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.
Benjamin S. Lerner is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, a Howard Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a MacArthur Fellow, among other honors. In 2011 he won the "Preis der Stadt Münster für internationale Poesie", the first American to receive the honor. Lerner teaches at Brooklyn College, where he was named a Distinguished Professor of English in 2016.
Susan Mitchell is an American poet, essayist and translator who wrote the poetry collections Rapture and Erotikon. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Michael Ryan has been teaching creative writing and literature at University of California, Irvine since 1990.
Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971.
Carl Phillips is an American writer and poet. He is a Professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis.
Northwestern University Press is an American publishing house affiliated with Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. It publishes 70 new titles each year in the areas of continental philosophy, poetry, Slavic and German literary criticism, Chicago regional studies, African American intellectual history, theater and performance studies, and fiction. Parneshia Jones is director of the press. It is a member of the Association of American University Presses.
Robert Wrigley is an American poet and educator.
B.H. Fairchild is an American poet and former college professor. His most recent book is The Blue Buick, 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."
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.
Four Way Books is an American nonprofit literary press located in New York City, New York, which publishes poetry and short fiction by emerging and established writers. It features the work of the winners of national poetry competitions, as well as collections accepted through general submission, panel selection, and solicitation by the editors. The press is run by director and founding editor Martha Rhodes, who is the author of five poetry collections. Four Way Books titles are distributed by University of Chicago Press. The press has received grants from New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and The Council of Literary Magazines and Presses through their re-grant program.
The Alice James Award, formerly the Beatrice Hawley Award, is given annually by Alice James Books. The award includes publication of a book-length poetry manuscript and a cash prize.
Patricia Spears Jones is an American poet. She is the author of five books of poetry. Jones is the editor of "The Future Differently Imagined", an issue of About Place Journal, the online publication of Black Earth Institute. Previously, she was the co-editor for Ordinary Women: Poems of New York City Women. Her poem "Beuys and the Blonde" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Jones was the winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize for 2017, and she will serve as the 2020 Louis D. Rubin Jr. Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University.
The Richard Wilbur Award is an American poetry award and publishing prize given by University of Evansville in Indiana. It is named in honor of the American poet Richard Wilbur and was established by William Baer, a professor at the University of Evansville. This biennial competition amongst all American poets awards publication of the winning manuscript by the University of Evansville Press and a small monetary prize.
The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards are a pair of American prizes based at Claremont Graduate University. They are given to poets for their collections of poetry written in the English language, by a citizen or legal resident alien of the United States.
Ariana Reines is an American poet, playwright, performance artist, and translator. Her books of poetry include The Cow (2006), which won the Alberta Prize from Fence Books; Coeur de Lion (2007); Mercury (2011); and Thursday (2012). She has taught at UC Berkeley, Columbia University (2013), The New School (2013), and Tufts University (2014). Reines has been described by Michael Silberblatt of NPR's Bookworm as "one of the crucial voices of her generation." She describes the subject matter of her work as "bearing witness to the search for the sacred in the 21st century."
Nightboat Books is an American nonprofit literary press founded in 2004 and located in Brooklyn, New York. The press publishes poetry, fiction, essays, translations, and intergenre books.
Danez Smith is an African-American, poet, writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. They are queer, non-binary and HIV-positive. They are the author of the poetry collections [insert] Boy and Don't Call Us Dead: Poems, both of which have received multiple awards. Their most recent poetry collection Homie was published on January 21, 2020.
Vievee Elaure Francis is an American poet. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan in 2009, and she received a Rona Jaffe Award the same year. She is the author of three collections of the poetry, the third of which, Forest Primeval, won the 2016 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for poetry and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts poetry award.
Sandra Simonds is an American poet and critic. The author of seven books of poetry, her poems have been included in Best American Poetry and have appeared in literary journals including Poetry, The New Yorker, The New York Times, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Granta, Boston Review, and Fence. In 2013, she won a Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand.” Her poetry reviews have been featured on the Poetry Foundation Website, the New York Times, the Harvard Review and the Kenyon Review.
