Amanda Johnston | |
---|---|
Born | September 18, 1977 East St. Louis, Illinois |
Education | Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from University of Southern Maine |
Occupation | American Poet |
Website | https://www.amandajohnston.com/ |
Amanda Johnston (born 1977) is an African-American poet. She was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and currently resides in Round Rock/Austin, Texas. Amanda Johnston received a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is a Stonecoast MFA faculty member, executive director and founder of Torch Literary Arts, [1] and cofounder of #BlackPoetsSpeakOut. [2]
An Affrilachian poet, former Cave Canem Foundation Board President, and Austin Project Fellow, Torch Literary Arts founder and a Black Poets Speak Out cofounder, Johnston is both a poet and performer. As an activist with Black Poets Speak Out, a video project consisting of African American poets protesting police misconduct with poetry, she has highlighted racial and social injustice in the United States. [3]
Johnston is the creator of a style of poetry known as Genesis. It is a style consisting of five poems written in columns, and read from top to bottom, plus an additional sixth poem that is created by reading all five columns together, left to right, and a seventh poem that is created from italicized words and phrases in the five columns, which are also read left to right. The poems also must move chronologically through time. [4]
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
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
Ruth Ellen Kocher is an American poet. She is the recipient of the PEN/Open Book Award, the Dorset Prize, the Green Rose Prize, and the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, and Cave Canem. She is Professor of English at the University of Colorado - Boulder where and serves as Associate Dean for the College of Arts and Sciences and Divisional Dean for Arts and Humanities.
Luisa A. Igloria is a Filipina American poet and author of various award-winning collections, and is the most recent Poet Laureate of Virginia (2020-2022).
Suzi Q. Smith is an American an award-winning artist, activist, and educator who lives in Denver, Colorado.
Tim Seibles is an American poet, professor and the former Poet Laureate of Virginia. He is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, Voodoo Libretto: New and Selected Poems. His honors include an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In 2012 he was nominated for a National Book Award, for Fast Animal.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Samiya A. Bashir is an American lesbian poet and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently associate professor of creative writing at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Afaa Michael Weaver, formerly known as Michael S. Weaver, is an American poet, short-story writer, and editor. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, and his honors include a Fulbright Scholarship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Pew Foundation, and Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He is the Director of the Writing Intensive at The Frost Place.
Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Tara Betts is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Refuse to Disappear, which was published in June 2022 with The Word Works, Break the Habit, which was published in October 2016 with Trio House Press, and her debut collection Arc & Hue on the Willow Books imprint of Aquarius Press. In 2010, Essence Magazine named her as one of their "40 Favorite Poets".
Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”
Bianca Lynne Spriggs is an American poet and multidisciplinary artist born in Milwaukee, WI. While widely considered a born-and-bred Kentuckian, she actually moved around a lot due to the nature of her parents' work. For several years of her childhood, she would bounce around from Florida, Indiana, and Milwaukee. She moved to Kentucky when she was eleven years old and lived there the longest. She currently resides in Athens, OH where she is an Assistant Professor of English at Ohio University. As a second generation Affrilachian Poet, she is the author of Kaffir Lily, How Swallowtails Become Dragons, The Galaxy is a Dance Floor, and Call Her By Her Name. She is the editor of The Swallowtale Project: Creative Writing for Incarcerated Women (2012), and co-editor of the anthologies, Circe's Lament: An Anthology of Wild Women, Undead: A Poetry Anthology of Ghouls, Ghosts, and More, and Black Bone: 25 Years of the Affrilachian Poets(University of Kentucky Press, 2018).
Yolanda Wisher is an American poet, educator and spoken word artist who focuses on the experience of being African-American. She is a graduate of Temple University and was selected as the third Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2016.
Reginald M. Harris, Jr. is a poet and writer and winner of the 2012 Cave Canem/Northwestern University Poetry Prize.
Phillip B. Williams is an American poet. Born in Chicago, he is the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels and Burn as well as the full length poetry collections Thief in the Interior and MUTINY.
Arisa White is an American poet based in Oakland, California. She is a Cave Canem fellow and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, and Black Pearl, and the books Hurrah's Nest, A Penny Saved, and You're the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened.
Donika Kelly is an American poet and academic, who is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa, specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations.
Xan Forest Phillips is an American poet and visual artist from rural Ohio. Phillips is a trans man.