is A Little Salvation: Poems Old and New, published by the University of Georgia Press. In 2012 he was named poet laureate of Georgia, and in 2013 he was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.

Anis Mojgani is the author of four poetry collections, all published by Write Bloody Publishing: The Pocketknife Bible (2015), Songs From Under The River (2013), The Feather Room (2011), and Over the Anvil We Stretch (2008). He is a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion and winner of the International World Cup Poetry Slam. A TEDx Speaker and former resident of the Oregon Literary Arts Writers-In-The-Schools program, Mojgani has performed for audiences as varied as the House of Blues and the United Nations. His work has appeared on HBO, NPR, and in such journals as Rattle, Paper Darts, Forklift Ohio, and Used Furniture Review.

Pulling inspiration from his Black and Iranian heritage, his childhood memories, his worldview, love, and existence, Anis takes seemingly commonplace subject matter and sculpts inspiration from them. Weaving dream-like tales that dip into imaginative imagery, Anis’s poems make the ordinary almost surreal and, through jolts of wide-eyed writing and striking honesty, make that which is fantastical remarkably relatable. Both innocent and heartbreaking, introspective and curious, the humanity his work carries causes listeners to remember and experience a childhood that is not their own but feels like it was. In the words of Tony Hoagland, “Anis Mojgani restores us to the genius of child-mind—his poems are heroic adventures that take us outward and upward for our own collective good.”

A graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design, Mojgani works on the covers for his own books as well as occasionally providing work for others. Originally from New Orleans, he currently lives in Austin, Texas.

Poet's Website

Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999-2009. He was born in London and in 2015 was appointed a Homewood Professor in the Arts at Johns Hopkins University. He is the co-founder and co-Director of The Poetry Archive (poetryarchive.org.uk), and the recipient of several prizes for his work, including most recently the Ted Hughes Award; he was knighted for his services to poetry in 2009. His most recent collection of poems is Peace Talks (2015).

Ginger Murchison earned her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. Together with Thomas Lux, she helped found POETRY @ TECH, where she served as associate director for five years. She serves as a member of the Board of Trustees of The Frost Place, consulting faculty for the Palm Beach Poetry Festival and is Editor-in-Chief of the acclaimed Cortland Review. Her debut collection of poems is a scrap of linen, a bone from Press 53.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of three books of poetry: Lucky Fish, winner of the Hoffer Grand Prize for Prose and Independent Books; At the Drive-In Volcano; and Miracle Fruit. With Ross Gay, she co-authored Lace & Pyrite, a chapbook of nature poems (Organic Weapon Arts, 2014). She is the poetry editor of Orion magazine and her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and Tin House. Awards for her writing include an NEA Fellowship in poetry and the Pushcart Prize. She teaches at The State University of New York at Fredonia, where she was awarded the Chancellor’s Medal of Excellence and named the campus-wide Hagan Young Scholar. In 2016-17, Nezhukumatathil will be the Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi’s MFA program in creative writing.

Alicia Ostriker has published seventeen volumes of poetry, including The Volcano and After; Waiting for the Light; The Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog; The Book of Life: Selected Jewish Poems 1979-2011; No Heaven; The Volcano Sequence; and The Imaginary Lover, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award. She was twice a National Book Award Finalist, for The Little Space (1998) and The Crack in Everything (1996), and twice a National Jewish Book Award winner.

Described by The Progressive as "America's most fiercely honest poet," Ostriker's honors include awards and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the Poetry Society of America, and the San Francisco State Poetry Center. In 2015, she was elected Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and in 2018, was named the New York State Poet Laureate.

Ostriker's poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, The New Republic, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Anthology, and many other journals and anthologies, and has been translated into numerous languages including Hebrew and Arabic. Her critical work includes the now-classic Stealing the Language: the Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America, and other books on American poetry and on the Bible.

Ostriker has taught in the low-residency Poetry MFA program of Drew University and New England College. She lives in Princeton, NJ, is professor emerita of English at Rutgers University.

Years,

                    —for J.P.O.

I have wished you dead and myself dead,
How could it be otherwise.
I have broken into you like a burglar
And you've set your dogs on me.
You have been a hurricane to me
And a pile of broken sticks
A child could kick.
I have climbed you like a monument, gasping,
For the exercise and the view,
And leaned over the railing at the top–
Strong and warm, that summer wind.

Ronya Othmann, born in Munich in 1993, is an author, poet, and journalist. She writes poetry, prose, and essays, and is a member of the GID poetry collective. The daughter of a Kurdish-Yazidi father and a German mother, her work deals with themes of migration, homeland, and war.

Her work has been published in anthologies and magazines such as BELLA Triste, Jahrbuch der Lyrik, TAZ am Wochenende, and LITERATUR SPIEGEL. She is co-editor of the poetry anthology Ansicht der leuchtend Wurzeln von unten (poetenladen, 2017). Together with Cemile Sahin, she writes the Orient Express column in TAZ.

Othmann has received numerous awards for her work, including the Leonhard and Ida Wolf-Memorial Prize of the City of Munich, a residential fellowship at Künstlerhaus Lukas, the MDR Literature Prize, the Caroline Schlegel Prize for Essay, the audience award at the 2019 Ingeborg Bachmann Competition for her text 'Vierundsiebzig' ('Seventy-four') about the genocide of the Yazidis, and the Gertrud Kolmar sponsorship award for her German-language poem 'Ich habe gesehen' ('I have seen'). In 2015, she organized the Kurdish Film Festival in Leipzig and in 2018, she was on the jury of the International Film Festival in Duhok, Kurdistan, Iraq.

Poet's Website

Dean Parkin was born in 1969 and left school at the age of sixteen to work at a printers, and then in a bookshop. He worked for The Poetry Trust for fifteen years (2000-2015) – latterly as Creative Director, programming the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival. He is now a freelance poet, devising his own projects and running workshops for every age group, from school children to the over nineties. He has published four chapbooks and his first full collection, The Swan Machine (The Rialto) was published in November 2015.

Sandeep Parmar is Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. She holds a PhD from University College London and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. Her research interests are primarily modernist women’s writing and contemporary poetry and race. Her books include: Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, scholarly editions for Carcanet Press of the Collected Poems of Hope Mirrlees and The Collected Poems of Nancy Cunard as well as two books of her own poetry: The Marble Orchard and Eidolon, winner of the Ledbury Forte Prize for Best Second Collection. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Statesman, the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement. She is a BBC New Generation Thinker and Co-Director of Liverpool’s Centre for New and International Writing. In 2017, she founded the Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critics Scheme for BAME reviewers and the Citizens of Everywhere project which focuses on broadening ideas of citizenship and belonging.

Poet's Website

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans — of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state — shared their favorite poems. The anthology Americans' Favorite Poems, which includes letters from project participants, is now in its 18th printing.

Pinsky is author of nineteen collections of poetry, which have earned praise for their wild musical energy and range. These include Selected Poems (FSG, 2011), The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and the prose book, The Life of David. His landmark translation of The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation. He is also co-translator of The Separate Notebooks, poems by Nobel Prize winner Czeslaw Milosz.  He most recently published his memoirs, Jersey Breaks (WW Norton, 2022); while his most recent collection of poetry is At the Foundling Hospital (FSG, 2016).

Pinsky publishes frequently in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Threepenny Review and The Best American Poetry anthologies. His honors include the PEN/Voelcker Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Lenore Marshall Prize, Italy’s Premio Capri, the Korean Manhae Award and the  Harold Washington Award from the City of Chicago. He teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University which, in 2015, named Robert Pinsky a William Fairfield Warren Distinguished Professor.

Poet's Website

Alberto Ríos is the author of thirteen full-length collections of poetry, including Not Go Away is My Name (2020), The Dangerous Shirt (2009), The Theater of Night (2006), Five Indiscretions (1985), and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982). He has also published three collections of short stories, and a memoir.

The son of a Mexican father from Tapachula, Chiapas, and an English mother from Warrington, Lancashire, Ríos was raised on the American side of the city of Nogales, Arizona, on the Mexican border. He is the recipient of the Arizona Governors Arts Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walt Whitman Award, the Western States Book Award for Fiction, and six Pushcart prizes.

Ríos's poems have been published in 250 other national and international literary anthologies. He served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2014 - 2020. In 2013, he was named Arizona's first Poet Laureate. his work is regularly taught and translated, and has been adapted to dance and both classical and popular music. He resides in Chandler, Arizona.

@AlbertoRiosAZ

Faculty Webpage at ASU.edu

Nikita

Under a heavy wire milk case,
A piece of concrete foundation
On top, in summer, in her backyard,
Mrs. Russo keeps the cat Nikita safe
From birds, from dogs, from eating
Johnson grass, which he throws up.
Nikita waits for ants to wander in
And for the sun to leave.
Instead, she comes to keep him
Company, saying You look fat
And that her son died,
Remember I told you?
Walking thin in his uniform
On a road.

Christopher Salerno resides in Caldwell, New Jersey, where he serves as associate professor in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University.

Vijay Seshadri is the author of three collections of poetry, including 3 Sections, which was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer Prize committee praised 3 Sections as: “a compelling collection of poems that examine human consciousness, from birth to dementia, in a voice that is by turns witty and grave, compassionate and remorseless.” His other collections include The Long Meadow, which won the James Laughlin Award, and Wild Kingdom. His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in AGNI, the American Scholar, Antaeus, Bomb, Boulevard, Lumina, the Nation, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Shenandoah, Southwest Review, Threepenny Review, Verse, Western Humanities Review, Yale Review, the Times Book Review, the Philadelphia Enquirer, Bomb, San Diego Reader, and TriQuarterly, and in many anthologies, including Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets, Contours of the Heart, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, and Best American Poetry.

Diane Seuss’s most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press 2021). Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry. Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press 2015) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Seuss is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. She received the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Seuss taught in the creative writing program at Kalamazoo College for many years, and has been a visiting professor at Colorado College, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis. She was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.

Don Share is the former editor of POETRY magazine. His most recent books are Wishbone (Black Sparrow), Union (Eyewear), and Bunting’s Persia (Flood Editions). He has also edited a critical edition of Basil Bunting’s poems published by Faber and Faber, a Times (London) Book of the Year, and is editing a selection of Bunting’s prose. His translations of Miguel Hernández, awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize and Premio Valle Inclán, were published in a revised and expanded edition by New York Review Books, and appear in an earlier edition from Bloodaxe Books. His other books include Seneca in English (Penguin Classics),Squandermania (Salt), The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of POETRY Magazine and its sequel, Who Reads Poetry: 50 Views from POETRY Magazine (University of Chicago Press). A collaboration with John Kinsella concerning eco-justice, Crown Decline, and a collection of essays about reading and poetry are forthcoming. His work at POETRY has been recognized with three National Magazine Awards for editorial excellence from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and a CLMP (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses) “Firecracker” Award for Best Literary Magazine. He received a VIDA “VIDO” Award for his “contributions to American literature and literary community.”

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of five poetry books, including The Octopus Museum (Knopf 2019), a New York Times Notable Book. Recipient of a 2018 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, she is Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

Poet's Website

Mahtem Shiferraw is a writer and visual artist from Ethiopia and Eritrea. Her poetry collection, Fuchsia (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), received the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She divides her time between Los Angeles, California, and Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Poet's Website

Anya Silver (1968 - 2018) published four books of poetry with the Louisiana State University Press:  The Ninety-Third Name of God, I Watched You Disappear, From Nothing, as well as a heartwrenchingly-beautiful posthumous collection, Saint Agnostica.  Her poems were published in numerous anthologies and journals, including Best American Poetry 2016, Poetry in Medicine, How to Write a Poem, and Intimacy:  Poems.  Her work was featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, in Ted Kooser’s syndicated column American Life in Poetry, as an Academy of American Poets Poem of the Day, and on Poetry Daily.  In 2015, she was named Georgia Author of the Year for Poetry.

Silver was Professor of English at Mercer University and lived in Macon, Georgia with her husband and son. 

Charles Simic is widely recognized as one of the most visceral and unique poets writing today. His work has won numerous awards, among them the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the appointment as US poet laureate.

Simic is the author of numerous collections of poems, among them, The Lunatic; Master of Disguises; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The World Doesn’t End: Prose Poems, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Classic Ballroom Dances, which won the University of Chicago’s Harriet Monroe Award and the Poetry Society of America’s di Castagnola Award.

A collection entitled Sixty Poems was released in honor of his appointment as US Poet Laureate. Simic has also published a number of prose books, most recently Memory Piano, and many translations of poets from former Yugoslavia as well as an anthology of Serbian poetry entitled The Horse Has Six Legs. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The Paris Review.

Empire of Dreams

On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.

-- Charles Simic (from Charles Simic: Selected Early Poems)

Danez Smith is a Black, Queer, Poz writer & performer from St. Paul, MN. Danez is the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award. They also wrote [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Danez's work has been featured widely, appearing on platforms such as BuzzFeed, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Best American Poetry, Poetry Magazine, and on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is the co-host of VS with Franny Choi, a podcast sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and Postloudness. Danez’s third collection, Homie, was published by Graywolf in January 2020.

Poet's Website

Jasmine Elizabeth Smith (she/her) is a Black poet from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Her poetic work is invested in the Diaspora of Black Americans in various historical contexts and eras.

Smith's debut collection South Flight (University of Georgia Press, 2022) was named a finalist for the 2020 National Poetry Series and is the winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize. Her work has been featured in Black Renaissance Noir, POETRY, the LA Review of Books, and Kweli, among others.

Jasmine Elizabeth received her MFA in Poetry from the University of California in Riverside. She is a Cave Canem Fellow and a recipient of the Glucks Art Fellowship. She currently works as an associate guest editor for the Black Earth Institute’s About Place Journal and currently serves on the 25th Anniversary Cave Canem Fellows and Faculty Committee while teaching a variety of English courses in her recent home of South Seattle. In rest, you will find Jasmine trekking about by boot or snowshoe in nature.

Poet's Website

Zouzou

Ain’t of no kind word in what they’ve been telling you.
Heard they call you “Song Bird” these days. Part your beak
and collar the long part of neck with sapphires.
Girl, when are you going to see
you aren’t ever goin’ be one of them. Don’t mean a thing
they pour prosecco in porcelain dishes.
Let you lap leftovers from their palms. Do they pinch
your sides to regurgitate the slug of white cake, candied
roses, the baked breasts of hummingbirds?
Merchant the fetid smell of it into crystal?
I heard their trade ain’t much different
from what is done here at home. Only difference
is they prefer their Black rare and chilled over ice,
fine caviars knifed from the ovaries of the South.
Maybe at night you prowl the Turkish rugs.
Dressed in Schiffli lace, an ankle ribbon tagging
you rare specimen. Do they call you beautiful
for one of your kind? Pocket your songs
and measure your skin for couture.
And for who do you think it will make
statement when worn to the Grand Palais Garnier?

(from Poetry, June 2019)

Maggie Smith is the author of four award-winning full-length books: Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005), The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison (Tupelo Press, 2015), and Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), named by the Washington Post as one of the Five Best Poetry Books of 2017, and her most recent Keep Moving (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2020). The title poem of Good Bones was called the "Official Poem of 2016" by Public Radio International and has been translated into nearly a dozen languages.

Smith’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, The Believer, The Paris Review, Kenyon Review, Best American Poetry, and on the CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary. A Pushcart Prize winner, Smith has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation.

Poet's Website

Dmitry Strotsev is an award-winning poet and publisher. He is an author of eleven books of poetry and a preserver of the "Minsk school of poetry" which unites non-conformist Russian-language poets in Belarus. An architect by education, Strotsev lives in Minsk. In October 2020 he was kidnapped from the street while walking home and found himself first in the KGB and then in prison.

Arthur Sze has published ten books of poetry, including Sight Lines (2019), which won the National Book Award. His other books include Compass Rose (2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (2009), selected for the PEN Southwest Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award; Quipu (2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970–1998, selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and the Asian American Literary Award; and Archipelago (1995), selected for an American Book Award. He has also published one book of Chinese poetry translations, The Silk Dragon (2001), selected for the Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (2010).

Sze is the recipient of many honors, including the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, and five grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry. His poems have been translated into a dozen languages, including Chinese, Dutch, German, Korean, and Spanish. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.

Chioma Urama’s work has been published in Pleiades, Blackbird, Paper Darts, the Normal School, Southern Humanities Review, and Prairie Schooner. She received the 2019 Georgia Poetry Prize for her collection A Body of Water (University of Georgia Press, 2021), which is forthcoming this February. She also received the 2015 Fred Shaw Fiction Prize and an honorable mention in the 2017 Lindenwood Review Lyric Essay Contest.

Urama is a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship alum and a graduate of the University of Miami MFA program, where she was a Michener Fellow. She teaches creative writing and composition at the University of New Orleans.

Poet's Website

Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon is the author of ] Open Interval [ (Pittsburgh Press, 2009), a finalist for the National Book Award and the LA Times Book Prize, and Black Swan (Pittsburgh Press, 2001), winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She has been awarded fellowships from Cave Canem, the Lannan Foundation, and Civitella Ranieri. She is an associate professor in the department of Literatures in English at Cornell University.

C] o [urse Listing: More Than a Notion

What am I asking—: What is this flashing—: hesitation? It appears like the red light near an airport—: at intervals, flash. Flash and then it disappears. A little notion. Now it sits—: a tease. Now hovering, twinkles warning. Notion’s—: little eye for—: hook, a catch to snag. Moves—: this is what I like—: about a cursor. And f*** you f***-a-doodle-do—: yes, I’m a silly thing. Flash—: is not me, not an I :—: I am so sick of—: Aye, aye, captain. The ayes have it and so win—: the vote. Vanity’s little ring of—: light. Slivered above what—: the screen shows. So much time—: with screens, veils. So much—: time collaging impacts. The vehicle is crushed. How to suck out the dent? The bent—: dent—: the thought

] of—: a house and how to—: but build it. [

(from Poetry, November 2022)

Ocean Vuong is the author of The New York Times bestselling poetry collection, Time is a Mother (Penguin Press 2022), and The New York Times bestselling novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press 2019), which has been translated into 37 languages. A recipient of a 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2016, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and the Pushcart Prize.

Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic, Granta, Harpers, The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Selected by Foreign Policy magazine as a 2016 100 Leading Global Thinker, Ocean was also named by BuzzFeed Books as one of “32 Essential Asian American Writers” and has been profiled on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” PBS NewsHour, Teen Vogue, Interview, Poets & Writers, and The New Yorker.

Born in Saigon, Vietnam and raised in Hartford, Connecticut in a working class family of nail salon and factory laborers, he was educated at nearby Manchester Community College before transferring to Pace University to study International Marketing. Without completing his first term, he dropped out of Business school and enrolled at Brooklyn College, where he graduated with a BA in Nineteenth Century American Literature. He subsequently received his MFA in Poetry from NYU.

He currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts and serves as a tenured Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at NYU.

Poet's Website

Toy Boat

        for Tamir Rice

yellow plastic
black sea

eye-shaped shard
on a darkened map

no shores now
to arrive — or
depart
no wind but
this waiting which
moves you

as if  the seconds
could be entered
& never left

toy boat — oarless
each wave
a green lamp
outlasted

toy boat
toy leaf  dropped
from a toy tree
waiting

waiting
as if the sp-
arrows
thinning above you
are not
already pierced
by their own names

(from Poetry, April 2016)

Afaa Michael Weaver is a native of Baltimore, Maryland, where in 1951, he was born to working class parents from Virginia. His parents moved to Baltimore during WWII. His father became a steelworker, and his mother a part-time beautician. After two years at the University of Maryland, Afaa spent fifteen years as a factory worker, a time that was his literary apprenticeship, as he began writing and publishing as a poet. In early 1985, he received an NEA fellowship for poetry and left factory life. His first book, Water Song, was also published that spring.

Afaa has taught at New York University, City University of New York, Seton Hall Law School, Rutgers University, and is retiring from Simmons College, where he held the Alumnae Endowed Chair for twenty years. He is currently a member of the core faculty in Drew University's MFA in Poetry and Translation. To date, he has published fifteen collections of poetry and had two professional theater productions.

His project remains that of articulating inner and outer structures of working class culture. In Water Song, he took on the immediate subject of his positioning as a worker poet in Industrial America. He has gradually sculpted geodesic connections between the network of seeming polarities in his life through the frame of his engagement with Chinese culture. Beginning in his twenties as a practitioner of the art of Taijiquan and a student of the Daoist philosophies and spiritual practices embedded in the art, he has worked at these assemblages, at times blending history, music and visual art. In Timber and Prayer, the writing partly involves ekphrastic poems about the work of Jacob Lawrence, while other poems respond to the work of Duke Ellington and other jazz musicians. Stations in a Dream is devoted entirely to the work of Marc Chagall.

As a Fulbright scholar, Afaa has taught in Taiwan, and at the age of fifty, he began studying Mandarin formally. The recipient of four Pushcart prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award, His newest book, Spirit Boxing, revisits his time as a worker poet in Baltimore with a renewed application of the frame of his Chinese spiritualism applied to his quest to bring a realization of wholeness to his life and his rootedness in America’s working class sensibilities.

Eleanor Wilner is the author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 2019), which includes poems from her previous seven books of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell (U. of Chicago) and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon). She received the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America; other awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart prizes. She has taught at many colleges and universities, and perennially for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a lifelong activist for civil rights and peace.

Eleanor Wilner is the author of Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems (Princeton University Press, 2019), which includes poems from her previous seven books of poetry, most recently Tourist in Hell (U. of Chicago) and The Girl with Bees in Her Hair (Copper Canyon). She received the 2019 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America; other awards include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; the Juniper Prize, and three Pushcart prizes. She has taught at many colleges and universities, and perennially for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She is a lifelong activist for civil rights and peace.

Zhou Xiaojing is Professor of English and Laurence Meredith Professor in the Humanities at the University of the Pacific. She is the author of Migrant Ecologies: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Women Migrant Workers, a collection of eco-critical essays and translations of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems. Her other translations of Zheng’s poems appeared in Chinese Literature Today, World Literature Today, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, International Poetry Exchanges, The Animated Reader: Poetry of Surround Audience, and Poetry International Festival Rotterdam.

Faculty webpage at University of the Pacific

Born in 1980 in rural Nanchong, Sichuan Province, Zheng Xiaoqiong left her hometown for Dongguan, Guangdong Province in 2001 after working as a nurse in a local hospital, and became a migrant worker for seven years. It was in the factory that she started writing poems. She has published a dozen critical acclaimed poetry collections, which won prestigious literary awards. Her poetry has been translated into many foreign languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Russian, Spanish, and Vietnamese. She has been invited to give readings at poetry festivals in Australia, Germany, France, Japan, Russia, Singapore, and the Netherlands. Some of her poems were performed on the stage in Germany and the United States. Currently she is the Deputy Director of the literary magazine Works in Guangzhou.

铁鸟 / Iron Bird

Time is like a grey iron bird fluttering against the window,
Moonlight treading on distant memories saunters into my room.
Mysterious reticent frost scatters, white seeds covering the ground
Have grown into tranquil trees, standing in the North,
Their leaves falling. I am in the South, looking into the distance, those happy times
Restored in dreams. The iron bird disappears into silence.
Those made-up faces flash past in-between the trees in the North,
Those imaginary loves of mine, each resembles
A grey iron bird, flapping its wings.

--Zheng Xiaoqiong (translation: Zhou Xiaojing)

(from Collected Poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong, Huacheng chuben she, 2008, 30.)

Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry and the PEN Open Book Award, and recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her work has appeared in Poetry, New York Times, and Tin House, among other publications. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Kundiman, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Poets & Writers. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise.

Jenny has taught at Princeton and NYU, and is currently on faculty at Bard College. She lives in New York.

Poet's Website

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, screenwriter, playwright, born 1985 in Pervomaisk Luhanska oblast, and currently living in Kyiv, Ukraine. She is the author of several full-length poetry collections, including Like FASHION and Apricots of Donbas, a collection of poems about people surviving a war, which received the International Poetic Award of the Kovalev Foundation (NYC, USA). Apricots of Donbas was listed in the Top 10 books about the war by Forbes magazine in Ukraine.

Her poems have been translating into roughly twenty languages, including English, German, French, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Hebrew, Lithuanian, Greek, Estonian, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Slovak, Belarusian, Romanian, Hungarian, Georgian, Azerbaijani and Serbian. She has also authored two film scripts and two plays. Her new play, The Wall was produced at the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theater, the largest and the oldest Ukrainian theatre.

Kyiv’s New Time magazine (Novoye Vremia) listed Yakimchuk among the one hundred most influential people in the arts in Ukraine. She has also received a number of awards, including the International Slavic Poetic Award, the Bohdan-Ihor Antonych Prize and Smoloskyp Prize, three of Ukraine’s most prestigious awards for young poets.

Lyuba performed in a musical and poetic duet with a double-bass player Mark Tokar (Lviv, Ukraine) and a vocalist Olesya Zdorovetska (Dublin, UK). As a vocalist, she performed in Fokstroty project by Serhiy Zhadan and Yuri Gurzhy. Her poetry has also been performed by singer Mariana Sadovska (Germany) as part of the project «2014».

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), explores some of these themes.

In his forthcoming memoir, SOLITO (Hogarth, 2022), Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.

Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O'Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign. Zamora’s poems appear in Granta, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New York Times, and elsewhere.

Javier lives in Tucson, AZ.

Poet's Website