The Center for the Book was founded in 1977 by Daniel J. Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, to promote literacy, libraries, and reading and an understanding of the history and heritage of American literature. The Center for the Book is mainly supported by tax-deductible donations. In 1984, the center began creating affiliated State Centers for the Book. Today, the Center for the Book has an affiliate center in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Campbell McGrath is an American poet. He is the author of nine full-length collections of poetry, including Seven Notebooks, Shannon: A Poem of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys.
Forrest Gander is an American poet, translator, essayist, and novelist. The A.K. Seaver Professor Emeritus of Literary Arts & Comparative Literature at Brown University, Gander won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2019 for Be With and is chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Claudia Emerson was an American poet. She won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her poetry collection Late Wife, and was named the Poet Laureate of Virginia by Governor Tim Kaine in 2008.
Mary Szybist is an American poet. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incarnadine.
The Witter Bynner Poetry Prize was established by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1980 to support the work of a young poet. It is named for poet Witter Bynner. The prize was discontinued in 2003. It is not to be confused with the Witter Bynner Prize for undergraduate excellence in poetry, administered in the 1920s by the Poetry Society of America and Palms magazine.
Jake Adam York was an American poet. He published three books of poetry before his death: Murder Ballads, which won the 2005 Elixir Prize in Poetry; A Murmuration of Starlings, which won the 2008 Colorado Book Award in Poetry; and Persons Unknown, an editor's selection in the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry. A fourth book, Abide, was released posthumously, in 2014. That same year he was also named a posthumous recipient of the Witter Bynner Fellowship by the U.S. Poet Laureate.
Rebecca Wee is an American poet, and associate professor of creative writing.
Joseph Stroud is an American poet.
Alice James Books is an American non-profit poetry press located in Farmington, Maine and affiliated with the University of Maine at Farmington.
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.
Martin Walls is a British-American poet and the first British-born winner of the US Library of Congress Witter Bynner Fellowship.
Monica Youngna Youn is an American poet and lawyer.
Christina Davis is an American poet most notably recognized for two collections of poetry that deal with philosophically questioning common ideas and emotions: An Ethic, published in 2013, and Forth A Raven, published in 2006. In An Ethic, Davis addresses the grief and darkness of a father's death, the challenges of conventional constructs of life on earth and an afterlife somewhere else. This seems to be a theme building on ideas she explored in Forth A Raven. She phases it simply as "There is no this or that world." As one reviewer wrote, "What follows is a rigorous meditation on this premise, a refusal of the notion that one passes from presence into absence, from life into death, as if by bridge or tunnel. Rather, presence and absence, life and death, coexist—and we are daily challenged to reconcile their simultaneity."
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 poetry collections. She currently lives in Pennsylvania.
Atsuro Riley is an American writer.
Louis S. Asekoff is an American poet and professor emeritus. Asekoff often incorporates surrealist imagery and monologue into his poetry, which is concerned with both the imagistic and aural dimensions of language. Asekoff's unconventional use of monologue as a poetic instrument is suggestive of "the inability of words to properly convey meaning" and a vehicle for implicating the readers who become "members of his poetic universe." In 2012, Poet laureate Philip Levine, who selected Asekoff for the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize, described Asekoff as "a true surreal visionary."
Sharon Dolin is a Jewish American poet, translator, and essayist, who is noted for her work in ekphrasis—writing in dialogue with art.
Barbara Goldberg is an American poet, author, translator, and editor from Maryland.
