Simon Robert Armitage is an English poet, playwright, musician and novelist. He was appointed Poet Laureate on 10 May 2019. He is professor of poetry at the University of Leeds.
James Arlington Wright was an American poet.
John Clare was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th century; he is now often seen as a major 19th-century poet. His biographer Jonathan Bate called Clare "the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self."
Thomas Kinsella was an Irish poet, translator, editor, and publisher. Born outside Dublin, Kinsella attended University College Dublin before entering the civil service. He began publishing poetry in the early 1950s and, around the same time, translated early Irish poetry into English. In the 1960s, he moved to the United States to teach English at universities including Temple University. Kinsella continued to publish steadily until the 2010s.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Archibald Randolph Ammons was an American poet who won the annual National Book Award for Poetry in 1973 and 1993.
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 member 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.
Akua Lezli Hope is an African-American woman artist, poet and writer.
"Sunday Morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium. Published in part in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, then in full in 1923 in Harmonium, it is now in the public domain. The first published version can be read at the Poetry web site: The literary critic Yvor Winters considered "Sunday Morning" "the greatest American poem of the twentieth century and... certainly one of the greatest contemplative poems in English".
Wesley McNair is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored 10 volumes of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, The Unfastening, and Dwellers in the House of the Lord. He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry. In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.
Richard Blanco is an American poet, public speaker, author and civil engineer. He is the fifth poet to read at a United States presidential inauguration, having read the poem "One Today" for Barack Obama's second inauguration. He is the first immigrant, the first Latino, the first openly gay person and at the time the youngest person to be the U.S. inaugural poet.
Geet Chaturvedi is a Hindi poet, short story author, lyricist, screenwriter and novelist. Often regarded as an avant-garde writer, he was awarded the Bharat Bhushan Agrawal Award for poetry in 2007 and Krishna Pratap Award for Fiction in 2014. He lives in Bhopal, India. He is active both as a fiction writer and critic. In 2011, The Indian Express included him in a list of the 'Ten Best Writers' of India. His poems have been translated into 22 languages worldwide. He translated the work of great Spanish Poet Pablo Neruda in Hindi and many others.
Abhay Kumar [Pen Name Abhay K.] is an Indian poet-diplomat and currently serves as the Deputy Director General of Indian Council of Cultural Relations (ICCR), New Delhi. He served as India's 21st Ambassador to Madagascar and Comoros from 2019-2022 He has also served in different diplomatic capacities earlier in Russia, Nepal and Brazil. His published collections of poetry include Stray Poems,Monsoon, The Magic of Madagascar, The Alphabets of Latin America, The Prophecy of Brasilia, The Eight-Eyed Lord of Kathmandu, The Seduction of Delhi among others, while his edited books are CAPITALS, 100 Great Indian Poems, 100 More Great Indian Poems, New Brazilian Poems, The Bloomsbury Anthology of Great Indian Poems, The Bloomsbury Book of Great Indian Love Poems among others. His translation of Kalidasa's Meghaduta and Ritusamhara has received Kalinga Literary Festival 2020-2021 Poetry Book of the Year Award. He recorded his poems at the Library of Congress. His poem 'The Partitioned Land' was taught at the Cornell University in the Fall 2021. His book-length poem 'Monsoon' has been chosen by Harvard University's assistant professor Sarah Dimick to study for a book project on Climate and Literature. His writings cover poetry, art, memoir, global democracy and digital diplomacy. His Earth Anthem has been translated into over 150 languages and was played at the United Nations to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Earth Day. He also wrote an anthem for SAARC spurring search for an official SAARC Anthem. He wrote a 'Moon Anthem' to celebrate the success of India's Moon Mission Chandrayaan-2. He has penned a 'Mars Anthem' to inspire the younger generation to explore our neighbouring red planet. He has penned anthems on all the planets in the Solar System.
Amy Catanzano is an American poet from Boulder, Colorado. She is the author of Multiversal, which won the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry. Michael Palmer describes her work as "a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity, and an open space that is motile and multidimensional." Since 2009 she has published writing on a theory and practice called "quantum poetics," which explores the intersections of poetry and science, particularly physics. Her other interests include cross-genre texts and the literary avant-garde.
"Renascence" is a 1912 poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, credited with introducing her to the wider world, and often considered one of her finest poems.
Eye to the Telescope is a quarterly online journal of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Poetry Association, which publishes speculative poetry, including science-fiction, fantasy, horror, and poetry. It was established in 2011.
Juliane Okot Bitek is a Kenyan-born Ugandan-raised diasporic writer and academic, who lives, studies and works in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is perhaps best-known for her poetry book 100 Days, a reflection on the 100-day 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsi and Hutu people were killed. She has been a contributor to several anthologies, including in 2019 New Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Writing by Women of African Descent, edited by Margaret Busby.
Sasha Dugdale FRSL is a British poet, playwright and translator. She has written five poetry collections and is a translator of Russian literature.
Major poetry related events taking place worldwide during 2020 are outlined below under different sections. This includes poetry books released during the year in different languages, major literary awards, poetry festivals and events, besides anniversaries and deaths of renowned poets etc. Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
F. J. Bergmann is the pen name of Jeannie Bergmann, an American editor and writer of speculative poetry and prose fiction.
