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.
Robert L. Hass is an American poet. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He won the 2007 National Book Award and shared the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for the collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997–2005. In 2014 he was awarded the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets.
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.
Lan Samantha Chang is an American writer of novels and short stories. She is the author of The Family Chao and Hunger. For her fiction, which explores Chinese American experiences, she is a recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Berlin Prize, the PEN/Open Book Award and the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award.
Ronald Sukenick was an American writer and literary theorist.
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.
James Hearst, born James Schell Hearst, was an American poet, philosopher, and university professor, who was sometimes described as the "Robert Frost of the Midwest".
John Bensko is an American poet who taught in the MFA program at the University of Memphis, along with his wife, the fiction writer Cary Holladay.
Dionisio D. Martinez, is a Cuban-born poet who grew up speaking Spanish, raised first in Spain, then in the United States.
Anne Pierson Wiese, is an American poet.
Robley Wilson was an American poet, writer, and editor. Educated at Bowdoin College, B.A., 1957; Indiana University, graduate study, 1960; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1968. Married Charlotte Lehon, August 20, 1955 ; married fiction writer Susan Hubbard in 1995; two sons: Stephen, Philip, two stepdaughters: Kate and Clare, and two grandchildren, Sam and Kate.
Nancy Vieira Couto is an American poet. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and the National Endowment for the Arts for Poetry award.
David Groff is an American poet, writer, and independent editor.
Lola Haskins is an American poet.
Jericho Brown is an American poet and writer. Born and raised in Shreveport, Louisiana, Brown has worked as an educator at institutions such as University of Houston, University of San Diego, and Emory University. His poems have been published in The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, and The New Yorker, among others. He released his first book of prose and poetry, Please, in 2008. His second book, The New Testament, was released in 2014. His 2019 collection of poems, The Tradition, garnered widespread critical acclaim.
Susan Hutton is an American poet.
Speer Morgan is an American novelist, short story writer, and editor.
Greg Hrbek is an American fiction author and educator.
John Robert Keeble is a Canadian-American author. Primarily a novelist, he is best known for his novel Yellowfish (1980) and Broken Ground (1987). He has also written short stories and nonfiction. In 2019, he won an O. Henry Award for his short story, "Synchronicity", which was published in Harper's Magazine.
John Gery is an American poet, critic, collaborative translator, and editor. He has published seven books of poetry, a critical work on the treatment of nuclear annihilation in American poetry, two co-edited volumes of literary criticism and two co-edited anthologies of contemporary poetry, as well as, a co-authored biography and guidebook on Ezra Pound's Venice.
