Anthony Dey Hoagland was an American poet. His poetry collection, What Narcissism Means to Me (2003), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other honors included two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, and a fellowship to the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. His poems and criticism have appeared in such publications as Poetry Magazine, Ploughshares, AGNI, Threepenny Review, The Gettysburg Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Indiana Review, American Poetry Review and Harvard Review.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is an American poet, photographer and bandleader. 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.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Natasha Trethewey is an American poet who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014. She won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her 2006 collection Native Guard, and is a former Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
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.
Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, writer, and literary scholar who has served as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018.
Graywolf Press is an independent, non-profit publisher located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Graywolf Press publishes fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Tyehimba Jess is an American poet. His book Olio received the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Adrian Matejka is an American poet. He was the poet laureate of Indiana for the 2018–2019 term. Since May 2022, he has been the editor of Poetry magazine.
Jericho Brown is an American poet and writer. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown has worked as an educator at institutions such as the University of Houston, the University of San Diego, and Emory University. His poems have been published in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New Yorker, among others. He released his first book of prose and poetry, Please, in 2008. His second book, The New Testament, was released in 2014. His 2019 collection of poems, The Tradition, garnered widespread critical acclaim.
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.
Roger William Reeves is an American poet and essayist.
Geffrey Davis is an American poet and professor. He is the author of Revising the Storm (2014) and Night Angler (2019). He teaches in The Arkansas Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas and lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas. He also serves on the poetry faculty at the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Gary Jackson is an American educator and poet. He had received a Cave Canem and Bread Loaf fellowship and was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2009.
Lauren K. Alleyne is a Trinidadian American poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, and educator born and raised in the dual-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago.
Parneshia Jones is an American publisher, poet, and editor. She is the author of a 2015 poetry collection, Vessel, which won the Midwest Book Award. In 2020, Jones was appointed director of Northwestern University Press.
Nicole Sealey is an American poet who was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, US. She is the former executive director of Cave Canem Foundation. She won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize for The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, and her collection Ordinary Beast was a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Her poem "Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure" won a Forward Prize for Poetry in October 2021. Sealey lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Charif Shanahan is an American poet and translator. His debut poetry collection Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing was the recipient of the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, selected by Allison Joseph, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award. His second collection, Trace Evidence: poems, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry, and is a finalist for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, his second Lammie nomination.
Dante Micheaux is an American poet whose work Circus was the winner of the 2019 Four Quartets Prize, presented by the Poetry Society of America in partnership with the T. S. Eliot Foundation, having been selected by judges Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Carmen Giménez Smith and Rosanna Warren.
