The Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) is a nonprofit literary organization that provides support, advocacy, resources, and community to nearly 50,000 writers, 500 college and university creative writing programs, and 125 writers' conferences and centers. Founded in 1967 by R. V. Cassill and George Garrett.
Robert Polito is a poet, biographer, essayist, critic, educator, curator, and arts administrator. He received the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography in 1995 for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York City, he was President of the Poetry Foundation from 2013–2015, before returning to the New School as a Professor of Writing.
Thomas Sayers Ellis is a poet, photographer and band leader. He previously taught as an associate professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Bennington College in Vermont, and also at Sarah Lawrence College until 2012.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published four collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for her 2011 volume Life on Mars Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Ander Monson is an American novelist, poet, and nonfiction writer.
Milkweed Editions is an independent, nonprofit literary publisher founded in Minneapolis in 1980. It releases eighteen to twenty new books each year in the genres of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Milkweed Editions annually awards three prizes for poetry: the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry, the Jake Adam York Prize, and they are a partner publisher for the National Poetry Series. In 2016, Milkweed Editions opened an independent bookstore focused on the sale of literary works.
Sarabande Books is an American not-for-profit literary press founded in 1994. It is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, with an office in New York City. Sarabande publishes contemporary poetry and nonfiction. Sarabande is an influential and nationally recognized literary press whose books have earned reviews in the New York Times.
Eula Biss is an American non-fiction writer who is the author of four books.
Carmen Giménez Smith is an American poet, writer and editor.
Cave Canem Foundation is an American 501(c)(3) organization founded in 1996 by poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady to remedy the underrepresentation and isolation of African-American poets in Master of Fine Arts (MFA) programs and writing workshops across the United States. It is based in Brooklyn, New York.
Gregory Pardlo is an American poet, writer, and professor. His book Digest won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His poems, reviews, and translations have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Callaloo, Poet Lore, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and on National Public Radio. His work has been praised for its “language simultaneously urban and highbrow… snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.”
Coffee House Press is a nonprofit independent press based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The press’s goal is to "produce books that celebrate imagination, innovation in the craft of writing, and the many authentic voices of the American experience." It is widely considered to be among the top five independent presses in the United States and has been called a national treasure. The press publishes literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.
Heid Ellen Erdrich is an Ojibwe writer and editor of poetry, short stories, and nonfiction, and maker of poem films.
Gary Jackson is an American educator and poet. He had received a Cave Canem and Bread Loaf fellowship and was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize in 2009.
Khadija Abdalla Bajaber is a Mombasa-born poet and novelist with a degree in journalism whose manuscript was selected as the first winner of the Graywolf Press Africa Prize, which is awarded for a first novel manuscript by an African author primarily residing in Africa.
Donika Kelly is an Assistant Professor of English specializing in poetry writing and gender studies in contemporary American literature, at the University of Iowa. She is the author of the chapbook Aviarium, published with fivehundred places in 2017, and the full-length collections Bestiary and The Renunciations forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May of 2021.
Noemi Press is an independent, nonprofit, 501(c)(3) publisher. Noemi Press was founded in 2002 to publish and promote the work of emerging and established writers, with a special emphasis on writers traditionally underrepresented by larger publishers, including women, people of color, and LGBTQIAP writers.
Emily Skaja is an American poet. She is the author of Brute, winner of the Walt Whitman award of the Academy of American Poets in 2018.
Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist.
