Ann Fisher-Wirth is an American poet and scholar, based at the University of Mississippi. She has won several teaching awards, including Liberal Arts Outstanding Teacher of the Year (2006), Humanities Teacher of the Year (2007), and the Elsie M. Hood Award (2014). Her poetry has received numerous awards, including several Pushcart nominations and a Pushcart Special Mention.
Achy Obejas is a Cuban-American writer and translator focused on personal and national identity issues, living in Benicia, California. She frequently writes on her sexuality and nationality, and has received numerous awards for her creative work. Obejas' stories and poems have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Fifth Wednesday Journal, TriQuarterly, Another Chicago Magazine and many other publications. Some of her work was originally published in Esto no tiene nombre, a Latina lesbian magazine published and edited by tatiana de la tierra, which gave voice to the Latina lesbian community. Obejas worked as a journalist in Chicago for more than two decades. For several years, she was also a writer in residence at the University of Chicago, University of Hawaii, DePaul University, Wichita State University, and Mills College in Oakland, California. She also worked from 2019 to 2022 as a writer/editor for Netflix on the bilingual team in the Product Writing department.
Josephine Louise Miles was an American poet and literary critic; the first woman tenured in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley. She wrote over a dozen books of poetry and several works of criticism. She was a foundational scholar of quantitative and computational methods, and is considered a pioneer of the field of digital humanities. Benjamin H. Lehman and Josephine Miles' interdepartmental "Prose Improvement Project" was the basis for James Gray's Bay Area Writing Project, which later became the National Writing Project. The "Prose Improvement Project" was one of the first efforts at creating a writing across the curriculum program.
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.
Janice Gould (1949–2019) was a Koyangk'auwi Maidu writer and scholar. She was the author of Beneath My Heart, Earthquake Weather and co-editor with Dean Rader of Speak to Me Words: Essays on Contemporary American Indian Poetry. Her book Doubters and Dreamers (2011) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award and the Binghamton University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award.
Josephine Jacobsen was a Canadian-born American poet, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She was appointed the twenty-first Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1971. In 1997, she received the Poetry Society of America's highest award, the Robert Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry.
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.
Elizabeth Willis is an American poet and literary critic. She currently serves as Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Willis has won several awards for her poetry including the National Poetry Series and the Guggenheim Fellowship. Susan Howe has called Elizabeth Willis "an exceptional poet, one of the most outstanding of her generation."
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
Sandy Pool is a Canadian poet, editor and professor of creative writing. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections and a chapbook published by Vallum Editions. Her first collection, Exploding Into Night was a shortlisted nominee for the Governor General's Award for English language poetry at the 2010 Governor General's Awards.
Chana Bloch was an American poet, translator, and scholar. She was a professor emerita of English at Mills College in Oakland, California.
Heid E. Erdrich is a poet, editor, and writer. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.
M. Evelina Galang is an American novelist, short story writer, editor, essayist, educator, and activist of Filipina descent. Her novel One Tribe won the AWP Novel of the Year Prize in 2004.
Kay Ulanday Barrett is a published poet, performer, educator, food writer, cultural strategist, and transgender, gender non-conforming, and disability advocate based in New York and New Jersey, whose work has been showcased nationally and internationally. Their second book, More Than Organs received a 2021 Stonewall Honor Book Award by the American Library Association and is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Literature Finalist. They are a 2020 James Baldwin Fellowship recipient, three-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and two-time Best of the Net Nominee. Barrett's writing and performance centers on the experience of queer, transgender, people of color, mixed race people, Asian, and Filipino/a/x community. The focus of their artistic work navigates multiple systems of oppression in the context of the U.S.
Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA) is a written arts organization that was founded in 1999 by Pulitzer-prize winning author Junot Diaz, along with award-winning author Elmaz Abinader, Víctor Díaz and Diem Jones in order to provide emerging writers of color with workshops and mentoring by established writers of color. Since its founding, over 2,000 aspiring writers from around the world have been involved in their programs.
PEN Oakland is a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. PEN Oakland was founded in 1989 by Ishmael Reed and co-founders Floyd Salas, Claire Ortalda and Reginald Lockett. PEN Oakland annually sponsors the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, named for the late poet and faculty member of U.C. Berkeley’s English Department. The award honors well-known and emerging Bay Area and international authors for excellence in multicultural literature. Past and present PEN Oakland board members include: Elmaz Abinader, Opal Palmer Adisa, Kim Addonizio, Robert Mailer Anderson, Jesse Beagle, Judith Cody, Lucha Corpi, Nicole Corrales, John Curl, Lucille Lang Day, Sharon Doubiago, Cheryl Fabio, Adelle Foley, Jack Foley, Emil Guillermo, Andrew Phillip Hayes, Herbert R. Kohl, Reginald Lockett, Kirk Lumpkin, Kim McMillon, Gerald Nicosia, Linda Noel, Claire Ortalda, Ishmael Reed, Tennessee Reed, Tony R. Rodriguez, Floyd Salas, Nina Serrano, Ntozake Shange, Gary Soto, Al Young, and Maw Shein Win. PEN Oakland is based in Oakland, California.
Sarah Quigley is a New Zealand writer.
Kaya Press is an independent non-profit publisher of writers of the Asian and Pacific Islander diaspora. Founded in 1994 by the postmodern Korean writer Soo Kyung Kim, Kaya Press is housed in the Department of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California.
