A
2002 - 2003
2016 - 2017
Kim Addonizio is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, teacher, and musician. The author of seven poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, she plays harmonica with the word/music group Nonstop Beautiful Ladies and has two word/music CDS. A finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, and two Pushcart Prizes. Recent books include a poetry collection, Mortal Trash (W.W. Norton), and a memoir, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life (Penguin). Visit her at http://www.kimaddonizio.com.
2021 - 2022
Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (Peepal Tree Press 2014), and Honeyfish (New Issues & Peepal Tree, 2019), and co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (Northwestern, 2020). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and Guernica, among others. Her most recent honors include a 2020 NAACP Image Award nomination for Outstanding Poetry, and the longlist for the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. She is currently an associate professor of English at James Madison University, and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center, where she also serves as editor-in-chief of the center's online journal, The Fight & The Fiddle. More information is available at www.laurenkalleyne.com.
2001 - 2002
Maggie Anderson is the author of four books of poems. Anderson has received fellowships for her poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the West Virginia Arts and Humanities Commission. Maggie Anderson is retired from Kent State University where she was a professor of English, director of the Wick Poetry Program, and editor of the Kent State University Press Wick Poetry Series.
B
2019 - 2020
David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. He was born in 1954 in Bangor, Maine, grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and since 1983 has lived in central Ohio. He received his B.S.E. and M.A. degrees in English from the University of Central Missouri and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah, where he also served from 1980-83 as Editor and Poetry Editor of Quarterly West. Since 1984 Baker has taught at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he is currently a teaching Emeritus Professor of English. Baker also serves frequently on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College and at writers' workshops around the country. After serving as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review for more than twenty-five years, he currently curates the annual "Nature's Nature" feature for the magazine.
2012 - 2013
Tony Barnstone is The Albert Upton Professor of English at Whittier College and the author of a dozen books. Among his awards are the Grand Prize of the Strokestown International Poetry Festival and a Pushcart Prize in Poetry, as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council. Read more about him athttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/tony-barnstone.
2012 - 2013
Willis Barnstone is the author of seventeen books of poetry, four memoirs and many other publications. A Guggenheim fellow, he has been the recipient of many awards over the years, including NEA and NEH grants, the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, the W. H. Auden Award of the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Midland Authors Award. He is currently a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Spanish at Indiana University. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/willis-barnstone.
2013 - 2014
Sandra Beasley is the author of two books of poetry and a memoir. She has received a DCCAH Artist Fellowship, the Friends of Literature Prize from the Poetry Foundation and two poet-in-residence positions. She lives in Washington, D.C. Read more about her at her website http://sandrabeasley.net/.
2014 - 2015
Noah Blaustein has published poems in the Los Angeles Review, the Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Harvard Review, Barrow Street, The Fish Anthology (selected by Billy Collins), Orion, LIT, Pleiades and many other journals. Noah’s first book, Flirt, was selected by Kevin Prufer for the 2013 Mary Burritt Christiansen poetry series edited by Hilda Raz for the University of New Mexico. The anthology he edited, Motion: American Sports Poems, was an editor’s pick of National Public Radio and The Boston Globe, and a Librarian’s Pick of the New York Public Library.
2012 - 2013
Todd Boss’s debut poetry collection, Yellowrocket (W. W. Norton, 2008) was followed by Pitch (Norton, 2012). He won Virginia Quarterly Review’s Emily Clark Balch Prize in 2009. He is a co-founder of Motionpoems, a poetry film initiative. Read more athttp://toddbosspoet.com/.
2018 - 2019
Elena Karina Byrne, author of three books of poetry, most recently Squander, is a freelance professor, editor, the Poetry Consultant / Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books,Literary Programs Director for The Ruskin Art Club, and one of the final judges for the Kate/Kingsley Tufts Prizes in poetry. Her publications include the Pushcart Prize XXXIII, Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Paris Review, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Slate, Poetry International, OmniVerse, The Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, Black Renaissance Noire, and BOMB. Elena just completed Voyeur Hour: Meditations on Poetry, Art & Desire. Her website is www.elenakarinabyrne.com.
2003 - 2004
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of three collections of poetry and editor of several anthologies. She was awarded a Fellowship at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference and the Pushcart Prize. She teaches a graduate poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College. Read more about her athttps://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/laure-anne-bosselaar/.
1999 - 2000
Cathy Smith Bowers is the author of four poetry collections and has been awarded a South Carolina Poetry Fellowship. Cathy Smith Bowers teaches in the MFA program in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte. In 2010, she was named Poet Laureate of the state of North Carolina. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/cathy-smith-bowers.
2012 - 2013
Marianne Boruch is the author of seven collections of poetry. She is the recipient of the Kingsley Tufts prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Fulbright Fellowship at the University of Edinburgh. She has received a number of teaching awards from Purdue University where she developed the graduate writing program, and where she remains on the MFA faculty; she also teaches in the low-residency Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/marianne-boruch.
2023 - 2024
CM Burroughs is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System (Tupelo, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award and LA Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation.
Master Suffering, Tupelo Press, 978-1946482389
The Vital System, Tupelo Press, 978-1936797158
C
2006 - 2007
Scott Cairns is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at University of Missouri. His is the author of six poetry collections and two memoirs. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2006, and was recently named the Catherine Paine Middlebush Chair in English. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/scott-cairns.
2010 - 2011
Rick Campbell is the author of 5 poetry collections. He has won a Pushcart Prize, an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two poetry fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. He is the director of Anhinga Press and the Anhinga Prize for Poetry, and he teaches English at Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, Florida.
2023 - 2024
Chen Chen’s second book of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is out from BOA Editions and Bloodaxe Books (UK). His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA, 2017; Bloodaxe, 2019), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Chen is also the author of five chapbooks, including Explodingly Yours (Ghost City Press, 2023), and the forthcoming book of craft essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God (Noemi Press, 2024). His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, Poem-a-Day, and three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, & 2021). He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman, the National Endowment for the Arts, and United States Artists.
2008 - 2009
Kelly Cherry has published more than twenty-five books, including works of poetry, fiction and nonfiction, as well as two dramatic translations. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bradley Major Achievement (Lifetime) Award. She was also the first to receive the Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work. In 2010, she was appointed as Poet Laureate of Virginia.
2020 - 2021
Victoria Chang’s poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/S&S. It was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her middle grade novel, Love, Love was published by Sterling Publishing. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the Program Chair of Antioch’s Low-Residency MFA Program. She also serves on the National Book Critics Circle Board.
2020 - 2021
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016), selected by Afaa Michael Weaver for the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark is a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, as well as a winner of the 2017 Furious Flower’s Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize and 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize. She was the 2017-2018 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Clark is the recipient of scholarships and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University (M.F.A) and Tennessee State University (B.A.) where she studied Africana and Women's studies. Her writing has appeared in or is forthcoming from The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, VQR, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, New England Review, Oxford American, Best New Poets 2015, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.
2022 - 2023
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.
1999 - 2000
Billy Collins is the author of fourteen poetry collections. Collins served two terms as U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003. His other honors and awards include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has conducted summer poetry workshops in Ireland at University College Galway and has taught at Columbia University, Sarah Lawrence, Lehman College, and City University of New York. From 2004-2006, he served as New York State Poet Laureate. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/billy-collins.
D
2004 - 2005
Robert Dana is the author of eleven collections of poetry. His awards include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and The Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University. Robert Dana passed away in February 2010, of pancreatic cancer. Read more about him at Robert Dana.
2017 - 2018
Erica Dawson is the author of two collections of poetry: The Small Blades Hurt (Measure Press, 2014) and Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser Press, 2007). Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, Literary Imagination, Unsplendid, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her poems have been featured in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2008, 2012, and 2015, American Society: What Poets See; Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression; and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. She writes a bi-weekly column, Dark and Sinful, for Creative Loafing Tampa. Born and raised in Maryland, Erica holds a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA from Ohio State University, and a PhD from University of Cincinnati. She’s taught workshops and seminars at the Florida Arts Coalition’s Other Words Conference, St. Leo University’s Sandhill Writers Retreat, and the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon. Erica is the Director of The University of Tampa’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing, and, at UT, an associate professor of English and Writing.
E
1998 - 1999
Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, one of which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama in 1999. His honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He currently lives in South Bend, Indiana and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame. Read more about him athttp://www.corneliuseady.com/.
2000 - 2001
Lynn Emanuel has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Bennington Writers’ Conference, and The Warren Wilson Program in Creative Writing. Currently, she is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers’ Series. She is the author of five books of poetry. She has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the Eric Matthieu King Award from The Academy of American Poets, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a National Poetry Series Award. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/lynn-emanuel.
F
2024 - 2025
Camonghne Felix, poet and essayist, is the author of Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World, 2023), which was hailed by TIME Magazine and Vogue as one of the most anticipated books of 2023 and top memoirs of 2023. Her poetry debut Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, 2019), was long listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry, shortlisted for the PEN/Open Book Awards, and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Awards. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Academy of American Poets, Harvard Review, LitHub, The New Yorker, PEN America, Poetry Magazine, Freeman’s Journal and elsewhere. Her next full-length work, Let the Poets Govern, is forthcoming from One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Multi-Genre at The New School in New York City.
2004 - 2005
Beth Ann Fennelly teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she is currently an Associate Professor of English. Fennelly has published three full-length poetry books and one book of essays. Fennelly was awarded a $50,000 inaugural grant from United States Artists Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She has won a Pushcart Prize, and has been awarded fellowships from Sewanee and Bread Loaf. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/beth-ann-fennelly.
2001 - 2002
Alice Friman is the author of eight collections of poetry and has received fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Arts Council of Indianapolis. Professor Emerita at the University of Indianapolis, she now lives in Milledgeville, Georgia where she is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College & State University.
G
2007 - 2008
Richard Garcia has published six collections of poetry, and among his numerous awards are the Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Richard teaches creative writing in the Antioch University Los Angeles MFA program and the College of Charleston, as well as privately.
2013 - 2014
Steve Gehrke has published three books of poetry and is working on a fourth. His awards include the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a Pushcard Prize. He teaches at the University of Nevada in Reno. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/steve-gehrke.
1998 - 1999; 2007 - 2008
Margaret Gibson is the author of ten books of poetry, and is the recipient of an NEA fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. Gibson is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut. Read more about her at https://margaretgibsonpoetry.com/.
2003 - 2004
Gary Gildner's twenty-two published books include poetry collections and a memoir. He has received a National Magazine Award for Fiction, Pushcart Prizes in fiction and non-fiction, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the William Carlos Williams and Theodore Roethke poetry prizes, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Read more about him athttp://www.pw.org/content/gary_gildner_1.
2005 - 2006
Albert Goldbarth has published more than twenty-five collections of poetry. Goldbarth is the only poet to have received the National Book Critics Circle award for poetry twice. He is Adele Davis Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University, where he has taught since 1987. He lives in Wichita, Kansas. Read more about him athttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/albert-goldbarth.
2018 - 2019
Juliana Gray is the author of three poetry collections, Honeymoon Palsy (Measure Press 2017), Roleplay (Dream Horse Press 2012, winner of the 2010 Orphic Prize), and The Man Under My Skin (River City Publishing 2005), as well as the chapbook Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve (Winged City Chapbook Press 2013). Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Birmingham Poetry Review, 32 Poems, and other journals, and her humor writing has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and teaches at Alfred University.
2016 - 2017
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is a poet and visual artist. She is the author of four collections of poetry, and her visual and literary work has appeared widely in such venues as the New York Times, Poets & Writers, American Poetry Review, Callaloo, and Guernica. Griffiths is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo, Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony, and the Cave Canem Foundation, and she teaches creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Visit her at http://www.rachelelizagriffiths.com.
H
2014 - 2015
C. G. Hanzlicek was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1942. He received a B.A. from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and an M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1966. He is the author of nine books of poetry: Living in It, Stars (winner of the 1977 Devins Award for Poetry), Calling the Dead, A Dozen for Leah, When There Are No Secrets, Mahler: Poems and Etchings, Against Dreaming, The Cave: Selected and New Poems, and, most recently, The Lives of Birds, which appeared in 2013. He has translated Native American Songs, A Bird’s Companion, and poems from the Czech, Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University, Fresno, where he taught for 35 years and was for most of those years the Director of the Creative Writing Program.
2015 - 2016
Jeffrey Harrison is the author of five books of poetry, including The Singing Underneath, chosen by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series in 1987, and Into Daylight, selected by Tom Sleigh for the Dorset Prize in 2014. Recipient of two Pushcart Prizes, as well as Guggenheim and NEA fellowships, he has published poems in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Nation, The Yale Review, The Paris Review and many other magazines and anthologies.
2003 - 2004
Bob Hicok is the author of seven critically acclaimed collections of poetry. He is a recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He currently teaches at Virginia Tech, where he is an Associate Professor of English. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bob-hicok.
2014 - 2015
Born in Berlin, Germany, of American parents, raised in Colorado, Texas, New York, and New Jersey, and educated at Boston University and the University of Colorado, Andrea Hollander (formerly Andrea Hollander Budy) is the author of six full-length poetry collections: And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023), Blue Mistaken for Sky (finalist for the 2018 Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Poetry Fest), Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems (finalist for the 2014 Oregon Book Award), Women in the Painting, The Other Life, and House Without a Dreamer (winner of the 1993 Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize). Other honors include the 2021 49th Parallel Prize in Poetry from The Bellingham Review, the 2017 Vern Rutsala Award from Hubbub, an Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts, the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and literary nonfiction, the Runes Poetry Prize, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. in 2008 Hollander received the Subiaco Award for Literary Excellence in the Writing and Teaching of Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and college textbooks including Writing Poems, The Poets' Grimm, and The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry-and in such literary journals and publications as The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Georgia Review, The Gettysburg Review, FIELD, Five Points, Cloudbank, Poetry Northwest, and Creative Nonfiction. For more than 22 years, Hollander served as the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, which awarded her the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. In 2011, she moved to Portland, Oregon, where she continues to mentor writers individually and to teach. In 2017 she established The Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she taught in her home until COVID when she switched to Zoom.
2013 - 2014
Andrew Hudgins has published nine books of poetry and has won fellowships from Guggenheim, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He also won prizes from The Fellowship of Southern Writers, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He is a professor at Ohio State University. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/andrew-hudgins.
J
2002 - 2003
Rodney Jones is the author of nine books of poetry. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, his other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Peter IB Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Harper Lee Award, and the 1989 National Book Critics Circle Award. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/rodney-jones.
2022 - 2023
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.
2002 - 2003
Allison Joseph is the author of six books of poetry and has received fellowships and awards from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Sewanee Writers Conference, and the Illinois Arts Council. Joseph directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where she also serves as editor and poetry editor of Crab Orchard Review and as director of the Young Writers Workshop, a coed residential creative writing summer workshop for high-school aged writers. She also serves as moderator of the Creative Writing Opportunities List, an online list-serve that distributes calls for submissions and literary contest information to writers free of charge. Read more about her here.
K
2020 - 2021
David Kirby's collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2007. Kirby is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” He teaches at Florida State University, where he has won five university teaching awards and is the Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English. Kirby has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and recently the Florida Humanities Council presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing. He is married to the poet and fiction writer Barbara Hamby, and his latest poetry collection is More Than This.
L
2009 - 2010
Dorianne Laux is the author of five collections of poetry and co-author of a writing guide. Her awards include two Best American Poetry Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Laux teaches poetry in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. Read more about her at http://doriannelaux.com/.
M
2018 - 2019
Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of Indiana University and the MFA program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He is the author of The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003) which won the New York / New England Award and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008 National Poetry Series. Mixology was also a finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. His third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin, 2013), focuses on Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion of the world. The Big Smoke was awarded the 2014 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was also a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, 2014 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and 2014 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His most recent book, Map to the Stars, was published by Penguin in 2017. Among Matejka’s other honors are the Eugene and Marilyn Glick Indiana Authors Award, the Julia Peterkin Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and a Simon Fellowship from United States Artists. He teaches in the MFA program at Indiana University in Bloomington and is the Poet Laureate of Indiana.
2010 - 2011
Cleopatra Mathis has six books of poems and has won numerous prizes for her work, including two National Endowment for the Arts grants, the Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poems, two Pushcart Prizes, and The Robert Frost Resident Poet Award. She is the Frederick Sessions Beebe Professor of the Art of Writing at Dartmouth College, where from 1982 until recently she directed the Creative Writing Program. Read more about her at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/cleopatra-mathis.
2024 - 2025
Shane McCrae’s most recent books of poems are Cain Named the Animal, a finalist for the Forward Prize and longlisted for the PEN/Voelcker Award, and The Many Hundreds of the Scent. New and Collected Hell, his newest book of poems, was published in February 2025. His memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, was published in 2023. Also, in 20 he was awarded the Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and his other awards include a Lannan Literary Award and a Whiting Writer's Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
2007 - 2008
Michael Meyerhofer has published three full-length poetry books, one novel, and five chapbooks. He has won the James Wright Poetry Award from Mid-American Review, the 2007 Laureate Prize for Poetry, and the 2006 Annie Finch Prize for Poetry from National Poetry Review. He currently teaches Poetry, Creative Writing and Composition at Ball State University. Read more about him at http://www.troublewithhammers.com/.
1998 - 1999
E. Ethelbert Miller has published eight collections of poetry and a memoir, and is also the editor of many anthologies. His awards include the Columbia Merit Award and the O.B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize. In 1979, the Mayor of Washington, DC, proclaimed September 28 of that year as "E. Ethelbert Miller Day." Miller is the Founder and Director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series, one of the oldest literary series in the Washington area, and the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University.
2015 - 2016
Jeff Mock is the author of Ruthless (Three Candles Press). His poems appear in The Atlantic Monthly, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, New England Review, The North American Review, Shenandoah, The Sewanee Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA program at Southern Connecticut State University and lives in New Haven, Connecticut.
2009 - 2010
Robert Morgan is the author of eight books of poems, three collections of short stories, three novels, and a collection of essays. Among his awards are National Endowment for the Arts grants, Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, and the North Carolina Literature Award. He is currently the Kappa Alpha Professor of English at Cornell. Read more about him at http://www.robert-morgan.com/.
N
2017 - 2018
Aimee Nezhukumatathil was born in Chicago to a Filipina mother and a father from South India. She attended The Ohio State University where she received her B.A. in English and her M.F.A. in poetry and creative non-fiction and was then awarded the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. Currently a Professor in The University of Mississippi's MFA program in creative writing, she has also served as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at The University of Mississippi, and as Professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia, where she taught creative writing and environmental literature. She is the author of the forthcoming book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonder (Milkweed, 2018), and three poetry collections: Lucky Fish (2011); At the Drive-In Volcano (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and Miracle Fruit (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, ForeWord Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Award and a finalist for The Glasgow Prize and the Asian American Literary Award. Her most recent chapbook is Lace & Pyrite (2014), a collaboration of nature poems with the poet Ross Gay. Other awards include a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pushcart Prize, the Angoff Award from The Literary Review, the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, The Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award in creative non-fiction, and fellowships to the MacDowell Arts Colony. 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.
1999 - 2000
Marilyn Nelson is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks, including books of poems for children as well as adult readers. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Award three times. Her honors include two NEA creative writing fellowships, an A.C.L.S. Contemplative Practices Fellowship, and a Guggenheim fellowship. A past Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut, Nelson is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and founder and director of Soul Mountain Retreat, a small writers’ colony. Read more about her at http://marilyn-nelson.com/.
O
2012 - 2013
Raised in Philadelphia, Jacqueline Osherow graduated from Radcliffe College with a BA magna cum laude, and from Princeton University with a PhD. At Harvard, she was part of the Harvard Lampoon. Her specialty is love poetry and Biblical poetry and she has been featured in Best American Poetry.
Writing in a 1999 article for the Poetry Society of America, Osherow said, "If I write out of a specific poetic tradition, it is the Jewish poetic tradition, American poet though I am." Her work has appeared in The New Criterion, The Jewish Daily Forward, The Yale Review, and many other journals and quaterlies. Additionally, she has been anthologized in Twentieth Century American Poetry (2003), The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry (2005), Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology (2000), and The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001), and has twice been included in Best American Poetry.
P
2009 - 2010
Kevin Prufer is the author of five books of poetry and the editor of four anthologies. Among his awards are three Pushcart prizes, two Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation. Prufer is also Editor-at-Large of Pleiades: A Journal of New Writing and Professor in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. Read more about him at https://www.kevinprufer.com/.
R
2021 - 2022
Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; the hybrid photo-text memoir, Intimate; and five books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos; Six Girls Without Pants; The Invention of the Kaleidoscope; Animal Eye, a finalist for the 2013 Kingsley Tufts Prize and winner of the UNT Rilke Prize; and Imaginary Vessels, finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Prize and the Washington State Book Award. Her newest work of nonfiction is a book-length essay, The Broken Country: On Trauma, a Crime, and the Continuing Legacy of Vietnam. A new collection of poems, Nightingale, which re-writes many of the myths in Ovid's The Metamorphoses, was published spring 2019. Appropriate: A Provocation, which examines cultural appropriation, was published by W.W. Norton in Feb. 2021. Her work has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Civitella Ranieri Residency, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Pushcart Prizes (2009, 2013), Narrative's Poetry Prize, the AWP Creative Nonfiction Prize, and various state arts council awards. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, the Best American Poetry series (2012, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019), and on National Public Radio, among others.
1999 - 2000
Bin Ramke is the author of nine poetry collections and was awarded the 1978 Yale Younger Poets Award. Ramke holds the Phipps Chair in English at the University of Denver, where he teaches literature and creative writing and also edits the Denver Quarterly. In recent years, he has also taught on occasion at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/bin-ramke.
2023 - 2024
Patrick Rosal is an interdisciplinary artist and author of five full-length poetry collections including The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems, which was listed among the best books of 2021 by The Boston Globe, in addition to winning the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Book Award. He has received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fulbright Research Scholar program, and the Civitella Ranieri Residency. His writing and visual work has been published in The New York Times, The Nation, e-flux, Best American Poetry and many other journals and magazines. He has taught at Bloomfield College, the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, as well as in many community workshops around the country through Poets House, Kundiman, the Alabama Prison Arts + Education Project, and elsewhere. He is the inaugural campus Co-Director of Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers-Camden, where he is a Professor of English. He heads the Quilting Water Initiative, an ongoing public art experiment at the intersections of race and ecology which gathers stories of water from around the world and which will culminate in collaborations with local South Jersey artists. A winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, he has performed as poet and musician in Europe, Africa, Asia, and throughout the Americas at venues that include Lincoln Center, NJPAC, the Cabrillo housing projects for agricultural workers, and Filipino Community Hall in Delano — comprising a writing and performance career spanning more than twenty years and reaching a myriad of audiences around the world.
The Last Thing: New and Selected Poems 978-0892555680
Brooklyn Antediluvian 978-0892552744
2006 - 2007
J. Allyn Rosser has published three collections of poetry and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Ohio Arts Council, Yaddo, Breadloaf, and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She has been awarded the Peter I.B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. Rosser lives in Athens, Ohio where she edits New Ohio Review and teaches in the creative writing program of Ohio University. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/j-allyn-rosser.
S
2024 - 2025
Leslie Sainz is the author of Have You Been Long Enough at Table (Tin House, 2023), winner of the 2024 Audre Lorde Award and a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, the New England Book Award, and the Vermont Book Award. The daughter of Cuban exiles, her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She’s received fellowships, scholarships, and honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, Canto Mundo, the Miami Writers Institute, the Adroit Journal, and the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts at Bucknell University. A former guest host of the award-winning podcast The Slowdown, she currently works as the managing editor of New England Review and teaches in the Newport MFA program at Salve Regina University.
2000 - 2001
Sherod Santos is the author of six collections of poetry and one collection of essays. His awards include prizes from the Academy of American Poets, a Pushcart Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal Prize from Poetry magazine and several fellowships. He is a member of the faculty at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Read more about him at http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/sherod-santos.
2015 - 2016
Margot Schilpp is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Civil Twilight (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012). Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines, and she has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Creative Writing at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Utah. She teaches at Southern Connecticut State University and at Quinnipiac University.
2017 - 2018
Ravi Shankar is founding editor of Drunken Boat, one of the world’s oldest electronic journals of the arts and teaches for the New York Writers Workshop and at City University of Hong Kong. He has published or edited ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including most recently with Priya Sarukkai Chabria The Autobiography of a Goddess, translations of the 9th century Tamil poet/saint Andal, and What Else Could it Be, which includes collaborations with over two dozen contemporary artists and poets, including Rodger Kamenetz, Mong Lan, Eileen Myles, Quintan Ana Wikswo, Brian Turner and many others. Along with Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal, he edited W.W. Norton’s Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East & Beyond, called “a beautiful achievement for world literature” by Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer. He has won a Pushcart Prize and a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, been featured in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Caravan, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, appeared as a commentator on the BBC, the PBS Newshour and NPR, received fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and most recently the Rhode Island State Council for the Arts, and has performed his work around the world.
2019 - 2020
Carmen Giménez Smith, a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, was born in New York City and received a BA in English at San Jose State University and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of a memoir and four poetry collections, including Milk and Filth, a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. She was awarded an American Book Award for her memoir Bring Down the Little Birds and the Juniper Prize for Poetry for her collection Goodbye, Flicker. She recently co-edited Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, an anthology of contemporary Latino poetry, fiction and nonfiction, published by Counterpath Press. She has received fellowships from the Howard Foundation, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Ragdale Foundation and CantoMundo. She teaches in the creative writing program at New Mexico State University while serving as the publisher of Noemi Press. Noemi has published over 40 full-length collections of poetry and fiction, which have received reviews in Boston Review, Publishers Weekly, The Rumpus, and Pleiades. With Francisco Aragon, she co-founded the Akrilica Series, a Noemi book series for innovative writing by Latinos, and Infidel Poetics, a series of short-form poetics on gender, identity, and the 21st century.
2000 - 2001; 2012 - 2013
Dave Smith is the author of eighteen books of poetry, a novel, a collection of stories, and three books of essays. Smith's books have earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in Poetry, and a Lyndhurst Fellowship. Two of his books of poetry were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Dave Smith is the Chairman of the Writing Seminars Department and Elliot Coleman Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. Read more about him athttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/dave-smith.
2001 - 2002
R. T. Smith has published nine books of poetry, a collection of stories, and edited an anthology. Smith's honors include grants in literature from Arts International, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Editor of Shenandoah, he is also a member of the faculty of the Converse College Low Residency MFA Program. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/r-t-smith.
2004 - 2005
Barry Spacks was the author of eleven poetry collections and was named the first Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California, in 2005. From 1960 to 1981, Spacks was a Professor of Literature at M.I.T., and he was named the Distinguished Professor in Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1991. He passed away in 2014. Read more about him at http://www.barryspacks.net/.
2008 - 2009
David St. John is the author of ten poetry books and one volume of essays and interviews, and has edited numerous collections. His awards include the Discover/The Nation prize, the James D. Phelan Prize, and the Prix de Rome fellowship in literature. He has also received several National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship. St. John currently teaches in the English Department at University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Read more about him at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/david-st-john.
2016 - 2017
Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962 and has lived in the United States since 1972. He is the author, editor, and translator of a multitude of books, including the short story collection The Soviet Circus Comes to Havana & Other Stories and the poetry collection 90 Miles: Selected & New Poems. Professor of Creative Writing at Florida State University, Suárez is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant as well as an Individual Arts Grant Recipient from the State of Florida.
2006 - 2007
Arthur Sze is the author of nine books of poetry. He was poet laureate of Santa Fe from 2006-2008 and is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, among many other awards. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Read more about him athttp://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/arthur-sze.
2005 - 2006
Larissa Szporluk is the author of five books of poetry and has received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim fellowship. She began her full-time teaching career at Bowling Green State University in 2000 and has since become an associate professor of Creative Writing and Literature. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/larissa-szporluk.
T
2022 - 2023
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
2003 - 2004
Diane Thiel is the author of ten books of poetry, nonfiction, and creative writing pedagogy and three textbooks. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Robert Frost Award, the Robinson Jeffers Award, and the New Millennium Writings Award. She is currently an Associate Professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico. Read more about her at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/diane-thiel
2010 - 2011
Brian Turner is a soldier-poet who has written two books of poetry and a memoir. His debut book of poems won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, The New York Times “Editor's Choice” selection, and the 2007 Poets Prize, among others. Read more about him at http://www.brianturner.org/.
W
2008 - 2009
Michael Waters has published seven books of poetry and is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, Individual Artist Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and four Pushcart Prizes. He teaches at Monmouth University in New Jersey and in the Drew University MFA Program. Read more about him athttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/michael-waters.
2021 - 2022
Called “Southern California’s most inventive and accessible poet,” Charles Harper Webb is the nation’s foremost proponent of Stand Up Poetry. A former professional rock singer/guitarist and licensed psychotherapist, he is Professor of English at California State University, Long Beach. His latest of twelve collections of poetry is Sidebend World( University of Pittsburgh, 2018). Webb has published a collection of essays, A Million MFAs Are Not Enough(Red Hen, 2016), and edited Stand Up Poetry: An Expanded Anthology(University of Iowa, 2002), used as a text in many universities. His awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Tufts Discovery Award, and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. An avid fly-fisherman, he lives in Los Angeles, CA.
2019 - 2020
Ryan Wilson was born in Griffin, Georgia, and raised in nearby Macon, Georgia. He graduated from Tattnall Square Academy in 2000. He earned his Bachelor of Arts at The University of Georgia in 2004, his Master of Fine Arts from The Writing Seminars at The Johns Hopkins University in 2007, and a second Master's degree from Boston University in 2008.
Currently the editor of Literary Matters, the online literary journal of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, he is a doctoral candidate at The Catholic University of America. He also serves as Office Manager of the ALSCW. He and his wife live in Baltimore, Maryland.
2014 - 2015
Sholeh Wolpé was born in Iran and spent her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. She is the recipient of 2013 Midwest Book Award, and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation Prize. About Sholeh, The Poetry Foundation writes, “Wolpé’s concise, unflinching, and often wry free verse explores violence, culture, and gender. So many of Wolpé's poems deal with the violent situation in the Middle East, yet she is ready to both bravely and playfully refuse to let death be too proud.” A poet, literary translator and an editor, Wolpé’s eight books include: Keeping Time with Blue Hyacinths; Breaking the Jaws of Silence—Sixty American Poets Speak to the World, featuring some of the most respected voices in American poetry; and The Forbidden: Poems from Iran and its Exiles.
2005 - 2006
Robert Wrigley has published eight books of poetry and has won the Kinglsey Tufts Award, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as the Theodore Roethke Award and two Pushcart Prizes. He is the Director of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Idaho. Read more about him athttp://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-wrigley.