Moderator:

Clint Smith is a PhD candidate at Harvard University and the author of Counting Descent, 2017 BCALA Literary award winner and NAACP Image award finalist. He is a 2014 National Poetry Slam champion and his writing has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, and elsewhere.

Tyehimba Jess's last book, Olio, won the Pulitzer Prize and Anisfield-Wolf. His first book, Leadbelly, won the National Poetry Series. A NEA, Whiting, and Lannan Foundation Award winner, he teaches at College of Staten Island and is poetry/fiction editor for African American Review.

Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment of the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.

Nicole Sealey is the author of The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere. She is the Executive Director at Cave Canem Foundation.

Shara McCallum is a Jamaican American poet and the author of five books of poetry, including The Water Between Us, which was awarded the 1999 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Madwoman, her most recently published volume. Her work has been widely published in the U.S., the Caribbean, and Europe, and has been translated into several languages. McCallum has been the recipient of several honors and awards, including a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and a 2011 NEA poetry fellowship. She lives in Pennsylvania and teaches creative writing and literature at Penn State University