Featured Presenters

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• Jimmy Santiago Baca
  

  Jimmy Santiago Baca is the author of the memoir A Place To Stand, which won the prestigious International Award, the novel A Glass of Water, and twelve books of poetry. His nonfiction book Adolescence on the Edge aims to change the learning environment at at-risk students and classes. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, and the National Poetry Award.

• Mary Jo Bang
  

  Mary Jo Bang is the author of five books of poems, including Elegy, and the recipient of numerous awards, including a "Discovery"/The Nation award, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, and a Hodder Award from Princeton University. Her books Louise In Love and Elegy both received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award for a manuscript-in-progress. She is currently the Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Washington University.

• Roger Bonair-Agard
  

  Roger Bonair-Agard is the author of the poetry collections Gully, and Tarnish and Masquerade, and the co-author of Burning Down the House. He is a two-time National Poetry Slam Champion, and has appeared several times on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. He is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the louderARTS Project in New York.

• Ronnie Baker Brooks
  

  Ronnie Baker Brooks grew up listening to Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and Buddy Guy play alongside his father, legendary guitarist Lonnie Brooks. Starting his own band after a stint with his father’s, Ronnie was named Best New Blues Artist in the Real Blues Awards and has since played with a who’s who of the blues: King, Guy, Junior Wells, Luther Allison, Elvin Bishop, Eddie Clearwater, Little Ed, Magic Slim, and many others. His distinctive guitar licks on numerous recordings—most recently Take Me Witcha, Ronnie Baker Brooks Live, and The Torch—epitomize the best of Chicago blues.

• Bonnie Jo Campbell
  

  Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of Women and Other Animals, which won the AWP prize for short fiction; American Salvage, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award, and the novel Once Upon a River.

• Bei Dao
  

  Bei Dao, born in Beijing in 1949, has lived in over six countries and taught and lectured around the world. He is considered to be China's most celebrated living poet. He has received numerous international awards for his poetry. His most recent books in English are The Rose of Time: New & Selected Poems, and a collection of essays titled, Blue House. He is currently a Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

• Mark Doty
  

  Mark Doty is the author of seven books of poems, including Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award, and School of the Arts, as well as three memoirs, including Dog Years. His honors include the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Rutgers University.

• Carol Ann Duffy
  

  Carol Ann Duffy is the current and twentieth Poet Laureate of Great Britain. She is the first woman, the first Scot, and the first openly bisexual person to hold the 10-year position. Duffy is one of Britain's best-known and most celebrated poets. She is the bestselling author of many poetry collections including The World's Wife, and Feminine Gospels. She won the T. S. Eliot Prize for her collection of linked love poems, Rapture. Other collections include Standing Female Nude, winner of a Scottish Arts Council Award; Selling Manhattan, which won a Somerset Maugham Award; and Mean Time, which won the Whitbread Poetry Award.

• Jennifer Egan
  

  Jennifer Egan is the author of the novels Look at Me, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, The Keep, and A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the 2011 Pulitzer in fiction.

• Thomas Sayers Ellis
  

  Thomas Sayers Ellis is the author of Skin, Inc.: Identity Repair Poems and The Maverick Room, winner of a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers' Award and the John C. Zacharis First Book Award. The co-founder of The Dark Room Collective, he is Assistant Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College and serves on the faculty of the Lesley University low-residency MFA Program.

• Nikky Finney
  

  Nikky Finney is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice, winner of the PEN America Open Book Award; The World Is Round, winner of the Benjamin Franklin Award for Poetry; and Head Off & Split, winner of the 2011 National Book Award. She has taught at Smith College, Berea College, and Cave Canem. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

• Forrest Gander
  

  Forrest Gander is the author of Core Samples from the World, and As a Friend, among other titles. He is a United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow and has received fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is currently the Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University.
  

• Dagoberto Gilb
  

  Dagoberto Gilb is the author of Before the End, After the Beginning. His previous books include The Flowers, Woodcuts of Women, Gritos, The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuña, and The Magic of Blood. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, and Callaloo. Among his honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the PEN/Hemingway Award, and a finalist for both the PEN/Faulkner and National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the Executive Director of the new CentroVictoria, a center for Mexican American Literature and Culture at the University of Houston, Victoria.

• Nikki Giovanni
  

  Nikki Giovanni has published over 30 books for adults and children, including the iconic Black Feeling, Black Talk; Ego-Tripping and Other Poems; and most recently, Bicycles: Love Poems. A University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech and an Oprah Winfrey Living Legend, she has received over 20 honorary degrees, several NAACP Image Awards and the Langston Hughes Medal for Poetry.

• Jaimy Gordon
  

  Jaimy Gordon's fourth novel, Lord of Misrule, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2010, and was a Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award; it also won the Tony Ryan Award for the year's best book about horse racing. Gordon's previous novels include Bogeywoman, a Los Angeles Times Best Book for 2000, and She Drove Without Stopping, which brought her an Academy-Institute Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters. She also translates from the German, especially the fiction of Maria Beig. She teaches at Western Michigan University and in the Prague Summer Program for Writers.

• Paul Harding
  

  Paul Harding is the author of Tinkers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. He graduated from the University of Massachusetts and Iowa Writers’ Workshop, was a drummer for the band Cold Water Flat, and has taught writing at Harvard and the University of Iowa. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim and the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship for Writers.

• Lyn Hejinian
  

  Lyn Hejinian is the author of more than ten books of poetry, including My Life, and most recently Saga/Circus. She received the sixty-sixth Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets for distinguished poetic achievement, and was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006.

• Aleksandar Hemon
  

  Aleksandar Hemon is the author of The Lazarus Project, finalist for the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, and New York Magazine’s No. 1 Book of the Year, as well as three short story collections: The Question of Bruno; Nowhere Man, also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Love and Obstacles. Stories, articles, and reviews have appeared in the New Yorker, Esquire, Paris Review, Granta, TriQuarterly, New York Times, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.”
  

• Linda Hogan
  

  Linda Hogan is the author of four novels, including People of the Whale, seven collections of poetry, including The Book of Medicines, which was finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and two memoirs, including The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir. Her honors include a Lannan Fellowship and a Native Writers Circle of the Americas and Wordcraft Circle.

• Pam Houston
  

  Pam Houston is the author of two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of stories, including Cowboys Are My Weakness, and a collection of essays. Her honors include the O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a selection for Best American Short Stories. She is the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis and teaches in the Pacific University low-residency MFA Program.

• Ha Jin
  

  Ha Jin’s previous books include the internationally best-selling Waiting, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Award; War Trash, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award; the story collections Under the Red Flag, which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and Ocean of Words, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award; and three books of poetry.

• Mat Johnson
  

  Mat Johnson is the author of three novels, including Pym, the graphic novels Dark Rain and Incognegro, and a nonfiction novella. He was named the first USA James Baldwin Fellow by the United States Artists Foundation. He is also a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Mat teaches is at the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program.

• Philip Levine
  

  Philip Levine is the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate. He is the author of twenty collections of poetry, including, The Simple Truth, which won the Pulitzer Prize; What Work Is, which won the National Book Award; and most recently, News Of The World. He is known as the poet of the working class, and remains dedicated to writing poetry "for people for whom there is no poetry.” He is also the recipient of the National Book Critics Award and the Ruth Lily prize.

• Taylor Mali
  

  Taylor Mali is the author of two books of poetry, The Last Time As We Are and What Learning Leaves, and has four CDs of spoken word. He appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam and in the documentary film SlamNation. He was the former president of Poetry Slam Incorporated.

• Eileen Myles
  

  Eileen Myles's works include Inferno (a poet’s novel), and Snowflake/different streets, a double poetry collection which is forthcoming. Her nonfiction writings are collected in The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009) for which she received a Warhol/Creative Capital grant. In 2010, the Poetry Society of America awarded her the Shelley prize. She writes for Bookforum, Artforum, Parkett, and The Believer. She is Professor Emeritus at UC San Diego.

• Marilyn Nelson
  

  Marilyn Nelson is the author of fourteen books and five chapbooks of poetry, including Carver: A Life In Poems, finalist for the National Book Award, A Wreath For Emmett Till, and Sweethearts of Rhythm. She was Poet Laureate of the State of Connecticut for five years, has won several fellowships, and is the founder of the Soul Mountain Retreat.

• Audrey Niffenegger
  

  Audrey Niffenegger, visual artist and writer, is the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, New York Times bestseller, British Book Award winner, and basis for a film, as well as Her Fearful Symmetry, The Night Bookmobile, and numerous hand-printed, hand-bound books. Her art has been exhibited at Printworks and collected by the Newberry Library, National Museum for Women in the Arts, Houghton Library, Art Institute of Chicago, Library of Congress, and Rijksmuseeum Meermano. A professor in the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago, she is at work on a new novel, The Chinchilla Girl in Exile.

• Alice Notley
  

  Alice Notley has authored more than twenty-five books of poetry. The New York Times once described her as “the most authentic and effective poet in many years to emerge from the Lower East Side division of what is loosely called ‘the New York School.’" She has received a number of honors and prizes, including the Lenore Marshall Award, The Griffin Poetry Prize, and the Shelley Award. Her latest books are Culture of One and Songs and Stories of the Ghouls.

• Molly Peacock
  

  Molly Peacock is the author of six volumes of poetry, including The Second Blush and Cornucopia, several prose books, and recently a biography, The Paper Garden: An Artist Begins Her Life's Work at 72. She also wrote and performed in a one-woman show in poems. Her work appeared in The Best American Poetry and The Best American Essays. She is the former president of the Poetry Society of America.

• Ed Roberson
  

  Ed Roberson is the author of eight books of poetry, including Voices Cast Out to Talk Us In, and a recent collection, The New Wing of the Labyrinth. His Atmosphere Conditions was selected for the National Poetry Series and nominated for the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. His latest book, To See the Earth Before the End of the World, is forthcoming from Wesleyan University Press. A recipient of the Lila Wallace Writers' Award and the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, he is Distinguished Artist in Residence at Northwestern University.

• Marilynne Robinson
  

  Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home, which won the L.A. Times Book Prize and the Orange Prize; and Housekeeping, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award from the Academy of American Arts and Letters. She received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writer’s Award and the Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts. She is also the author of four books of nonfiction, Mother Country, The Death of Adam, Absence of Mind, and When I Was a Child I Read Books. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

• Luis J. Rodriguez
  

  Luis J. Rodriguez is the author of fourteen books in poetry, children's literature, fiction, and nonfiction. He is best known for his memoir, Always Running: La Vida Loca:Gang Days in L.A. He's also Founder and Editor of Tia Chucha Press, a small cross-cultural poetry press, and co-founder of Tia Chucha's Centro Cultural, a not-for-profit cultural arts center and bookstore. His new book is the memoir It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing.

• Esmeralda Santiago
  

  Esmeralda Santiago has written three memoirs: When I was Puerto Rican; Almost a Woman, which she adapted into a Peabody Award-winning film for PBS’s Masterpiece Theatre; and The Turkish Lover. She is also the author of the children’s book, A Doll for Navidades; and the novels América’s Dream; and Conquistadora. Her essays and commentaries have been widely published and featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Esmeralda travels throughout the world as a bi-lingual cultural ambassador and is a passionate spokesperson for libraries and media literacy.

• Rebecca Skloot
  

  Rebecca Skloot's work has appeared in New York Times Magazine and others. Her New York Times bestselling book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was chosen as a best book of 2010 by more than 60 media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and Washington Post. It is being made into an HBO film produced by Oprah Winfrey and Alan Ball. Skloot has a BS in biological sciences and an MFA in creative nonfiction and has taught at University of Memphis, NYU, and University of Pittsburgh. She and her father, Floyd Skloot, co-edited Best American Science Writing 2011. Skloot lives in Chicago.

• Jane Smiley
  

  Jane Smiley is the author of A Thousand Acres, which won the National Book Critics Circle award in fiction and the Pulitzer Prize in 1992; Ordinary Love and Good Will, an NBCC fiction finalist, and Moo, an NBCC fiction finalist.

• Darin Strauss
  

  Darin Strauss is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, and a winner of the American Library Association's Alix Award, The National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the internationally-bestselling author of the novels Chang & Eng, The Real McCoy, and More Than It Hurts You, and the NBCC-winning memoir Half a Life. These have been named New York Times Notable Books, Entertainment Weekly Must Books of the Year, and Newsweek, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, Chicago Tribune, and NPR Best Books of the Year. He is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU's Creative Writing Program.

• Jesmyn Ward
  

  Jesmyn Ward is from DeLisle, Mississippi. Her second novel, Salvage the Bones, won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, Where the Line Bleeds, was a Black Caucus of the ALA Honor Award recipient, and a finalist for the 2009 VCU Cabell Award and the 2009 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Jesmyn graduated with an MFA in Fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, and a Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.
  

• Eliot Weinberger
  

  Eliot Weinberger is an American writer, essayist, editor, and translator. Weinberger first gained recognition for his translations of the Nobel Prize winning writer and poet Octavio Paz. He has translated two books by Bei Dao. His most recent books of essays are Oranges and Peanuts for Sale, and An Elemental Thing.

• Irvine Welsh
  

  Irvine Welsh is the author of Trainspotting, later a cult classic film. His other often controversial books include The Acid House, Ecstasy, Filth, Glue, Porno, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, Crime and Reheated Cabbage. His wide-ranging interests encompass journalism, film and play scripts, music videos, and various humanitarian causes. A film of Ecstasy is scheduled for release, along with the eagerly anticipated Trainspotting prequel, Scagboys.

• Isabel Wilkerson
  

  Isabel Wilkerson, who spent most of her career as a national correspondent and bureau chief at The New York Times, is the first black woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in journalism. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, won the NBCC award for nonfiction.

• C. K. Williams
  

  C. K. Williams is the author of numerous books of poetry and translations, including The Singing, which won the National Book Award; Repair, winner of a Pulitzer Prize; Flesh and Blood, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; Tar; With Ignorance; I Am the Bitter Name; Lies; and most recently, Wait: Poems. Among his many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University.

• C.D. Wright
  

  C.D. Wright, a Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University, is the winner of the 2011 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, for her most recent title, One With Others. Her other books of poetry include Rising, Falling, Hovering, and One Big Self: An Investigation. In 2004, she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

• Monica Youn
  

  Monica Youn is the author of two books of poetry: Barter, and Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2010. She has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner fellow. She is currently the Brennan Center Fellow in Constitutional Law at NYU Law School.

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Tribute

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• Richard Brautigan
  

  Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) is the author of the cult classics Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and Revenge of the Lawn. While he distanced himself from either movement, he was considered one of the last of the Beats and his work was fast adopted by the ‘60s and ‘70s counterculture in California. When he took his own life in 1984, he left behind twelve novels, eleven books of poetry, and one collection of stories, all noteworthy for their surrealism, humor, and heart.

• Robert Patrick Dana
  

  Robert Patrick Dana was born in 1929, in Boston. After serving in the South Pacific during WWII, he received his MA from The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1954, where he studied with Robert Lowell and John Berryman. His works include eleven full-length books of poetry and three books of prose. Dana’s last two books, New & Selected Poems 1955 to 2010; and a book of essays, Paris on the Flats: Versions of a Literary Life were published posthumously. Dana was a Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence Emeritus at Cornell College, and in September of 2004, he was named poet laureate for the State of Iowa.

• Deborah Digges
  

  Deborah Digges was the author of two memoirs and five books of poetry, including: Rough Music, for which she won the Kingsley Tufts Award; Trapeze; and the posthumously published collection, The Wind Blows Through the Doors of My Heart. The recipient of grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merrill Foundation, she lived in Massachusetts, where she was a professor at Tufts University until her death in 2009.

• Édouard Glissant
  

  Édouard Glissant (1928-2011) who was born to a humble family in Martinique, was educated at the Sorbonne, and a resident of Paris, Baton Rouge, and New York. He was a philosopher, playwright, poet, visionary, and professor. Regarded as one of the most important writers of the French Caribbean, and for works including Poétique de la Relation, Traité du Tout-Monde, and Philosophie de la Relation, he was once shortlisted for the Nobel Prize for Literature. He offered us a vision of a world that, grounded in the unique and multiple experience of the Antilles, was at once harrowing and exhilarating, radically generous and mercilessly perceptive.

• Robert Gover
  

  Robert Gover was born in 1929 and grew up in Girard College. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh for creative writing, and later on became interested in economics. In his twenties, he worked as a journalist for several companies and newspapers. He is the author of numerous novels, including One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding, The Maniac Responsible, Time and Money: The Economy and the Planets, and On the Run with Dick and Jane. Gover writes: “It seems to be my destiny, to become fascinated by shunned or esoteric subjects—miscegenation, pantheism, the history of money and economics, and astrology.”
  

• Nancy Hale
  

  Nancy Hale (1908-1988) is best known for her novel, The Prodigal Women. She studied painting at the Boston Museum School; later on, she moved to New York City, became a writer and editor for Vogue magazine, and the New York Times’ first female news reporter. She is the founder of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, an international working retreat for visual artists, writers, and composers.

• George Hitchcock
  

  George Hitchcock (1914-2010) was an influential American poet, playwright, actor, teacher, and publisher. In 1964, he created the poetry magazine, Kayak. In the words of Philip Levine, “To understate the matter, George Hitchcock gave the American poetry world three priceless gifts: his own writing, Kayak–the finest poetry magazine of my era, and his complex and unusual presence, which served as a model for so many of us, the model of the poet as a total human being (as my mother would have said, a mensch)."
  

• Laura Jensen
  

  Laura Jensen is the author of Bad Boats, Memory, and Shelter. She attended the University of Washington for her BA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for her MFA. In 1996, she helped to create the Distinguished Poet Series. She has been the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and others.

• Carolyn Kizer
  

  Carolyn Kizer has held many distinguished positions in the literary community, including: Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets; Director of the Literature Program at the NEA; Co-founder and Editor of the prestigious journal, Poetry Northwest; and an appointment teaching as a U.S. State Department specialist in Pakistan. She is the recipient of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award; the Robert Frost Medal; and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. She has been a translator, essayist, and author of nine books of poetry, including Yin: New Poems, which won the 1985 Pulitzer Prize.

• Jeanne Leiby
  

  Jeanne Leiby (1965-2011) was the first woman Editor of The Southern Review and former Editor of The Florida Review. She received the Doris Bakwin Prize for her short-story collection Downriver. As associate professor at LSU, she was a dedicated mentor and teacher, launching a program to train young editors. She was famous for phoning acceptances and personalizing rejections for TSR. Poet Laureate Philip Levine wrote: “Jeanne awakened The Southern Review from a sleep of generations.”
  

• Pat Mora
  

  Pat Mora is the author of six collections of poetry and three collections of essays for adults, two collections of poetry for teens, and 31 children's books, with many in bilingual editions. She is a founder of Dia de Libros/Dia de Niños, an annual celebration emphasizing the importance of advocating literacy for children of all linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

• Akilah Oliver
  

  Akilah Oliver (1961-2011) taught at Naropa, the New School, Pratt, and the Poetry Project, was a PhD candidate at the European Graduate School, and a member of *Belladonna. Her books include A Toast In The House of Friends; the she said dialogues; An Arriving Guard of Angels; Thusly Coming to Greet; The Putterer’s Notebook; a(A)ugust; and A Collection of Objects. She performed widely and was a founding member of the Sacred Naked Nature Girls. She was a resident at Beyond Baroque and received grants from California Arts Council, Flintridge, and Rockefeller.

• Ryūichi Tamura
  

  Ryūichi Tamura (1923-1998) was a Japanese poet, essayist, and translator. He attended Meiji University, and was drafted into the Imperial Japanese Navy in 1943. After the conclusion of WWII, he started the journal, Arechi, (The Waste Land). He is the author of Yosen no hi no yoru (Four Thousand Days and Nights), and Kotoba no nai sekai, (World Without Words). In 1998, he was awarded the 54th Japan Academy of Arts Award for Poetry.

• Eleanor Ross Taylor
  

  Eleanor Ross Taylor is the author of six collections of poetry, including most recently: Days Going/Days Coming Back; Late Leisure; and Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems. She is the recipient of several awards, including the Shelly Memorial Prize, the Library of Virginia’s Literary Award for Poetry, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern Poetry, and a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2009, she was elected to the Fellowship of Southern Writers.

• Lorenzo Thomas
  

  Lorenzo Thomas is the author of five volumes of poetry, including: Chances Are Few, The Bathers, and Dancing on Main Street. In 1944, he was born in Panama, then moved with his family to New York, attended Queens College, and served in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy. He became a part of the Black Arts Movement in New York City and the Umbra Workshop. Later on, he moved to Houston as a writer-in-residence at Texas Southern University, then taught at the Black Arts Center, and as a professor at the University of Houston. In his legacy, he helped organize the “Juneteenth Blues Festival,” an emancipation celebration in Houston and other Texas cities.

• Dunstan Thompson
  

  Dunstan Thompson (1918-1975) edited the magazine, Vice Versa, and was the author of Poems; The Dove with the Bough of Olive; Lament for the Sleepwalker, and The Phoenix in the Desert. In 1984, his collection, Poems 1950 – 1974, was published posthumously. In 1942, he joined the U.S. Army, and afterwards, travelled to the Middle East, then the United Kingdom.

• Keith Waldrop
  

  Keith Waldrop was born in Kansas in 1932. While stationed in Germany in 1954 with the U.S. military, he met his wife, Rosmarie, who he later attended school with at Aix-Marseille and Michigan. He is the author of more than fifteen collections of poetry, prose, and translations, including Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy, which won the 2009 National Book Award; Several Gravities; and Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil & Paris Spleen. Currently, he is a professor at Brown University. In 1961, Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop purchased a secondhand printing press and founded Burning Deck Press.

• Rosmarie Waldrop
  

  Rosmarie Waldrop was born in Germany in 1935; she studied at the Universities of Würzburg, Aix-Marseille, and Michigan, after emigrating to the U.S. Her recent poetry books include Driven to Abstraction, Curves to the Apple, Blindsight, and Dissonance (if you are interested). In 2006 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has translated fourteen volumes by Jabès, and books by Hocquard, Roubaud, Mayröcker, Erb, Pastior, Rühm, and Stolterfoht, the last for which she won a PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Both Keith and Rosmarie have been named Chevalier des arts et des lettres by the French government.

• David Young
  

  David Young’s most recent of eleven books of poetry is Field of Light and Shadow: Selected and New Poems. He has also been the translator of Rilke, Eich, Montale, Petrarch, the classical Chinese poets, Paul Celan, Du Fu, and Shakespeare. In 1969, he helped found the semi-annual journal of contemporary poetry and poetics, FIELD, which later expanded to become the Oberlin College Press. While retired from teaching, he continues to be active as an editor. Perhaps the best introduction to his world and work is Seasoning: A Poet's Year.
  

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Award Series

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• Quan Barry
  

  Quan Barry is the author of the poetry collections Water Puppets, Asylum and Controvertibles, all published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin.

• Danielle Cadena Deulen
  

  Danielle Cadena Deulen is the author of two books, Lovely Asunder, winner of the Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize, and The Riots, winner of the AWP Prize in Creative Nonfiction. Formerly, she was a Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is an Assistant Professor of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati.

• Mandy Keifetz
  

  Mandy Keifetz’s work has appeared in Penthouse, Vogue, the Review of Contemporary Fiction and many others. Entertainment Weekly called her first novel, Corrido, ‘an intoxicating cocktail of sex and death.’ She was a Fellow with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2002, and her plays have been staged in London, Cambridge, Montréal, Oslo and New York. She is an occasional MFA dissertation defense panelist at UMASS, Amherst.

• Douglas Light
  

  Douglas Light is the author of East Fifth Bliss, which won the Benjamin Franklin Award, and is the co-author of this novel’s screen adapation. He has been the winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction for Girls in Trouble, and the recipient of a NoMAA/JP Morgan writers grant. His fiction was selected for inclusion in O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading.