Nicole Sealey

Nicole Sealey was born in St. Thomas, U.S Virgin Islands. and raised in Apopka, Florida. She is the author of The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, an excerpt from which was awarded the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, Ordinary Beast, finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a 2023-2024 Cullman Center Fellowship from the New York Public Library, a Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a visiting professor at Boston University and teaches in the MFA Writers Workshop in Paris program at New York University.

Photo Credit: Michael Lionstar

Sara Daniele Rivera

Sara Daniele Rivera is a Cuban and Peruvian American artist, writer, translator, and educator from Albuquerque, New Mexico. She received her MFA in creative writing from Boston University. She is the author of the forthcoming collection The Blue Mimes from Graywolf Press, which was selected by Eduardo C. Corral to receive the 2023 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. She is also the recipient of the 2018 Stephen Dunn Prize in Poetry from Solstice Literary Magazine and the 2017 St. Botolph Club Emerging Artist Award. She is the co-translator of The Blinding Star: Selected Poems of Blanca Varela (Tolsun Books, 2021). Rivera lives in Albuquerque.

Photo Credit: Eliade Novat

Suji Kwock Kim

Suji Kwock Kim was educated at Yale College; the Iowa Writers' Workshop; Seoul National University, where she was a Fulbright Scholar; and Stanford University, where she was a Stegner Fellow. She is the author of Notes from the Divided Country (Louisiana State University Press, 2003), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2002 Walt Whitman Award, and Notes from the North (Smith/Doorstop, U.K., 2021), winner of the International Book & Pamphlet Competition. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Wordsworth Trust, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Photo Credit: Raymond Collier Short

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado (Introducer)

Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Ricardo Alberto Maldonado is the President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets. He is the author of The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. He is currently part of El proyecto de la literatura puertorriqueña / The Puerto Rican Literature Project, a forthcoming online database collecting the creative output of Puerto Rican poets in the diaspora and archipelago, developed in partnership with the University of Houston’s Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Program and the Mellon Foundation.