Richard Purdy Wilbur was an American poet and literary translator. One of the foremost poets of his generation, Wilbur's work, often employing rhyme, and composed primarily in traditional forms, was marked by its wit, charm, and gentlemanly elegance. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987 and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice, in 1957 and 1989.
Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Award winner in 1970, and the recipient of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1976. Dwight Garner argued in 2018 that she was perhaps "the most purely gifted poet of the 20th century".
John Lawrence Ashbery was an American poet and art critic.
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the Mayflower. His family, past and present, were important subjects in his poetry. Growing up in Boston also informed his poems, which were frequently set in Boston and the New England region. The literary scholar Paula Hayes believes that Lowell mythologized New England, particularly in his early work.
Mark Strand was a Canadian-born American poet, essayist and translator. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1990 and received the Wallace Stevens Award in 2004. Strand was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University from 2005 until his death in 2014.
Campbell John McGrath is an American poet. He is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry, including Seven Notebooks, Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, for which McGrath was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Edward M. Hirsch is an American poet and critic who wrote a national bestseller about reading poetry. He has published nine books of poems, including The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work, and Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy for his son that The New Yorker called "a masterpiece of sorrow." He has also published five prose books about poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in New York City.
Helen Hennessy Vendler is an American literary critic and is Porter University Professor Emerita at Harvard University.
Ruth Stone was an American poet.
'Skunk Hour' is one of Robert Lowell's most frequently anthologized poems. It was published in his groundbreaking book of poems, Life Studies, and is regarded as a key early example of Confessional poetry.
Peter Balakian is an Armenian-American poet, prose writer, and scholar. He is the author of many books including the 2016 Pulitzer prize winning book of poems Ozone Journal, the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand award in 1998 and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America's Response, winner of the 2005 Raphael Lemkin Prize and a New York Times best seller. Both prose books were New York Times Notable Books. Since 1980 he has taught at Colgate University where he is the Donald M and Constance H Rebar Professor of the Humanities in the department of English and Director of Creative Writing.
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."
Vijay Seshadri is an American poet, essayist and literary critic based in Brooklyn.
Tom Sleigh is an American poet, dramatist, essayist and academic, who lives in New York City. He has published nine books of original poetry, one full-length translation of Euripides' Herakles and two books of essays. His most recent books are House of Fact, House of Ruin: Poems and The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing In an Age of Refugees (essays). At least five of his plays have been produced. He has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, worth $100,000, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. He currently serves as director of Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing. He is the recipient of the Anna-Maria Kellen Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Dan Chiasson is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
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.
Maria Saskia Hamilton was an American poet, editor, and professor and university administrator at Barnard College. She published four collections of poetry, with a fifth collection, All Souls, set to be posthumously published in September 2023. Her academic focus was largely on the American poet Robert Lowell; she edited several collections of the writings and personal correspondence of Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Elizabeth Bishop. Additionally, she served as the director of literary programs at the Lannan Foundation, as the Vice Provost for Academic Programs and Curriculum at Barnard College, and as an editor at The Paris Review and Literary Imagination.
Michael Benedikt was an American poet, editor, and literary critic.
Srikanth Reddy is an Indian American writer, scholar, and author of three full-length volumes of poetry. His awards include a 2013 NEA fellowship, a 2013 Creative Capital Award, and a 2018 Guggenheim fellowship. Reddy delivered the Bagley Wright Lectures in Poetry in fall 2015, and served as a judge for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
