Alicia Suskin Ostriker is an American poet and scholar who writes Jewish feminist poetry. She was called "America's most fiercely honest poet" by Progressive. Additionally, she was one of the first women poets in America to write and publish poems discussing the topic of motherhood. In 2015, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2018, she was named the New York State Poet Laureate.
Mary Dorcey is a poet, novelist, short story writer, feminist, LGBTQIA+ activist, and elected member of the Aosdana. She was a writer in residence at Trinity College Dublin from 1995 to 2005 and the Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre of University College Dublin.
Kimiko Hahn is an American poet and distinguished professor in the MFA program of Queens College, CUNY. Her works frequently deal with the reinvention of poetic forms and the intersecting of conflicting identities.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Lorna Gaye Goodison CD is a Jamaican poet, essayist and memoirist, a leading West Indian writer. She is now Professor Emerita, English Language and Literature/Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, previously serving as the Lemuel A. Johnson Professor of English and African and Afroamerican Studies. She was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica in 2017, succeeding Mervyn Morris. In 2019, she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Michelle Carla Cliff was a Jamaican-American author whose notable works included Abeng (1985), No Telephone to Heaven (1987), and Free Enterprise (2004).
Pamela Claire Mordecai is a Jamaican-born poet, novelist, short story writer, scholar and anthologist who lives in Canada.
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.
Daniela Gioseffi is a poet, novelist and performer who won the American Book Award in 1990 for Women on War; International Writings from Antiquity to the Present. She has published 16 books of poetry and prose and won a PEN American Center's Short Fiction prize (1995), and The John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry (2007).
Kamaria S. Muntu is a Black Feminist poet, writer and arts activist. She is also Editor and Founder of Femficatio Literary Magazine.
Lorna Dee Cervantes is an American poet and activist, who is considered one of the greatest figures in Chicano poetry. She has been described by Alurista, as "probably the best Chicana poet active today."
Akasha Gloria Hull is an American poet, educator, writer, and critic whose work in African-American literature and as a Black feminist activist has helped shape Women's Studies. As one of the architects of Black Women's Studies, her scholarship and activism has increased the prestige, legitimacy, respect, and popularity of feminism and African-American studies.
Camille T. Dungy is an American poet and professor.
Shara McCallum is an American poet. She was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. McCallum is the author of four collections of poems, including Madwoman, which won the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the poetry category. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Susan Nalugwa Kiguli is a Ugandan poet and literary scholar. She is an associate professor of literature at Makerere University. Kiguli has been an advocate for creative writing in Africa, including service as a founding member of FEMRITE, a judge for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and an advisory board member for the African Writers Trust. As a poet, Kiguli is best known for her 1998 collection The African Saga, as a scholar, and for her work on oral poetry and performance.
Maria Terrone is an American poet and writer. She is the author of three collections of poetry: Eye to Eye (2014), A Secret Room in Fall (2006) and The Bodies We Were Loaned (2002). She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize and has received the Individual Artist Initiative Award from the Queens Council on the Arts. Her poetry ranges widely in subject, including themes of history, family and contemporary urban environments.
Joanna Clapps Herman is an Italian American writer, editor and poet. She is the author of three books of prose, editor of two anthologies, and her essays and writing have been published in many anthologies and literary journals, including Creative Nonfiction, Inkwell and The Massachusetts Review.
Born in 1961, Diane Raptosh is an American poet of Sicilian/American descent who became the first poet laureate for Boise, Idaho, in 2013, a position that was eliminated after her tenure. A self-described "noted author, poet and educator," “highly active ambassador for poetry,” and “cutting-edge advocate,” Raptosh grew up in Idaho and attended the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho, earning a BA in literature and modern languages. She received an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, returning to teach undergraduates at the College of Idaho in 1990. She is the mother of Keats Conley, whose first book, Guidance from the Gods of Seahorses, was a finalist for the Wandering Aengus award and was published by Green Writers Press in 2021. Both mother and daughter use alliteration, assonance, and puns to craft whimsical poems.
Becky Birtha is an American poet and children's author who lives in the greater Philadelphia area. She is best known for her poetry and short stories depicting African-American and lesbian relationships, often focusing on topics such as interracial relationships, emotional recovery from a breakup, single parenthood and adoption. Her poetry was featured in the acclaimed 1983 anthology of African-American feminist writing Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith and published by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She has won a Lambda Literary award for her poetry. She has been awarded grants from the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to further her literary works. In recent years she has written three children's historical fiction picture books about the African-American experience.
Terri Lynn Jewell was an American author, poet and Black lesbian activist. She was the editor of The Black Woman’s Gumbo Ya-Ya, which received the New York City Library Young Persons Reading Award in 1994.
