Michael Cunningham is an American novelist and screenwriter. He is best known for his 1998 novel The Hours, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award in 1999. Cunningham is a senior lecturer of creative writing at Yale University.
The Iowa Writers' Workshop, at the University of Iowa, is a celebrated graduate-level creative writing program in the United States. The writer Lan Samantha Chang is its director. Graduates earn a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing. It has been cited as the best graduate writing program in the nation, counting among its alumni 17 Pulitzer Prize winners.
William Edgar Stafford was an American poet and pacifist. He was the father of poet and essayist Kim Stafford. He was appointed the twentieth Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1970.
Mark Doty is an American poet and memoirist best known for his work My Alexandria. He was the winner of the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008.
Marie Howe is an American poet. Her most recent poetry collection is Magdalene. In August 2012 she was named the State Poet for New York.
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.
Ross Gay is an American poet and professor. Along with a National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, he is the author of the New York Times best-selling collection of essays, “The Book of Delights.” Gay compiled the book for a year’s worth of daily essays about things that delighted him, especially the small actions of individuals that create community. The Book of Delights, he said, “is about how do we attend to the ways that we make each other possible.”
Michael Ryan has been teaching creative writing and literature at University of California, Irvine since 1990.
John Skoyles is an American poet and writer.
Tony Curtis FRSL is a Welsh poet, who writes in English.
Richard John McCann was a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He lived in Washington, D.C., where he was a longtime professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University.
Reginald Gibbons is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic. He is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University. Gibbons has published numerous books, as well as poems, short stories, essays, reviews and art in journals and magazines, has held Guggenheim Foundation and NEA fellowships in poetry and a research fellowship from the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington D.C. For his novel, Sweetbitter, he won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award; for his book of poems, Maybe It Was So, he won the Carl Sandburg Prize. He has won the Folger Shakespeare Library's O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, and other honors, among them the inclusion of his work in Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. His book Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the 2008 National Book Award for poetry. His other poetry books include Sparrow: New and Selected Poems, Last Lake and Renditions, his eleventh book of poems. His has also published two collections of very short fiction, Five Pears or Peaches and An Orchard in the Street.
Kazim Ali is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and professor. His most recent books are Inquisition and All One's Blue. His honors include an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. His poetry and essays have been featured in many literary journals and magazines including The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Barrow Street, Jubilat, The Iowa Review, West Branch and Massachusetts Review, and in anthologies including The Best American Poetry 2007.
Major Jackson is an American poet and professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of five collections of poetry: The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, finalist for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature-Poetry, and Leaving Saturn, winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Award Circle. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America's Countee Cullen: Collected Poems.
April Ossmann is an American poet, teacher, and editor. She is author of Event Boundaries and Anxious Music, and has had her poems published in many literary journals including Harvard Review,Hayden’s Ferry Review,Puerto del Sol,Seneca Review,Passages North,Mid-American Review, and Colorado Review, and in anthologies including From the Fishouse, and Contemporary Poetry of New England. Her awards include a 2000 Prairie Schooner Reader's Choice Award. Her essays have been published in Poets & Writers, and by the Poetry Foundation.
Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”
Elmaz Abinader is an American author, poet, performer, English professor at Mills College and co-founder of the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA). She is of Lebanese descent. In 2000, she received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award for her poetry collection In the Country of My Dreams....
Pablo Medina is a Cuban American poet and novelist, Professor in the Department of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College and Director of its MFA Program.
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American poet and scholar. Akbar was born in Tehran, Iran, in 1989. He is the author of Pilgrim Bell, published by Graywolf Press, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, published by Alice James Books in the US and Penguin Books in the UK, and the chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, published by Sibling Rivalry Press. In 2014, he founded the poetry interview website Divedapper. He received his MFA from Butler University and his PhD in Creative Writing from Florida State University. He is a faculty member at Purdue University, and on the faculty of the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College and Warren Wilson College. In 2018, he married the American poet Paige Lewis.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is an American poet, editor, essayist, and professor.
