Sterling Allen Brown was an American professor, folklorist, poet, and literary critic. He chiefly studied black culture of the Southern United States and was a professor at Howard University for most of his career. Brown was the first Poet Laureate of the District of Columbia.
Michael Dana Gioia is an American poet, literary critic, literary translator, and essayist.
Martín Espada is a Puerto Rican-American poet, and a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry. Puerto Rico has frequently been featured as a theme in his poems.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
James Vincent Tate was an American poet. His work earned him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robert Garnell Kaufman was an American Beat poet and surrealist as well as a jazz performance artist and satirist. In France, where his poetry had a large following, he was known as the Black American Rimbaud.
Haki R. Madhubuti is an African-American author, educator, and poet, as well as a publisher and operator of black-themed bookstore. He is particularly recognized in connection with the founding in 1967 of Third World Press, considered the oldest independent black publishing house in the United States.
Marvin Hartley Bell was an American poet and teacher who was the first Poet Laureate of the state of Iowa.
Jeffrey McDaniel is an American poet. He has published six books of poetry, most recently Holiday in the Islands of Grief. He is the recipient of a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His writing has been included in Ploughshares, The Best American Poetry 1994, The Best American Poetry 2010, The Best American Poetry 2019, and The New Young American Poets, as well as on the National Endowment for the Arts website. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Mộng-Lan is a Vietnamese-born American writer, visual artist, musician, dancer, and educator. Former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Fulbright Scholar, she has published seven books of poetry & artwork, three chapbooks, has won numerous prizes such as the Juniper Prize and the Pushcart Prize. Poems have been included in international and national anthologies such as Best American Poetry Anthology and several Norton anthologies. Her books include: Song of the Cicadas ; Why is the Edge Always Windy?; Tango, Tangoing: poems & art; One Thousand Minds Brimming, 2016; and Dusk Aflame: poems & art, 2018. Her latest music album releases include Arrabal de Tango: Tango por Siempre, voice & guitar, 2020; Perfumas de Amor, de Argentina y Viet Nam, , 2018; New Orleans of My Heart, jazz piano, 2019; Dreaming Orchid: Poetry & Jazz Piano, 2016. www.monglan.com
B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is An Ordinary Life, and his poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Southern Review, Poetry, TriQuarterly, The Hudson Review, Salmagundi, The Sewanee Review. His third poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe, winner of the 1997 Beatrice Hawley Award, brought Fairchild's work to national prominence, garnering him a large number of awards and fellowships including the William Carlos Williams Award, Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, California Book Award, Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, PEN Center USA West Poetry Award, National Book Award (finalist), Capricorn Poetry Award, and Rockefeller and Guggenheim fellowships. The book ultimately gave him international prominence, as The Waywiser Press in England published the U.K. edition of the book. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "The Art of the Lathe by B.H. Fairchild has become a contemporary classic—a passionate example of the plain style, so finely crafted and perfectly pitched...workhorse narratives suffused with tenderness and elegiac music."
Larry Neal or Lawrence Neal was an American writer, poet, critic and academic. He was a notable scholar of African-American theater, well known for his contributions to the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He was a major influence in both New York and Chicago, pushing for black culture to focus less on integration with White culture, rather than celebrating its differences within an equally important and meaningful artistic and political field, thus celebrating Black heritage.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
Eugene Ethelbert Miller is an African-American poet, teacher and literary activist, based in Washington, DC. He is the author of several collections of poetry and two memoirs, the editor of Poet Lore magazine, and the host of the weekly WPFW morning radio show On the Margin.
Sherod Santos is an American poet, essayist, translator and playwright. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recentlyThe Burning World in 2024, and Square Inch Hours in 2017. Individual poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, Poetry, Proscenium Theatre Journal, American Poetry Review, and The New York Times Book Review. His plays have been produced at The Algonquin Theatre in New York City, The Royal Court Theatre in London, The Side Project in Chicago, the Brooklyn International Theatre Festival, and the Flint Michigan Play Festival. Santos also wrote the settings for the Sappho poems in the CD Magus Insipiens, composed by Paul Sanchez and sung by soprano Kayleen Sanchez.
Joshua Mehigan is an American poet.
Percy Edward Johnston was an African-American poet, playwright, and professor. He was also a founder of the Howard Poets and publisher of Dasein literary journal.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Robert Earl Price is an American playwright and poet. He is a recipient of the American Film Institute's William Wyler award for screenwriting and is the author of four books of poetry and has had eleven plays produced in American regional theaters and abroad in Berlin and Johannesburg. He is artist-in-residence in the Drama Department at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland, where he also serves as artistic director of the Charles Sumner G.A.R. Post #25, a historic hall built in 1908 to honor African-American veterans of the Civil War.
