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.
Eloise Klein Healy is an American poet. She has published five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her collection of poems, Passing, was a finalist for the 2003 Lambda Literary Awards in Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award from The Publishing Triangle. Healy has also received the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and has received six Pushcart Prize nominations.
Lloyd Schwartz is an American poet, and the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He was the classical music editor of The Boston Phoenix, a publication that is now defunct. He is Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts (2019-2021), Senior Music Editor at New York Arts and the Berkshire Review for the Arts, and a regular commentator for NPR's Fresh Air.
Luisa A. Igloria is a Filipina American poet and author of various award-winning collections, and is the most recent Poet Laureate of Virginia (2020-2022).
Elizabeth "Betsy" Sholl is an American poet who was poet laureate of Maine from 2006 to 2011 and has authored nine collections of poetry. Sholl has received several poetry awards, including the 1991 AWP Award, and the 2015 Maine Literary Award, as well as receiving fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Arts Commission.
Denise Low is an American poet, honored as the second Kansas poet laureate (2007–2009). A professor at Haskell Indian Nations University, Low taught literature, creative writing and American Indian studies courses at the university.
Jennifer Militello is an American poet and professor. She is author of the award-winning memoir Knock Wood which appeared from Dzanc Books in 2019, and five collections of poetry including The Pact, Tupelo Press, 2021. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Flinch of Song, was published in 2009 by Tupelo Press, and won the Tupelo Press/Crazyhorse First Book Prize.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, These Many Rooms. Her collection, Small Gods of Grief, won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium. Her chapbook Rooms Remembered appeared from Sungold Editions in 2018.
Adrian Blevins is an American poet. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Appalachians Run Amok, winner of the 2016 Wilder Prize. Her other full-length poetry collections are Status Pending, Live from the Homesick Jamboree and The Brass Girl Brouhaha. With Karen McElmurray, Blevins co-edited Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean: Meditations on the Forbidden from Contemporary Appalachia, a collection of essays of new and emerging Appalachian poets, fiction writers, and nonfiction writers. Her chapbooks are Bloodline and The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, which won the first of Bright Hill Press's chapbook contests..
Samiya A. Bashir is a queer American artist, poet, and author. Much of Bashir's poetry explores the intersections of culture, change, and identity through the lens of race, gender, the body and sexuality. She is currently the June Jordan visiting professor at Columbia University of New York. Bashir is the first black woman recipient of the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature. She was also the third black woman to serve as tenured professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.
Gayle Brandeis is the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), Dictionary Poems, the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, Self Storage (Ballantine) and Delta Girls (Ballantine), and her first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Holt). She has two books forthcoming in 2017, a collection of poetry, The Selfless Bliss of the Body, and a memoir, The Art of Misdiagnosis
William Waters (1843–1917) was an American architect who designed numerous buildings in Wisconsin that eventually were listed on the National Register of Historic Places. He was responsible for designing much of historic Oshkosh, Wisconsin. He was also responsible for designing the Wisconsin building for the Columbian Exposition. Waters died in 1917 and is buried at Riverside Cemetery in Oshkosh. After his death, Oshkosh honored him by naming the intersection of Washington Avenue and State Street as the "William Waters Plaza".
Bruce Dethlefsen is an American poet and teacher of poetry. He was Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2011–2012, having been appointed by Governor James Doyle. He also served as secretary for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets for six years.
Kelly Cherry was an American novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Silvia Curbelo is a Cuban-born, American poet and writer.
Kathleen Flenniken is an American writer, poet, editor, and educator. In 2012, she was named the Poet Laureate of Washington. She has been honored with a 2012 Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships with the Artist Trust, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her collection of poetry titled Famous, received the 2005 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her following work, Plume, was honored with the 2013 Washington State Book Award.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Rosemary Catacalos was the 2013–2014 Texas Poet Laureate. A writer of Mexican and Greek ancestry, Catacalos was the first Latina named to the State post.
Valerie Macon is an American civil servant and poet. She was named by Governor Pat McCrory as the eighth North Carolina Poet Laureate, a position she was set to hold from 2014 to 2016. Appointed on July 11, 2014, she resigned on July 17, 2014 amid controversy over the appointment. Macon continues to work for the state's Department of Health and Human Services as a Disability Examiner. Her two books of poetry prior to her appointment to North Carolina poet laureate were self-published in 2011 and 2014.
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.
