John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
Randall Jarrelljə-REL was an American poet, literary critic, children's author, essayist, and novelist. He was the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress—a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate of the United States.
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from the incredible accomplishments of artists of the Harlem Renaissance.
Dušan Simić, known as Charles Simic, was a Serbian American poet and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
John Joseph Wieners was an American poet.
Clayton Eshleman was an American poet, translator, and editor, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave painting and the Paleolithic imagination. Eshleman's work has been awarded with the National Book Award for Translation, the Landon Translation prize from the Academy of American Poets (twice), a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy, among other awards and honors.
Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades. Novelist Dennis Cooper has described Myles as "one of the savviest and most restless intellects in contemporary literature." The Boston Globe described them as "that rare creature, a rock star of poetry." In 2012, Myles received a Guggenheim Fellowship to complete Afterglow, which gives both a real and fantastic account of a dog's life. Myles uses they/them pronouns.
Rochester Poets is the oldest ongoing literary organization in the upstate New York region. Founded in 1920 as the Rochester, New York, chapter of the Poetry Society of America, the group ceased its affiliation with the Society in the 1980s in order to accept a wider variety of members. At that time, the organization adopted its current name.
Frank Judge was an American poet, publisher, translator, journalist, film critic, teacher, and arts administrator. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including New Directions, The Greenfield Review, New Orleans Review, Bellingham Review, Mediterranean Review, Frogpond, Miller's Pond, HazMat Review, Bitterroot, Invisible City, Blank Tape, Manticora, Brass Bell, Talker of the Town, Troutswirl, Lake Affect, and Writer Online. His translations have appeared in Poesia verde, Rapporti , and Tam-Tam (Italy), and other journals. In 2012, he was among the first poets inducted into the Rochester Poets Walk, a walk of fame in the sidewalk along University Avenue in front of Rochester's Memorial Art Gallery.
Ron Padgett is an American poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, and a member of the New York School. Great Balls of Fire, Padgett's first full-length collection of poems, was published in 1969. He won a 2009 Shelley Memorial Award. In 2018, he won the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America.
Walter E. Butts was an American poet and the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. His book Sunday Evening at the Stardust Café was a finalist for the 2005 Philip Levine Prize in Poetry from the California State University, Fresno, and won the Iowa Source Poetry Book Prize. He has also received a Pushcart Prize nomination.
Ron Kolm is an American poet, writer, editor, archivist, and bookseller based in New York City. Known as "one of the mainstays of the downtown (literary) scene," Kolm is also a founder of the Unbearables, a "ragtag bunch of downtown poet-troublemakers."
Poetry Central was a loose collection of performance poets and audiences in the area of Rochester, N.Y. Performances and readings were presented publicly under its sponsorship from about 1972 to about 1986, originally at the First Unitarian Universalist Church on Clinton Avenue, although there were some long periods when the collective was unable to find a space for presentation of these readings.
Aram Saroyan is an American poet, novelist, biographer, memoirist and playwright, who is especially known for his minimalist poetry, famous examples of which include the one-word poem "lighght" and a one-letter poem comprising a four-legged version of the letter "m".
Joan Larkin is an American poet and playwright. She was active in the small press lesbian feminist publishing explosion in the 1970s, co-founding the independent publishing company Out & Out Books. She is now in her fourth decade of teaching writing. The science fiction writer Donald Moffitt was her brother.
Askia Muhammad Touré is an African-American poet, essayist, political editor, and leading voice of the Black Arts Movement. Toure helped to define a new generation of black consciousness by creating a triumphal identity for the purpose of uplifting the African heritage beyond the oppressive ideas that dominated the time.
Max Wickert is a German-American teacher, poet, translator and publisher. He is Professor of English Emeritus at the University at Buffalo.
Neil Baldwin is a poet, critic, cultural historian, biographer, arts executive, and emeritus professor in the College of the Arts at Montclair State University.
Paul J. Smith was an arts administrator, curator, and artist based in New York. Smith was professionally involved with the art, craft, and design fields since the early 1950s and was closely associated with the twentieth-century studio craft movement in the United States. He joined the staff of the American Craftsmen's Council in 1957, and in 1963 was appointed Director of the Museum of Contemporary Crafts, a position he held for the next 25 years. In September 1987, he assumed the title of director emeritus and continued to work as an independent curator and consultant for museums, arts organizations, and collectors.
Danielle Legros Georges is a Haitian-born American poet, essayist and academic. She is a professor of creative writing in the Lesley University MFA Program in Creative Writing. Her areas of focus include contemporary American poetry, African-American poetry, Caribbean literature and studies, literary translation, and the arts in education. She is the creative editor of sx salon, a digital forum for innovative critical and creative explorations of Caribbean literature.
