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Courtney Faye Taylor
Courtney Faye Taylor is the author of Concentrate (Graywolf Press, 2022). It is the winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by Rachel Eliza Griffiths and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Through found texts, visual collages, poems and micro essays, Concentrate considers the life of Latasha Harlins—a fifteen-year-old Black girl killed by Korean-American grocer, Soon Ja Du, in 1991. Courtney earned her B.A from Agnes Scott College and her MFA from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program where she received the Hopwood Award in Poetry. She is also the winner of the 92Y Discovery Prize and an Academy of American Poets Prize. Her writing can be found in Poetry Magazine, The Nation, Ploughshares, Best New Poets 2020, The New Republic, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. Find more at www.courtneyfayetaylor.com
Allison adelle hedge coke
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke’s most recent honors include 2021 Texas Institute of Letters induction, the 2021 AWP George Garrett Award, a 2021-2022 Legacy Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council, and the 2022-2023 UCR Dean’s Mellon Professorship. An American Book Award winning author and former Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellow, she is a Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing for the University of California Riverside, where she directs UCR Writers Week Festival and is affiliated faculty (narrative medicine) for the UCR School of Medicine. Her eighth authored book is Look at This Blue (Coffee House Press, 2022) and tenth edited book is Effigies III.
ashley m. jones
Ashley M. Jones is Poet Laureate of the state of Alabama (2022-2026). She holds an MFA in Poetry from Florida International University, and she is the author of Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press 2017), dark / / thing (Pleiades Press 2019), and REPARATIONS NOW! (Hub City Press 2021). Her poetry has earned several awards, including the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, the Silver Medal in the Independent Publishers Book Awards, the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Prize for Poetry, a Literature Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, the Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize, and the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She was a finalist for the Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship in 2020. Her poems and essays appear in or are forthcoming at CNN, POETRY, The Oxford American, Origins Journal, The Quarry by Split This Rock, Obsidian, and many others. She teaches Creative Writing at the Alabama School of Fine Arts and in the Low Residency MFA at Converse University. Jones co-directs PEN Birmingham, and she is the founding director of the Magic City Poetry Festival. She recently served as a guest editor for Poetry Magazine.