Featured Presenters

Scroll over presenter photos for biographies.

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  

  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is author of the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah, as well as the story collection The Thing Around Your Neck. She also speaks at events around the world, including two TED Talks: “The Danger of A Single Story” and “We Should All Be Feminists”—which has now been published as a book. Adichie has received numerous accolades, including the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Orange Prize (now the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction) and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

• Peter Balakian
  

  Peter Balakian is the author of several books of poems, most recently Ozone Journal, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Other collections include Ziggurat, June-tree: New and Selected Poems 1974–2000, and Dyer’s Thistle. His memoir Black Dog of Fate is the winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir and a New York Times Notable Book Award.

• J. Mae Barizo
  

  J. Mae Barizo is a poet, critic, and performer. She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from The New School, the Jerome Foundation, Bennington College, and Poets House. Her poems and essays have appeared in AGNI, Bookforum, Boston Review, Hyperallergic, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. A champion of cross-genre work, she has performed sound/text collaborations with musicians from The National, the American String Quartet, and many more. In 2015 she was the subject of a feature in The New York Times. Barizo is the author of The Cumulus Effect.

• Tina Chang
  

  Tina Chang is the author of the poetry collections Of Gods & Strangers and Half-Lit Houses, and the coeditor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. She was raised in New York City. She is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, and recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Academy of American Poets, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Van Lier Foundation among others. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the City University of Hong Kong.
  (Photo credit: Tom Callan)

• Ron Charles
  

  Ron Charles is the editor of Book World at The Washington Post, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, and an NBCC board member. Before moving to DC, he edited the books section of The Christian Science Monitor in Boston.
  (Photo Credit: Courtesy of The Washington Post)

• Alexander Chee
  

  Alexander Chee is the bestselling author of The Queen of the Night and Edinburgh. He is a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at Virginia Quarterly Review and Lit Hub, and a critic at large for The Los Angeles Times. He is winner of the Whiting Award, the AAWW Literary Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the MCCA. He teaches creative writing at Dartmouth College.

• Ta-Nehisi Coates
  

  Ta-Nehisi Coates is the author of the New York Times bestseller Between the World and Me and the memoir The Beautiful Struggle. A former Village Voice writer, Coates is an Atlantic National Correspondent, where he has written many influential articles, including “The Case for Reparations.” Among his many honors includes the Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, the George Polk Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Coates was previously the Martin Luther King Visiting Associate Professor at MIT, and is currently the Journalist in Residence at the School of Journalism at CUNY.
  (Photo credit: Nina Subin)

• Maureen Corrigan
  

  Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, is Critic in Residence and Professor of the Practice at Georgetown University and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. She is the author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures and Leave Me Alone, I’m Reading!
  (Photo credit: Nina Subin)

• Rita Dove
  

  Rita Dove is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Collected Poems 1974–2004, Sonata Mulattica, and On the Bus with Rosa Parks. Dove served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Among her many honors is the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2005 to 2011. Dove is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, where she has been teaching since 1989. 
  (Photo credit: Fred Viebahn)

• Andre Dubus III
  

  Andre Dubus III is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller House of Sand and Fog. This novel was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and it was an Oprah Book Club Selection. His memoir, Townie, and novel, Dirty Love, were both New York Times bestsellers and New York Times Editors’ Choices. Dirty Love was also listed as Notable Fiction from The Washington Post and a Kirkus Starred Best Book. Dubus has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, two Pushcart Prizes, and an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. His books are published in over twenty-five languages.
  (Photo credit: David Le)

• Rikki Ducornet
  

  Rikki Ducornet is the author of nine novels, three collections of short fiction, two books of essays and five books of poetry. She has received a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction, the Bard College Arts and Letters award, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her collected papers including prints and drawings are in the permanent collection of the Ohio State University Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
  (Photo credit: Mara Natale)

• Jennifer Egan
  

  Jennifer Egan is the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad. She has written four other critically acclaimed books and her nonfiction appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine. Egan is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, and a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library.
  (Photo credit: M. Van Hattem)

• Patricia Engel
  

  Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, named a New York Times Editors’ Choice; Vida, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year as well as a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Fiction Award and Young Lions Fiction Award; and the novel It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award. Her books have been translated into several languages and she has received honors including a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

• Angela Flournoy
  

  Angela Flournoy is the author of The Turner House, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. She was also a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, and she has written for The New York Times, The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times. Flournoy has taught at the University of Iowa and the Writer’s Foundry at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn.
  (Photo credit: John Midgley)

• Aminatta Forna
  

  Aminatta Forna is the author of three novels, The Hired Man, The Memory of Love, and Ancestor Stones, and the critically acclaimed memoir, The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her fiction has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award and the PEN Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and has been shortlisted for the Neustadt Prize, the Orange Prize for Fiction, the IMPAC Award, the Warwick Prize, and nominated for the European Prize for Fiction. Her memoir was serialized on BBC Radio and in The Sunday Times newspaper. Forna is currently a Lannan Visiting Chair at Georgetown University.
  (Photo credit: Jonathan Ring)

• Karen Joy Fowler
  

  Karen Joy Fowler is the author of six novels and four story collections—most notably We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves and The Jane Austen Book Club. Her works have been New York Times Notable Books and have been included in many best-of-year lists. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves won the PEN/Faulkner Award as well as the California Book Award for fiction and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Fowler is the cofounder of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the current president of the Clarion Foundation.  
  (Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones)

• Vievee Francis
  

  Vievee Francis is the author of Horse in the Dark and Blue-Tail Fly. She is an associate editor for Callaloo.

• Ross Gay
  

  Ross Gay is the author of three books of poems: Against Which, Bringing the Shovel Down, and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. A founding editor, with Karissa Chen and Patrick Rosal, of the online sports magazine Some Call It Ballin’, he is an editor with the chapbook presses Q Avenue and Ledge Mule Press and a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Indiana University.

• Aracelis Girmay
  

  Aracelis Girmay is the author of the poetry collections The Black Maria, Kingdom Animalia, and Teeth, as well as the picture book changing, changing. The recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for poetry and the GLCA New Writers Award, she was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her otherhonors include fellowships from Cave Canem,Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches in Hampshire College’sSchool for Interdisciplinary Arts and in Drew University’s low-residencyMFA program in poetry.
  (Photo credit: Sheila Griffin)

• Albert Goldbarth
  

  Albert Goldbarth has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, including Selfish, Everyday People, and The Kitchen Sink, and six collections of essays, including The Adventures of Form and Content. He lives in Wichita, Kansas.
  (Photo credit: Michael Pointer)

• Nan Graham
  

  Nan Graham has worked in publishing at Pantheon Books; Viking Penguin, where she was the Executive Editor; and Scribner as its Editor in Chief before becoming Scribner’s publisher in 2013. She has edited writers of fiction, sociology, history, and psychology. She has worked on many memoirs, including Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, and Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Living History. Her other nonfiction authors include National Book Award–winner The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression and National Book Critics Circle Award–winner Far from the Tree, both by Andrew Solomon, and Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Pulitzer Prize–winner, The Emperor of All Maladies,and his second book The Gene: An Intimate History.She has edited Don DeLillo for twenty-five years and Stephen King for twenty years. Her other fiction authors include Annie Proulx, Amy Hempel, Colm Toibin, Ann Beattie, M.L. Stedman, Rachel Kushner, Miranda July, Dana Spiotta, and Anthony Doerr.

• Daniel Halpern
  

  Daniel Halpern is publisher and president of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. He is the author of nine collections of poetry, most recently Something Shining. For twenty-five years, Halpern edited the literary magazine Antaeus, which he founded in Tangier with Paul Bowles. Halpern is the editor or coeditor of anthologies including The Art of the Tale; The Art of the Story; On Nature: Nature, Landscape, and Natural History (with Dan Frank); and Reading the Fights with Joyce Carol Oates. Halpern has received numerous grants and awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, the PEN Publisher Citation, and The Maxwell Perkins Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Field of Fiction.

• Terrance Hayes
  

  Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, which won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series; and Wind in a Box. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including a MacArthur Foundation Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

• Chris Jackson
  

  Chris Jackson is the Publisher and Editor in Chief of One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Previously, Jackson was an Executive Editor at Spiegel & Grau, where he edited several bestselling authors, including Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, Eddie Huang, Jill Leovy, Matt Taibbi, Victor LaValle, and Jay Z. His forthcoming One World authors include Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, Alex Wagner, Quiara Hudes, Molly Crabapple, Marwan Hisham, and Binyavanga Wainaina. His own writing has appeared in TheAtlantic.com, The Paris Review, and Callaloo among other places.

• Major Jackson
  

  Major Jackson is the author of four collections of poetry: Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Whiting Award, and he has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress.
  (Photo credit: Erin Patrice O'Brien)

• Marlon James
  

  Marlon James won the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for A Brief History of Seven Killings. The novel also won the American Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the OCM Bocas Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. James is in the process of adapting the work into an HBO television series. His first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was a finalist for the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, as well as a New York Times Editor’s Choice. His second novel, The Book of Night Women, won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize, the Minnesota Book Award, and it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction as well as an NAACP Image Award. James was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1970. He holds degrees from the University of the West Indies and from Wilkes University. He teaches English and creative writing at Macalester College.

• Margo Jefferson
  

  Margo Jefferson is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography for Negroland. She was for years a book, theater, and culture critic for The New York Times and Newsweek. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, New York Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Believer. Jefferson is a professor of writing at Columbia University.
  (Photo credit: Michael Lionstar)

• Ben Lerner
  

  Ben Lerner is the author of two internationally acclaimed novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04, and three poetry collections, The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. He holds a BA in political theory and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and has received fellowships from the Fulbright, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations. Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

• Dana Levin
  

  Dana Levin has published four books of poetry, including most recently Banana Palace. Her debut volume, In the Surgical Theatre, won the APR/Honickman Award. She has received fellowships from a wide range of foundations, including Witter Bynner, Lannan, Guggenheim, and Whiting, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. Her poetry has been widely anthologized and has won several Pushcart Prizes. A teacher of poetry for over twenty years, Levin splits her time between Santa Fe and St. Louis, where she serves as Distinguished Writer in Residence at Maryville University.
  (Photo credit: Anne Staveley)

• Paul Lisicky
  

  Paul Lisicky is the author of five books, including The Narrow Door, Famous Builder, and The Burning House. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the James Michener/Copernicus Society, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He teaches in the MFA program at Rutgers University–Camden.
  (Photo credit: Star Black)

• Margot Livesey
  

  Margot Livesey was born and grew up on the edge of the Scottish Highlands. She is the author of a collection of stories and eight novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture, The Flight of Gemma Hardy, and most recently Mercury. The Hidden Machinery, a book about the craft of writing, will be published in 2017. She has taught in numerous writing programs including Emerson College, Boston University, and the Warren Wilson low-residency MFA program, and has been the recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute. She is on the faculty of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

• Pura López-Colomé
  

  Pura López-Colomé is the author of twelve books of poems, most recently Via Corporis. Her essays have been collected and published by Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México under the titles Afluentes and Imperfecta semejanza. She has received numerous honors, including the Premio Xavier Villaurrutia, the Premio Nacional Alfonso Reyes, and the Linda Gaboriau Award. She has translated poetry by Seamus Heaney, collected in a bilingual edition under the title Seamus Heaney: Obra Reunida; Philip Larkin; and William Carlos Williams. She lives in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

• Carlos Lozada
  

  Carlos Lozada is nonfiction book critic of The Washington Post and winner of the 2016 National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing. Before joining the Post in 2005, he was managing editor of Foreign Policy and a Knight-Bagehot fellow at Columbia University. A native of Lima, Peru, he is an adjunct professor of political science in the University of Notre Dame’s Washington semester program.

• Valeria Luiselli
  

  Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. A novelist (Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth) and essayist (Sidewalks), her work has been translated into many languages. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award. The Story of My Teeth was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won the 2015 Los Angeles Times Prize for Best Fiction.
  (Photo credit: Alfredo Pelcastre)

• Thomas Mallon
  

  Thomas Mallon’s nine books of fiction include Henry and Clara, Fellow Travelers, Watergate (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), and most recently Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years. He has also written volumes of nonfiction about plagiarism (Stolen Words), diaries (A Book of One’s Own), letters (Yours Ever), and the Kennedy assassination (Mrs. Paine’s Garage), as well as two books of essays (Rockets and Rodeos and In Fact). His honors include Guggenheim and Rockefeller fellowships, membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Vursell prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for distinguished prose style.
  (Photo credit: William Bodenschatz)

• Sarah Manguso
  

  Sarah Manguso is the author of four books of prose including Ongoingness, a meditation on motherhood and time; The Guardians, an investigation of friendship and suicide; The Two Kinds of Decay, a memoir of her experience with a chronic autoimmune disease; and Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape, a collection of very short stories. She is also the author of the poetry collections Siste Viator and The Captain Lands in Paradise, poems from which have won a Pushcart Prize and appeared in four editions of the Best American Poetry series.
  (Photo credit: Andy Ryan)

• Colum McCann
  

  Colum McCann is the internationally bestselling author of the National Book Award–winning novel Let the Great World Spin and most recently the short fiction collection Thirteen Ways of Looking. Previous works also include the novels Zoli, Dancer, This Side of Brightness, Songdogs, and TransAtlantic. McCann is a member of the Irish Academy, and among his many honors includes the Chevalier des Arts et Lettres and an award from the American Academy. He currently teaches at the MFA program in Hunter College.
  (Photo credit: Matt Valentine)

• Erroll McDonald
  

  Erroll McDonald, a trustee of PEN America, is a Vice President, Executive Editor in the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group of Penguin Random House. Among the authors he has edited and published are: James Baldwin, Italo Calvino, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Henry Louis Gates, Michael R. Gordon, Kazuo Ishiguro, Randall Kennedy, Fran Lebowitz, Arthur Levitt, Wangari Maathai, Toni Morrison, Bao Ninh, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Richard Posner, Salman Rushdie, and Wole Soyinka. McDonald graduated from Yale and Columbia Business School. He has been a lecturer at Yale and an adjunct professor at Columbia.

• Andrew Motion
  

  Andrew Motion is the author of twelve books of poetry, including, most recently, Peace Talks. His biography of poet Philip Larkin won the Whitbread Prize for biography. Motion also wrote Keats: A Biography, which inspired film director Jane Campion’s adaptation, Bright Star. Motion has also published several collections of autobiographical prose and fiction. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1984 and knighted in 1999, Motion served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1999 to 2009. He is the cofounder and codirector of the Poetry Archive (UK) and Poetry by Heart. He currently teaches at the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.
  (Photo credit: Johnny Ring)

• Sabina Murray
  

  Sabina Murray is the author of four novels and two short story collections, including Tales of the New World and the PEN/Faulkner Award–winning The Caprices. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute, and is on the fiction faculty of the MFA program at UMass Amherst. She wrote the script for Beautiful Country, a Golden Bear contender, for which she was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Her most recent book is Valiant Gentlemen.

• Eileen Myles
  

  Eileen Myles is the author of nineteen books including I Must Be Living Twice: New & Selected Poems and Chelsea Girls. They are the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital art writers’ grant, a Lambda Book Award, the Shelley Prize from The Poetry Society of America, as well as being named to the Slate/Whiting Second Novel List. Currently they teach at NYU and Naropa University.
  (Photo credit: Catherine Opie)

• Viet Thanh Nguyen
  

  Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and the California Book Award for First Fiction. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. Nguyen is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
  (Photo credit: Bebe Jacobs)

• Alice Notley
  

  Alice Notley is the author of numerous books of poetry, and of essays and talks on poetry, and has edited and coedited books by Ted Berrigan and Douglas Oliver. She edited the magazine CHICAGO in the 70s and coedited with Oliver the magazines SCARLET and Gare du Nord in the 90s. She is the recipient of The Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Griffin Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize, and the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Prize. Her latest book is Certain Magical Acts. 

• Ann Patchett
  

  Ann Patchett is the author of seven novels, including The Patron Saint of Liars, Bel Canto, State of Wonder, and Commonwealth, as well as three books of nonfiction, Truth & Beauty, What now?, and This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Patchett has received numerous awards and fellowships, including England’s Orange Prize, PEN/Faulkner Award, the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Book Sense Book of the Year, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Women’s National Book Association’s Award. In 2011, she opened Parnassus Books in Nashville, Tennessee, with her partner Karen Hayes. In 2012 she was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.
  (Photo credit: Heidi Ross)

• Rowan Ricardo Phillips
  

  Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven, which was longlisted for the 2015 National Book Award, and The Ground: Poems, for which he received a 2013 Whiting Award, the 2013 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the 2013 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award for poetry. The author of the influential critical volume When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness, Philips is also the translator of Salvador Espriu’s story collection Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth as well as numerous other works from Catalan, Spanish, and Italian. His other honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship.
  (Photo credit: Sue Kwon)

• Paisley Rekdal
  

  Paisley Rekdal is the author of a book of essays, The Night My Mother Met Bruce Lee; a hybrid-genre photo-text memoir that combines poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and photography entitled Intimate; and four books of poetry: A Crash of Rhinos, Six Girls Without Pants, The Invention of the Kaleidoscope, and Animal Eye. Her work has received the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship, and various state arts council awards. Her newest book of poems, Imaginary Vessels, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
  (Photo credit: Austen Diamond)

• Sonia Sanchez
  

  Sonia Sanchez is the author of over twenty books including Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment and Other Stories, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, and most recently, Morning Haiku. In addition to being a contributing editor to Black Scholar and The Journal of African Studies, she has edited an anthology, We Be Word Sorcerers: 25 Stories by Black Americans. Among her many honors are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEW, the American Book Award, the Langston Hughes Poetry Award, and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.

• Tim Seibles
  

  Tim Seibles, the newly appointed Poet Laureate of Virginia, is the author of several poetry collections including Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, and Buffalo Head Solos. His latest, Fast Animal, was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award. Seibles is the recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Misericordia University. He has been a workshop leader for Cave Canem and the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Seibles is a professor of English at Old Dominion University where he teaches literature as well as other classes in the MFA in writing program.
  (Photo credit: Jennifer Fish)

• Danez Smith
  

  Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Don’t Call Us Dead. Danez is also the author of two chapbooks, hands on your knees and black movie, winner of the Button Poetry Prize. They are a 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. They are a two-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, placing second in 2014, and a two-time Rustbelt Poetry Slam Champion. Danez is a member of the Dark Noise Collective and is an MFA Candidate at the University of Michigan.
  (Photo credit: Hieu Minh Nguyen)

• Patricia Smith
  

  Patricia Smith is the author of six critically acknowledged volumes of poetry, including Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, which won the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Teahouse of the Almighty. She also edited the crime fiction anthology Staten Island Noir. She is a Cave Canem faculty member, a professor of English at CUNY/College of Staten Island, and a faculty member of the Sierra Nevada MFA program.
  (Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan)

• Tracy K. Smith
  

  Tracy K. Smith is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Ordinary Light and three books of poetry. Her collection Life on Mars won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book. Duende won the 2006 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and an Essence Literary Award. The Body’s Question was the winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Smith was the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers’ Award and a Whiting Award. She is currently the director of Princeton University’s creative writing program.
  (Photo credit: Tina Ruisinger)

• Emma Straub
  

  Emma Straub is The New York Times bestselling author of Modern Lovers, The Vacationers, Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures, and Other People We Married. Her books have been published in seventeen countries.

• Hannah Tinti
  

  Hannah Tinti is the author of the bestselling novel The Good Thief, which won The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, and the story collection Animal Crackers, a runner-up for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her new novel, The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, will be published in March 2017. She teaches creative writing at New York University's MFA program and co-founded the Sirenland Writers Conference. Tinti is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of One Story magazine, which won the AWP Small Press Publisher Award in 2014.
  (Photo credit: Dani Shapiro)

• Ocean Vuong
  

  Ocean Vuong is the author of Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which received a 2016 Whiting Award. His other honors include an Academy of American Poets College Poetry Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets, and a Pushcart Prize.
  (Photo credit: Arnold Adler)

• Jacqueline Woodson
  

  Jacqueline Woodson won a 2014 National Book Award for her memoir in verse, Brown Girl Dreaming. The author of more than two dozen books, Woodson is a four-time Newbery Honor winner, a three-time National Book Award finalist, and both an NAACP Image Award and a two-time Coretta Scott King Book Award winner. Her books include Miracle’s Boys, which received a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Locomotion, and Beneath a Meth Moon. Her new novel, Another Brooklyn is a New York Times Bestseller and long-listed for the National Book Award in fiction. She is currently the Young People’s Poet Laureate.
  (Photo credit: Juna F. Nagle)

• Monica Youn
  

  Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre; Ignatz, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Barter. She has received fellowships from the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation–Bellagio, and the MacDowell Colony. Her poems have been widely published, including in Poetry, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and The Best American Poetry. She has previously taught at Columbia University, Bennington College, and the Warren Wilson and Sarah Lawrence MFA programs, and she currently teaches at Princeton University.

AWP Award Series Readers

Scroll over presenter photos for biographies.

• Marci Calabretta
  

  Marci Calabretta is the author of Hour of the Ox, winner of the 2015 AWP Award Series in Poetry. She is the recipient of poetry fellowships from Kundiman and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. She is also the author of a chapbook, Last Train to the Midnight Market. She is cofounder and managing editor for Print-Oriented Bastards, and assistant editor for Jai-Alai magazine, founded by P. Scott Cunningham as a subsidiary of the O, Miami Poetry Festival.

• Eric Neuenfeldt
  

  Eric Neuenfeldt is the author of Wild Horse, winner of the 2015 AWP Award Series in Short Fiction. His chapbook of stories, Fall Ends Tomorrow, won the 2010 Iron Horse Literary Review Single-Author Competition.

• Carol Zoref
  

  Carol Zoref is the author of Barren Island, winner of the 2015 AWP Award Series in the Novel. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She is married to photographer Pamela Walter.