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.
Linda Gregerson is an American poet and member of faculty at the University of Michigan. In 2014, she was named as a Chancellor of 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.
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She found inspiration for her work in nature and had a lifelong habit of solitary walks in the wild. Her poetry is characterized by a sincere wonderment and profound connection with the environment, conveyed in unadorned language and simple yet striking imagery. In 2007, she was declared to be the country's best-selling poet.
Susan Wheeler is an educator and award-winning poet whose poems have frequently appeared in anthologies. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University. She has also taught at University of Iowa, NYU, Rutgers, Columbia University and The New School.
Kimberly Johnson is an American poet and Renaissance scholar.
Carol Muske-Dukes is an American poet, novelist, essayist, critic, and professor, and the former poet laureate of California (2008–2011). Her most recent book of poetry, Sparrow, chronicling the love and loss of Muske-Dukes’ late husband, actor David Dukes, was a National Book Award finalist.
Jessica Fisher is an American poet, translator, and critic. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Stephanie Burt is a literary critic and poet. She is the Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University. The New York Times said that she is "one of the most influential poetry critics of [her] generation". She grew up near Washington D.C. She has published various collections of poetry and a large amount of literary criticism and research. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker,The New York Times Book Review, The London Review of Books, and other publications.
Liz Waldner is an American poet.
Rachel Zucker is an American poet born in New York City in 1971. She is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently, SoundMachine. She also co-edited the book Women Poets on Mentorship: Efforts and Affections with fellow poet, Arielle Greenberg.
Mary Jo Bang is an American poet.
Grace Schulman is an American poet. She received the 2016 Frost Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in American Poetry, awarded by the Poetry Society of America. In 2019, she was inducted as member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Amy Quan Barry is a Vietnamese American poet, novelist, and playwright. She is a recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Barry is a Lorraine Hansberry Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Ellen Bass is an American poet and author. She has won three Pushcart Prizes and a Lambda Literary Award for her 2002 book Mules of Love. She co-authored the 1991 child sexual abuse book The Courage to Heal. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2014 and was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2017. Bass has taught poetry at Pacific University and founded poetry programs for prison inmates.
Max Ritvo was an American poet. Milkweed Editions posthumously published a full-length collection of his poems, Four Reincarnations, to positive critical reviews. Milkweed published Letters from Max and a second collection of Ritvo's poems, The Final Voicemails, in September 2018.
Kaveh Akbar is an Iranian-American writer.
Melissa Broder is an American author, essayist and poet. Her work includes the novels The Pisces, Milk Fed, and Death Valley, the poetry collection Last Sext, and the essay collection So Sad Today, as well as the Twitter feed also titled So Sad Today, on which the book is based. Broder has written for The New York Times, Elle, Vice, Vogue Italia, and New York magazine‘s The Cut.
Lee Ann Brown is an American poet and book publisher. She has published several volumes of poetry in addition to being the founder of Tender Buttons Press, a poetry press dedicated to publishing experimental women's poetry.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths is an American poet, novelist, photographer and visual artist, who is the author of five published collections of poems. In Seeing the Body (2020), she "pairs poetry with photography, exploring memory, Black womanhood, the American landscape, and rebirth." It was a nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry.
