Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation," Anne Sexton famously described her as "mother of us all", while Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."
Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
Florence Rosenfeld Howe was an American author, publisher, literary scholar, and historian who is considered to have been a leader of the contemporary feminist movement.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is an American poet and essayist, known as a feminist critic and scholar with a special interest in modernist and contemporary poetry. Her work has been widely anthologized.
Ann Lauterbach is an American poet, essayist, art critic, and professor.
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Toi Derricotte is an American poet. She is the author of six poetry collections and a literary memoir. She has won numerous literary awards, including the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry awarded by the Poetry Society of America, and the 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets. From 2012–2017, Derricotte served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is currently a professor emerita in writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Derricotte is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Grace Cavalieri is an American poet, playwright, and radio host of the Library of Congress program The Poet and the Poem. In 2019, she was appointed the tenth Poet Laureate of Maryland.
Paul Randolph Violi was an American poet born in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including Splurge, Fracas, The Curious Builder, Likewise, and most recently Overnight. Violi was managing editor of The Architectural Forum from 1972–1974, worked on free-lance projects at Universal Limited Art Editions and as chairman of the Associate Council Poetry Committee, he organized a series of readings at the Museum of Modern Art from 1974 to 1983. He also co-founded Swollen Magpie Press, which produced poetry chapbooks, anthologies, and a magazine called New York Times. His art book collaborations with Dale Devereux Barker, most recently Envoy; Life is Completely Interesting, have been acquired by major collections. The expanded text of their first collaboration, Selected Accidents, Pointless Anecdotes, a collection of non-fiction prose, was published by Hanging Loose Press in 2002.
Mary Lou Mackey is an American novelist, poet, and academic. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and fourteen novels, including the New York Times best-seller A Grand Passion and The Village of Bones, The Year The Horses Came, The Horses At The Gate, and The Fires of Spring, four sweeping historical novels that take as their subject the earth-centered, Goddess-worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe. In 2012, her sixth collection of poetry, Sugar Zone, won a PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. Another collection, The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2018, won a 2018 Women’s Spirituality Book Award from the California Institute of Integral Studies; and the 2019 Eric Hoffer Small Press Award for the best book published by a small press. Her first novel, Immersion, was the first novel published by a Second Wave feminist press. Long concerned with environmental issues, Mackey frequently writes about the rainforests of Costa Rica and the Brazilian Amazon. In the early 1970s, as Professor of English and Writer-In-Residence at California State University, Sacramento, she was instrumental in the founding of the CSUS Women's Studies Program and the CSUS English Department Graduate Creative Writing Program. From 1989-1992, she served as President of the West Coast Branch of PEN American Center involving herself in PEN's international defense of persecuted writers.
Barbara Howes was an American poet.
Sonia Raiziss Giop was an American poet, critic, and translator.
Alfredo Giop de Palchi was an Italian poet and translator.
Emanuel di Pasquale is an American poet and translator.
Julie Kane is a contemporary American poet, scholar, and editor and was the Louisiana Poet Laureate for the 2011–2013 term.
Maria Terrone is an American poet and writer. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Eye to Eye (2014), A Secret Room in Fall (2006) and The Bodies We Were Loaned (2002). She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and has received the Individual Artist Initiative Award from the Queens Council on the Arts. Her poetry ranges widely in subject, including themes of history, family and contemporary urban environments.
Louisa Calio is an American poet, writer, multimedia performance artist and teacher. She has directed the Poets and Writers' Piazza for Hofstra University's Italian Experience for the past 10 years. Calio's writings have appeared internationally in anthologies, magazines and journals. She has been honored by Barnard College, Columbia University as a Feminist Who Changed America Second Wave 1963–1975. She has traveled to East and West Africa, lived in the Caribbean and documented her journeys in photographs and the written word, completing an epic poem "Journey to the Heart Waters" which was also the title of an exhibition of photos and poems that opened at Round Hill Resort in Montego Bay in 2007.
Neil Baldwin is a poet, critic, cultural historian, biographer, arts executive, and emeritus professor in the College of the Arts at Montclair State University. He is the 2024-2026 External Mentor for the National Park Service Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellowship Program at the Thomas Edison National Historic Park in West Orange, New Jersey; and at work on a novel.
Paola Jo (PJ) Corso is an American fiction writer, poet, photographer and literary activist. Corso is a New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellow, Sherwood Anderson Fiction Award Winner,, and included on the Pennsylvania Center for the Book's Literary Map. She is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including 'Vertical Bridges: Poems and Photographs of City Steps,' (2020) with original photos by the author and archival photographs from the University of Pittsburgh Library; Catina's Haircut: A Novel in Stories (2010) on Library Journal’s notable list of first novels; Giovanna's 86 Circles And Other Stories (2005), a Binghamton University's John Gardner Fiction Book Award Finalist; a book of poems, Death by Renaissance (2004), and award-winning poetry collections, The Laundress Catches Her Breath, winner of the Tillie Olsen Award for Creative Writing; and Once I Was Told the Air Was Not for Breathing (2012), about Pittsburgh steelworkers and garment workers in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and winner of a Triangle Fire Memorial Association Award.
Bordighera Press is an independent publisher that was founded in 1989 by Fred Gardaphé, Paolo Giordano, and Anthony Julian Tamburri. Committed to Italian and Italian American culture in North America, the press consists of four series and two journals.
