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.
Joan Murray is an American poet, writer, playwright and editor. She is best known for her narrative poems, particularly her book-length novel-in-verse, Queen of the Mist; her collection Looking for the Parade which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition, and her New and Selected Poems volume, Swimming for the Ark, which was chosen as the inaugural volume in White Pine Press's Distinguished Poets Series.
Daniel Tobin is an American poet, scholar, editor, and essayist, and the winner of numerous awards for his work, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Massachusetts Books Award, and the Julia Ward Howe Award, among many others.
Jim Simmerman was a poet and editor from the United States.
Marianne Boruch is an American poet whose published work also includes essays on poetry, sometimes in relation to other fields and a memoir about a hitchhiking trip taken in 1971.
Spencer Reece is a poet and presbyter who lives in Madrid, Spain. He graduated from Wesleyan University (1985). Reece received his M.A. from the University of York (UK), his M.T.S. from the Harvard Divinity School, and a M.Div. from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale Divinity School. At Wesleyan, Spencer took a class in writing verse with Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard, whom he describes as "an early encourager," along with James Merrill, the Stonington poet with whom Spencer corresponded.
Pattiann Rogers is an American poet, and a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2018, she was awarded a special John Burroughs Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Nature Poetry.
Brigit Pegeen Kelly was an American poet and teacher. Born in Palo Alto, California, Kelly grew up in southern Indiana and lived much of her adult life in central Illinois. An intensely private woman, little is known about her life.
Reetika Gina Vazirani was an Indian/American immigrant poet and educator.
Martha Collins is a poet, translator, and editor. She has published ten books of poetry, including Night Unto Night ,Admit One: An American Scrapbook, Day Unto Day, White Papers, and Blue Front, as well as two chapbooks and four books of co-translations from the Vietnamese. She has also co-edited, with Kevin Prufer and Martin Rock, a volume of poems by Catherine Breese Davis, accompanied by essays and an interview about the poet’s life and work.
Heather McHugh is an American poet notable for the independent ranges of her aesthetic as a poet, and for her working devotion to teaching and translating literature.
Michael Robert Collier is an American poet, teacher, creative writing program administrator and editor. He has published five books of original poetry, a translation of Euripides' Medea, a book of prose pieces about poetry, and has edited three anthologies of poetry. From 2001 to 2004 he was the Poet Laureate of Maryland. As of 2011, he is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a professor of creative writing at the University of Maryland, College Park and the poetry editorial consultant for Houghton Mifflin.
Elaine Terranova is an American poet.
Arthur Smith was an American poet whose work appeared in The New Yorker, "The Georgia Review," "Northwest Review," "Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts," "Crazyhorse," "Southern Poetry Review," Hunger Mountain, and The Nation. He was a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee and lived in Knoxville, Tennessee with his three Keeshonden.
Victoria Chang is an American poet, writer, editor, and critic.
Melissa Stein is an American poet. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis and is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.
Diann Blakely was an American poet, essayist, editor, and critic. She taught at Belmont University, Harvard University, Vanderbilt University, led workshops at two Vermont College residencies, and served as senior instructor and the first poet-in-residence at the Harpeth Hall School in Nashville, Tennessee. A "Robert Frost Fellow" at Bread Loaf, she was a Dakin Williams Fellow at the Sewanee Writers' Conference at which she had worked earlier as founding coordinator.
Tarfia Faizullah is a Bangladeshi American poet. Born in 1980, she was raised in West Texas. She traveled to Bangladesh in 2010 to interview survivors of rape by Pakistani soldiers during the 1971 Liberation War, the birangona. Seam, her first book, was a collection of poems that were inspired by the many interviews she had with the birangona; and won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Awards Her writing has also appeared widely in media across the US and abroad and has appeared in many journalistic media such as BuzzFeed. In 2016, Harvard Law School included Faizullah in their list of 50 Women Inspiring Change
Chard deNiord is an American author, Poet Laureate of Vermont (2015–2019), poet, and teacher. He lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife Liz.
Ann Townsend is an American poet and essayist. She is the co-founder of VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts and a professor of English and director of the creative writing at Denison University, She has published three original poetry collections and co-edited a collection of lyric poems.
