Brian Turner is an American poet, essayist, and professor. He won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize is Phantom Noise.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and band leader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.
Kevin D. Prufer is an American poet, academic, editor, and essayist. His most recent books are How He Loved Them ,Churches, In A Beautiful Country and National Anthem.
Luisa A. Igloria is a Filipina American poet and author of various award-winning collections, and is the current Poet Laureate of Virginia.
Susan Deer Cloud is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and creative essays.
Jan Steckel is a San Francisco Bay Area-based writer of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, who is also known as an activist in the bisexual community and an advocate on behalf of the disabled and the underprivileged.
Mark Wunderlich, is an American poet. He was born in Winona, Minnesota, and grew up in a rural setting near the town of Fountain City, Wisconsin. He attended Concordia College's Institute for German Studies before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied English and German literature. After moving to New York City he attended Columbia University, where he received an MFA degree.
Sharona Muir is an American writer and academic.
Nancy K. Pearson is an American poet. She is the author of The Whole by Contemplation of a Single Bone and Two Minutes of Light.
Eve Shelnutt was an American poet and writer of short stories. She lived in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Athens, Ohio, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Over the course of her career, she taught at Western Michigan University University of Pittsburgh, Ohio University, and The College of the Holy Cross.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of six poetry collections including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of selected poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets, "Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow" was published by Lost Horse Press in fall, 2021 and short-listed for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize the ALTA National Translation Award, and awarded the 2022 AAUS Translation Prize.
Carolyne Wright is an American poet.
William Wenthe is an American poet and professor. His most recent poetry collection is Words Before Dawn. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including Georgia Review, Southern Review, Callaloo, Tin House, Paris Review,Poetry, and in anthologies including Poets on Place. His honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Texas Commission on the Arts.
Frannie Lindsay is an American poet. She is author of three poetry collections, most recently, The Snow's Wife. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the MacDowell and Millay Colonies, and Yaddo. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including The Atlantic Monthly, The Yale Review, Black Warrior Review, The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, Southern Humanities Review, Field, Prairie Schooner,Poetry East, Beloit Poetry Journal, Harvard Review, and Hunger Mountain. Her poems have also been featured on Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Lindsay earned her B.A. from Russell Sage College and her M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She grew up in a musical family—her mother was a concert violinist—and she is a classical pianist and lives in Belmont, Massachusetts with her two dogs.
Michael Benedikt was an American poet, editor, and literary critic.
Michael Dumanis is an American poet, professor, and editor of poetry.
R. A. Villanueva is a Filipino American poet. His debut collection, Reliquaria, won the 2013 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. He is a founding editor of Tongue: A Journal of Writing & Art.
Tanya Grae is an American poet and essayist, whose debut collection Undoll was awarded the Julie Suk Award and a Florida Book Award and was a National Poetry Series finalist. Her poems and essays have been widely published in literary journals, including Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, and The Massachusetts Review. Grae was born in Sumter, South Carolina, while her father was stationed at Shaw AFB. She grew up traveling the United States as her father relocated for the military every few years and often writes about those early experiences. Her family is from Nashville, Tennessee and is of Irish, Dutch, and Cherokee descent. Her primary themes often revolve around the natural world, the American Southeast, womanhood, girlhood, matrilineal history, domesticity, and feminism.
David Michael Daniel is an American poet. Best known for two full-length volumes of his poetry, Seven-Star Bird and Ornaments. Daniel is the creator and producer of WAMFEST: The Words and Music Festival which he founded in 2007. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Fairleigh Dickinson University where the festival is held.
