Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
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.
Lia Purpura is an American poet, writer and educator. She is the author of four collections of poems, four collections of essays and one collection of translations. Her poems and essays appear in AGNI, The Antioch Review, DoubleTake, FIELD, The Georgia Review, The Iowa Review, Orion Magazine, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Ploughshares. Southern Review, and many other magazines.
Mary Szybist is an American poet. She won the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Incarnadine.
Cyrus Cassells is an American poet and professor.
Stuart Dischell is an American poet and Professor in English Creative Writing in the Master of Fine Arts Program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Terese Svoboda is an American poet, novelist, memoirist, short story writer, librettist, translator, biographer, critic and videomaker.
Wesley McNair is an American poet, writer, editor, and professor. He has authored 10 volumes of poetry, most recently, Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, The Unfastening, and Dwellers in the House of the Lord. He has also written three books of prose, including a memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry. In addition, he has edited several anthologies of Maine writing, and served as a guest editor in poetry for the 2010 Pushcart Prize Annual.
Alison Hawthorne Deming is an American poet, essayist and teacher, former Agnese Nelms Haury Chair in Environment and Social Justice and currently Regents Professor Emerita in Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. She received a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship.
April Anne Bernard is an American writer, poet, and novelist.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar is a Belgian-American poet, translator, professor, and former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. She is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently, These Many Rooms. Her collection, Small Gods of Grief, won the 2001 Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry. A New Hunger, was an American Library Association Notable Book in 2008. She is the author of Artémis, a collection of French poems, published in Belgium. Her chapbook Rooms Remembered appeared from Sungold Editions in 2018.
Matthew Dickman is an American poet. He and his identical twin brother, Michael Dickman, also a poet, were born in Portland, Oregon.
Carolyne Wright is an American poet.
Beth Bachmann is an American poet.
Christopher Bakken an American poet, translator, chef, travel writer, and professor at Allegheny College.
Kelly Cherry was an American 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.
Beth Ann Fennelly is an American poet and prose writer and was the Poet Laureate of Mississippi.
Rosemary Catacalos was the 2013–2014 Texas Poet Laureate. A writer of Mexican and Greek ancestry, Catacalos was the first Latina named to the State post.
Emmy Pérez is a Chicanx poet and writer originally from Santa Ana, California, United States. She was a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 2017. She has lived in the borderlands of Texas since 2000, where she has taught creative writing in college and MFA programs, as well as in detention facilities and as part of social justice projects. Her latest collective is Poets Against the Border Wall. She was also a fellow (2010–12) and organizing committee member of CantoMundo (2018–19) and is a long-time member of Macondo Writers Workshop.
David Mercier Parsons was born on April 16, 1943, in Villa Rica, Georgia, and is an American author, poet, and educator. Raised in Austin, Texas, he was named by the Texas State Legislature in 2011 to a one-year term as Poet Laureate of Texas, commemorated by the publication of David M. Parsons New & Selected Poems by the Texas Christian University Press. His most recent book is the poetry collection Reaching for Longer Water. Parsons holds a BBA from Texas State University and an MA from the University of Houston’s Creative Writing Program where he studied poetry and literature with Edward Hirsch, Stanley Plumly, Richard Howard, Robert Pinsky and Howard Moss.
