Dahlia Ravikovitch was an Israeli poet, translator and recipient of the Israel Prize for Poetry in 1998.
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.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, professor, translator, and human rights advocate. She has received many awards for her literary work.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
Sonia Sanchez is an American poet, writer, and professor. She was a leading figure in the Black Arts Movement and has written over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories, critical essays, plays, and children's books. In the 1960s, Sanchez released poems in periodicals targeted towards African-American audiences, and published her debut collection, Homecoming, in 1969. In 1993, she received Pew Fellowship in the Arts, and in 2001 was awarded the Robert Frost Medal for her contributions to the canon of American poetry. She has been influential to other African-American poets, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Julia Mae Spicher Kasdorf is an American poet.
Grace Bauer is an American poet. She lives in Nebraska, grew up in Pennsylvania and has also lived in New Orleans, Montana, Virginia and Massachusetts.
Bai Tamia Johnson Moore, commonly known by his pen name Bai T. Moore, was a Liberian poet, novelist, folklorist and essayist. He held various cultural, educational and tourism posts both for the Liberian government and for UNESCO. He was the founder of Liberia's National Cultural Center. He is best known for his novella Murder in the Cassava Patch (1968), the tale of a crime passionnel in a traditional Liberian setting. It became such a classic in Liberian literature that it is still taught in high schools.
Daniela Gioseffi is an American 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.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is an American poet and editor. Her debut book, Dog Road Woman, won the American Book Award and was the first finalist of the Paterson Poetry Prize and Diane DeCora Award. Since then, she has written five more books and edited eight anthologies. She is known for addressing issues of culture, prejudice, rights, the environment, peace, violence, abuse, and labor in her poetry and other creative works.
Mark Halliday is an American poet, professor and critic. He is author of seven collections of poetry, most recently "Losers Dream On", "Thresherphobe" and Keep This Forever. His honors include serving as the 1994 poet in residence at The Frost Place, inclusion in several annual editions of The Best American Poetry series and of the Pushcart Prize anthology, receiving a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, and winning the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Robin Becker is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor. She was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection. Her All-American Girl, won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. Becker earned a B.A. in 1973 and an M.A. from Boston University in 1976. She lives in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania and spends her summers in southern New Hampshire.
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.
Leymah Roberta Gbowee is a Liberian peace activist responsible for leading a women's nonviolent peace movement, Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace that helped bring an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Her efforts to end the war, along with her collaborator Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, helped usher in a period of peace and enabled a free election in 2005 that Sirleaf won. Gbowee and Sirleaf, along with Tawakkul Karman, were awarded the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
Althea Romeo-Mark is an Antiguan-born writer and educator, who has travelled throughout the world and now makes her home in Switzerland. In addition to having published five volumes of poetry, she has been an invited speaker at international poetry festivals in Medellín, Colombia and Kisii, Kenya. She was one of the founders of the Liberian Association of Writers. In 2009, she was awarded the Marguerite Cobb McKay Prize by The Caribbean Writer.
Martha Modena Vertreace-Doody is an American poet, and author of short stories and articles on literature and teaching. She is currently Distinguished Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kennedy-King College in Chicago.
Wayétu Moore is a Liberian-American author and social entrepreneur. Her debut novel, She Would Be King, was published by Graywolf Press in September 2018, and was named a best book of 2018 by Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Entertainment Weekly & BuzzFeed. The novel was positively reviewed by Time Magazine, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. Moore has published work in The New York Times, The Paris Review, Guernica Magazine, The Atlantic, and other journals. She was awarded a Lannan Literary Fellowship for fiction in 2019. Moore's memoir, The Dragons, The Giant, The Women, was named a 2020 New York Times Notable Book, a Time Magazine 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2020, and a Publishers Weekly Top 5 Nonfiction Books of 2020. In 2011, Moore founded a publishing house and nonprofit organization, One Moore Book, which publishes and distributes books intended for children in countries underrepresented in literature.
Trapeta B. Mayson is a Liberian-born poet, teacher, social worker, and non-profit administrator residing in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US. Her writing primarily centers on the experiences of immigrants to the United States, the struggles of people dealing with conflict in Liberia, and the daily lives of average people, especially women and girls. She received a Master of Social Work from Bryn Mawr College and an MBA from Villanova University. She was selected as the fifth Poet Laureate of Philadelphia in 2019.
