PEN America, founded in 1922, and headquartered in New York City, is a nonprofit organization that works to defend and celebrate free expression in the United States and worldwide through the advancement of literature and human rights. PEN America is the largest of the more than 100 PEN centers worldwide that together compose PEN International. PEN America has offices in New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.
Bryan Thao Worra is a Laotian American writer. His books include On The Other Side Of The Eye, Touching Detonations, Winter Ink, Barrow and The Tuk Tuk Diaries: My Dinner With Cluster Bombs. He is the first Laotian American to receive a Fellowship in Literature from the United States government's National Endowment for the Arts. He received the Asian Pacific Leadership Award from the State Council on Asian Pacific Minnesotans for Leadership in the Arts in 2009. He received the Science Fiction Poetry Association Elgin Award for Book of the Year in 2014. He was selected as a Cultural Olympian representing Laos during the 2012 London Summer Olympics. He is the first Asian American president of the international Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, and the first Laotian American member of the professional Horror Writers Association.
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. It was founded in 1967 by R. V. Cassill and George Garrett.
Bao Phi is a Vietnamese-American spoken word artist, writer and community activist living in Minnesota. Bao Phi's collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published in 2011 and, Thousand Star Hotel, was published in 2017 by Coffee House Press. He has written three children’s books published by Capstone Press. First book, A Different Pond received multiple awards, including the Caldecott Award, Charlotte Zolotow Award, the Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books.
Sun Yung Shin is a Korean American poet, writer, consultant, and educator living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The Playwrights' Center is a non-profit theatre organization focused on both supporting playwrights and promoting new plays to production at theaters across the country. It is located in the Seward neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. In October of 2020, the organization announced plans to move to a larger space in St. Paul.
Kirsten Dierking is an American poet from Minnesota. Common topics in her poetry include the healing aspects of nature, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the aftermath and recovery from sexual assault. Some of her more well known works include I Might Have Dreamed This, Sailing Lake Superior and Nuthatch.
Milkweed Editions is an independent nonprofit literary publisher that originated from the Milkweed Chronicle literary and arts journal established in Minneapolis in 1979. The journal ceased and the business transitioned to publishing. 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.
Louis Burke Jenkins was an American prose poet. He lived in Duluth, Minnesota, with his wife Ann for over four decades, beginning in 1971. He also lived in Bloomington, Minnesota. His poems have been published in a number of literary magazines and anthologies. Jenkins was a guest on A Prairie Home Companion numerous times and was also featured on The Writer's Almanac and on the Northern Lights TV Series.
Minnesota Center for Book Arts (MCBA) is the largest and most comprehensive independent nonprofit book arts center in the United States. Located in Minneapolis, Minnesota, MCBA is a nationally recognized leader in the celebration and preservation of traditional crafts, including hand papermaking, letterpress printing and hand bookbinding, as well as the use of these traditional techniques by contemporary artists in creating new artists' books and artwork.
Terry Wolverton is an American novelist, memoirist, poet, and editor. Her book Insurgent Muse: Life and Art at the Woman's Building, a memoir published in 2002 by City Lights Books, was named one of the "Best Books of 2002" by the Los Angeles Times, and was the winner of the 2003 Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her novel-in-poems Embers was a finalist for the PEN USA Litfest Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award.
Poets & Writers, Inc. is one of the largest nonprofit literary organizations in the United States serving poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers. The organization publishes a bi-monthly magazine called Poets & Writers Magazine, and is headquartered in New York City.
David Mura is an American author, poet, novelist, playwright, critic and performance artist whose writings explore the themes of race, identity and history. In 2018, Mura has published a book on creative writing, A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity & Narrative Craft in Writing, in which he argues for a more inclusive and expansive definition of craft.
Patricia Hampl is an American memoirist, writer, lecturer, and educator. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota at Minneapolis and is one of the founding members of the Loft Literary Center.
Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay is a Minnesota-based Lao American spoken word poet, playwright, and community activist. She was born in 1981 in a refugee camp in Nong Khai, Thailand. In 2020, she received a National Playwright Residency Program grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
PEN Center USA was a branch of PEN, an international literary and human rights organization. It was one of two PEN International Centers in the United States, the other being the PEN America in New York City. On March 1, 2018, PEN Center USA unified under the PEN America umbrella as the PEN America Los Angeles office. PEN Center USA was founded in 1943 and incorporated as a nonprofit association in 1981. Much of PEN Center USA's programming continues out of the PEN America Los Angeles office, including the Emerging Voices Fellowship, PEN In The Community writing residencies and guest speaker program, and PEN Presents conversation series.
Aspen Summer Words (ASW) is a festival of words, stories and ideas held each June in Aspen, Colorado. It is the flagship program of Aspen Words, a literary arts non-profit and program of the Aspen Institute. Until 2015, Aspen Words was known as the Aspen Writers' Foundation.
Hieu Minh Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American poet based in Minneapolis. A graduate of the Warren Wilson College MFA Program, his writing has appeared in PBS NewsHour, POETRY magazine, BuzzFeed, Poetry London, Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Muzzle Magazine, The Paris-American, the Indiana Review, and more. He identifies as queer.
John R. Mitchell was a poet and a professor of English at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He taught at the college for 36 years, dying at age 66. His work was featured in anthologies, such as 25 Minnesota Writers, alongside the work of Jon Hassler, Patricia Hampl, and Carol Bly.
Blythe Baird is an American poet, author, and actress from Chicago, Illinois. Her writing covers themes such as mental illness, eating disorders, sexuality, feminism, and trauma.
