Lorri Neilsen Glenn is a Canadian poet, ethnographer, essayist and educator. Born in Winnipeg (Treaty One), and raised on the Prairies, she moved to Nova Scotia in 1983. Neilsen Glenn is the author and editor of several books of creative nonfiction, poetry, literacy, ethnography, and essays (scholarly and literary). She was Poet Laureate for Halifax from 2005-2009, the first Métis to hold the position. Her writing focuses on women, arts-based research, and memoir/life stories; her work is known for its hybrid and lyrical approaches. She has published book reviews in national and international journals and newspapers. Neilsen Glenn has received awards for her poetry, creative nonfiction, teaching, scholarship and community work.
Her first book of poetry, All the Perfect Disguises, winner of the Poet's Corner Award, was published in 2003. In 2007, a chapbook, Saved String (Rubicon Press) and the collection Combustion (Brick Books) were published. Neilsen Glenn published 'Lost Gospels' (Brick Books) in 2010. A collection of essays on poetry and loss, Threading Light, was published in 2011 by Hagios Press. The best-selling anthology of poetry and prose about mothers, "Untying the Apron: Daughters Remember Mothers of the 1950s" was published in 2013 by Guernica Editions.
Neilsen Glenn was appointed Poet Laureate for the Halifax Regional Municipality in 2005, [1] [2] a role she held through 2009. [3] She lives in Halifax, and is Professor Emerita at Mount Saint Vincent University. She has served as a mentor in the University of King's College MFA program in creative nonfiction since the program's inception, and has served as a juror for provincial, regional and national writing awards. Neilsen Glenn was President of the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia from 2020 to 2021 and has served several terms on the WFNS board. She was awarded the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2023 for her work in the arts.
Neilsen Glenn' poetry has won or has been shortlisted for the National Magazine Awards, Poets' Corner Award, Short Grain Contest, CBC Literary Awards, Bliss Carman Poetry Award, CV2 Poetry Contest, The Malahat Open Season Award, ReLit Award, among others. Her creative nonfiction has won awards in Grain, Event Magazine, and Prairie Fire. Among her honours are awards for research excellence and innovative teaching (Mount Saint Vincent University) and a Halifax Progress Club Women of Excellence award for her work in the arts.
Neilsen Glenn has taught writing (poetry, creative nonfiction (memoir, the lyric essay, life writing) across Canada, as well as in Ireland, Australia, Chile, and Greece. She has worked extensively with writers in all walks of life since 1983.
Neilsen Glenn's historical memoir in hybrid form, Following the River: Traces of Red River Women, compiles portraits of her Indigenous grandmothers and their contemporaries in 19th Century Rupertsland / Red River, Manitoba and was published by Wolsak and Wynn in Fall 2017. It won The Miramichi Reader's Best Nonfiction Award for 2018 and was short-listed for the Evelyn Richardson Award for Nonfiction. Her 2024 memoir, The Old Moon in Her Arms: Women I Have Known and Been was published by Nimbus Publishing and explores a long life in short prose pieces.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work.
Susanne Antonetta is the pen name of Suzanne Paola, an American poet and author who is most widely known for her book Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir. In 2001, Body Toxic was named by the New York Times as a "Notable Book". An excerpt of "Body Toxic" was published as a stand-alone essay which was recognized as a "Notable Essay" in the 1998 Best American Essays 1998 anthology. She has published several prize-winning collections of poems, including Bardo, a Brittingham Prize in Poetry winner, and the poetry books Petitioner, Glass, and most recently The Lives of The Saints. She currently resides in Washington with her husband and adopted son. She is widely published both in newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as in literary journals including Orion, Brevity, JuxtaProse Literary Magazine, Seneca Review, and Image. She is the current Editor-in-Chief of Bellingham Review.
Dr. Afua Ava Pamela Cooper is a Jamaican-born Canadian historian. As a historian, "she has taught Caribbean cultural studies, history, women's studies and Black studies at Ryerson and York universities, at the University of Toronto and at Dalhousie University." She is also an author and dub poet who as of 2018, has published five volumes of poetry.
Shirley Geok-lin Lim is an American writer of poetry, fiction, and criticism. She was both the first woman and the first Asian person to be awarded Commonwealth Poetry Prize for her first poetry collection, Crossing The Peninsula, which she published in 1980. In 1997, she received the American Book Award for her memoir, Among the White Moon Faces.
Susan (Sue) Goyette is a Canadian poet and novelist.
Rigoberto González is an American writer and book critic. He is an editor and author of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and bilingual children's books, and self-identifies in his writing as a gay Chicano. His most recent project is Abuela in Shadow, Abuela in Light, a literary memoir. His previous memoir What Drowns the Flowers in Your Mouth: A Memoir of Brotherhood was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He is the 2015 recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle, and the 2020 recipient of the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry.
Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, writer and professor, described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker and a quintessential global citizen, she has published 10 prize-winning books, including Life in a Country Album. She is praised for her “diverse, and innovative body of work.”
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.
Tina Chang is an American poet, professor, editor, organizer, and public speaker. In 2010, she was named Poet Laureate of Brooklyn.
Meghan O'Rourke is an American nonfiction writer, poet and critic.
Sarah Gorham is an American poet, essayist, and publisher residing in Prospect, Kentucky.
Honor Moore is an American writer of poetry, creative nonfiction and plays. She currently teaches at The New School in the MFA program for creative nonfiction, where she is a part-time associate teaching professor.
Angela Jackson is an American poet, playwright, and novelist based in Chicago, Illinois. Jackson has been a member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a community that fosters the intellectual development of Black creators, since 1970. She has held teaching positions at Kennedy-King College, Columbia College Chicago, Framingham State University, and Howard University. Jackson has won numerous awards, including the American Book Award, and became the fifth Illinois Poet Laureate in 2020.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Maureen Hynes is a Canadian poet and author. Her debut collection of poetry, Rough Skin, won the League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award for best first book of poetry by a Canadian in 1996.
Tanis MacDonald is a Canadian poet, professor, reviewer, and writer of creative non-fiction. She is Professor at Wilfrid Laurier University with specialities in Canadian literature, women’s literature, and the elegy. She is the author of four books of poetry and one scholarly study, the editor of a selected works, and the founder of the Elegy Roadshow.
Anne Boyer is an American poet and essayist. She is the author of The Romance of Happy Workers (2008), The 2000s (2009), My Common Heart (2011), Garments Against Women (2015), and The Handbook of Disappointed Fate (2018). In 2016, she was a featured blogger at the Poetry Foundation, where she wrote an ongoing series of posts about her diagnosis and treatment for a highly aggressive form of breast cancer, as well as the lives and near deaths of poets. Her essays about illness have appeared in Guernica, The New Inquiry, Fullstop, and more. Boyer teaches at the Kansas City Art Institute with the poets Cyrus Console and Jordan Stempleman. Her poetry has been translated into numerous languages including Icelandic, Spanish, Persian, and Swedish. With Guillermo Parra and Cassandra Gillig, she has translated the work of 20th century Venezuelan poets Victor Valera Mora, Miguel James, and Miyo Vestrini.
Debra Marquart is an American poet and musician from the small town of Napoleon, North Dakota. Since 1992 she has been performing as singer-songwriter with the band The Bone People. After graduating with master's degrees from Moorhead State University and Iowa State University (ISU), she became an English professor at ISU, directing an MFA program in "creative writing and environment". In 2014, she taught writers' workshops in Bakken oil field communities most affected by hydraulic fracking, where "many people ... are despairing – feeling that they have been declared an energy sacrifice zone." She is the Poet Laureate of Iowa since 2019. In 2021 she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, professor, poet and editor. Originally from St. Lucia, Lubrin now lives in Whitby, Ontario, Canada.
The Poet Laureate of Halifax, Nova Scotia is a poet laureate position appointed by the municipal government of the Halifax Regional Municipality, Nova Scotia, Canada. The position was first created in 2001, and has been held by eight poets as of 2020.