Karen Louise Erdrich is an American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.
Sarah Kane was an English playwright, screenwriter and theatre director. She is known for her plays that deal with themes of redemptive love, sexual desire, pain, torture—both physical and psychological—and death. They are characterised by a poetic intensity, pared-down language, exploration of theatrical form and, in her earlier work, the use of extreme and violent stage action.
Eavan Aisling Boland was an Irish poet, author, and professor. She was a professor at Stanford University, where she had taught from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland's poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
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.
Amrita Pritam was an Indian novelist, essayist and poet, who wrote in Punjabi and Hindi. A prominent figure in Punjabi literature, she is the recipient of the 1956 Sahitya Akademi Award. Her body of work comprised over 100 books of poetry, fiction, biographies, essays, a collection of Punjabi folk songs and an autobiography that were all translated into several Indian and foreign languages.
Sharon Olds is an American poet. Olds won the first San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980, the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. She teaches creative writing at New York University and is a previous director of the Creative Writing Program at NYU.
Patricia Fargnoli was an American poet and psychotherapist. She was the New Hampshire Poet Laureate from December 2006 to March 2009.
Judith Ortiz Cofer was a Puerto Rican author. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning work spans a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and young-adult fiction. Ortiz Cofer was the Emeritus Regents' and Franklin Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia, where she taught undergraduate and graduate creative writing workshops for 26 years. In 2010, Ortiz Cofer was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame, and in 2013, she won the University's 2014 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land.
Sia Figiel is an American contemporary Samoan novelist, poet, and painter.
Meena Alexander was an Indian American poet, scholar, and writer. Born in Allahabad, India, and raised in India and Sudan, Alexander later lived and worked in New York City, where she was a Distinguished Professor of English at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Randall Mann is an American poet.
Suzanne Gardinier is an American poet. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Kundiman is a nonprofit organization dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature. The organization offers an annual writing retreat, readings, workshops, a mentorship program, and a poetry prize, and aims to provide "a safe yet rigorous space where Asian American poets can explore, through art, the unique challenges that face the new and ever changing diaspora." Kundiman was co-founded in 2004 by Asian American poets Sarah Gambito and Joseph O. Legaspi, and has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the Poetry Foundation, the New York Community Trust, Philippine American Writers, PAWA, and individuals.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.
Katie Farris is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, academic and editor.
Banira Giri was a Nepalese poet and novelist, best known for her novels such as Karagar, Nirbandha and her poetry collections such as Jiwan: Thayamaru, Euta Jiundo Jung Bahadur, etc. In 1999, she received the Sajha Puraskar for her novel, Shabdatit Shantanu, becoming the first woman to win the prize.
Jennifer Chang is an American poet and scholar.
Gwen Benaway is Canadian poet and activist. She is a PhD candidate in the Women & Gender Studies Institute at the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto. Benaway has also written non-fiction for The Globe and Mail and Maclean's.
Cheryl Allison Boyce-Taylor is a Trinidadian poet, teaching artist, and theatre performer who lives in Brooklyn, New York. Boyce-Taylor has published several full-length poetry monographs including early works As A Woman I Laugh and Cry: Poems, Birthsounds, Rhythms and Other Contractions; five collections of poetry; and an award-winning verse memoir dedicated to her son.
