Adrienne Cecile Rich was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse". Rich criticized rigid forms of feminist identities, and valorized what she coined the "lesbian continuum", which is a female continuum of solidarity and creativity that impacts and fills women's lives.
Annie Dillard is an American author, best known for her narrative prose in both fiction and non-fiction. She has published works of poetry, essays, prose, and literary criticism, as well as two novels and one memoir. Her 1974 work Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. From 1980, Dillard taught for 21 years in the English department of Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut.
Creative nonfiction is a genre of writing that uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives. Creative nonfiction contrasts with other nonfiction, such as academic or technical writing or journalism, which are also rooted in accurate fact though not written to entertain on prose style. Many writers view creative nonfiction as overlapping with the essay.
Priscilla Denise Levertov was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
Tess Gallagher is an American poet, essayist, and short story writer. Among her many honors were a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts award, Maxine Cushing Gray Foundation Award.
Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues from a left-leaning perspective, including abortion, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty.
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild. It is characterised by a sincere wonderment at the impact of natural imagery, conveyed in unadorned language. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Lucille Clifton was an American poet, writer, and educator from Buffalo, New York. From 1979 to 1985 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Clifton was a finalist twice for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Hayden Carruth was an American poet, literary critic and anthologist. He taught at Syracuse University.
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.
Julia Mae Spicher Kasdorf is an American poet.
Zhai Yongming is a Chinese poet, essayist and screenwriter from Chengdu, in the southwest Sichuan Province. Born during the Maoist era, Zhai was forcibly sent away for two years to do manual labor in the countryside as part of the Cultural Revolution, eventually returning to Chengdu to work as a poet. Her poems began getting published in 1981, but her rise to critical acclaim came with the release of her poem cycle 'Woman', featuring one of the first instances of a socially-aware woman expressing her societal perspectives in Chinese literature. She has been marked by scholars as a foundational Chinese feminist poet, being the first to explore elements of gender and feminine identity beyond the scope of the male-oriented gaze; 'Woman' has even been appointed as the starting point for the subsequent 'Black Tornado' era of confessional Chinese women writers. Among her most notable works include poetry works are 'Jing'an Village (1985),' 'Plain Songs in the Dark Night (1997),' 'Collected Poems by Zhai Yongming (1994),' 'The Most Tactful Words (2009),' and 'Roaming the Fuchun Mountains with Huang Gongwang (2015).'
Valentine Ackland was an English poet, and life partner of novelist Sylvia Townsend Warner. Their relationship was strained by Ackland’s infidelities and alcoholism, but survived for nearly forty years. Both were closely involved with communism, remaining under continued scrutiny by the authorities. Ackland’s poetry did not become widely noticed until after her death, when her reflective, confessional style was more in vogue, and left-wing writers of the 1930s had become a popular topic.
Janice Eidus, is an American writer living in New York City. Her novels include The War of the Rosens, The Last Jewish Virgin and Urban Bliss. She has twice won the O.Henry Prize for Fiction, as well as a Pushcart Prize. Other awards include the Redbook Short Fiction Contest, The Acker Award for Achievement, an Independent Book Award, and The Firecracker Award given by the Community of Literary Magazines & Presses.
Leza Lowitz is an American expatriate writer residing in Tokyo, Japan. She has written, edited and co-translated over twenty books, many about Japan, its relationship with the US, on the changing role of Japanese women in literature, art and society, and about the lasting effect of the Second World War and the desire for reconciliation in contemporary Japanese society.
Brenda Hillman is an American poet and translator. She is the author of ten collections of poetry: White Dress, Fortress, Death Tractates, Bright Existence, Loose Sugar, Cascadia, Pieces of Air in the Epic, Practical Water, for which she won the LA Times Book Award for Poetry, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, which received the 2014 Griffin Poetry Prize and the Northern California Book Award for Poetry, and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award for Poetry. Among the awards Hillman has received are the 2012 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the 2005 William Carlos Williams Prize for poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. A professor of Creative Writing, she holds the Olivia Filippi Chair in Poetry at Saint Mary's College of California, in Moraga, California. Hillman is also involved in non-violent activism as a member of the Code Pink Working Group in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2016, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian American poet, translator, editor, and teacher. She received her BA from Oberlin College and her MFA from the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She is author of six poetry collections including Convertible Night, Flurry of Stones for which she received a Sheila Motton Book Award, and Silvertone (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2013) for which she was named Ohio Poetry Day Association's 2014 Co-Poet of the Year. Her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted in 2009 as a Carnegie Mellon University Classic Contemporary. Her sixth, Bad Harvest, was published in fall of 2018 and was named a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry. Her co-translations with Ali Kinsella from the Ukrainian of selected poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets, "Eccentric Days of Hope and Sorrow" was published by Lost Horse Press in fall, 2021 and short-listed for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize the ALTA National Translation Award, and awarded the 2022 AAUS Translation Prize.
Kelly Cherry was a novelist, poet, essayist, professor, and literary critic and a former Poet Laureate of Virginia (2010–2012). She was the author of more than 30 books, including the poetry collections Songs for a Soviet Composer, Death and Transfiguration, Rising Venus and The Retreats of Thought. Her short fiction was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and New Stories from the South, and won a number of awards.
Anna Jackson is a New Zealand poet, fiction and non-fiction writer and an academic.
Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and a professor of English and director of the creative writing at Denison University, She has published three original poetry collections and co-edited a collection of lyric poems.
