Francisco Aragón is the author of Puerta del Sol (Bilingual Press) and Glow of Our Sweat (Scapegoat Press) as well as editor of, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry (University of Arizona Press), these latter two titles winners of International Latino Book Awards, respectively. His poems and translations from the Spanish have appeared in various print and web publications, as well as numerous anthologies. In 2003 he joined the faculty of the Institute for Latino Studies (ILS) at the University of Notre Dame, where he established Letras Latinas—the ILS’ literary initiative. In 2010 he was awarded the Outstanding Latino/a Cultural Arts, Literary Arts and Publications Award by the American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education. In 2015 he received a VIDO Award by VIDA: Women in the Literary Arts. A native of San Francisco and resident of Arlington, Virginia, he divides his year between the Notre Dame campus in Indiana and the ILS office in Washington, D.C. www.franciscoaragon.net
2017 Poetry Teaching Staff
Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in northern California. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Twice Alive, Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and the collaboration, Knot, with photographer Jack Shear. Gander’s translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Best Translated Book Award), and Names and Rivers: Poems by Shuri Kido. He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations.
Photo Credit: Ashwini Bhat
Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems. His collection of poems entitled Time and Materials won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. He has also written books of essays including Twentieth Century Pleasures, Now & Then, and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration Into the Formal Imagination of Poetry. His book of essays, What Light Can Do: Essays on Art, Imagination, and the Natural World, is the recipient of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Hass translated many of the works of Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz, and he has edited Selected Poems: 1954-1986, by Tomas Transtromer; The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa; Poet’s Choice: Poems for Everyday Life; the 2001 edition of Best American Poetry; and Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (with Paul Ebenkamp). He wrote the introduction to an edition of selected Walt Whitman poems titled Song of Myself: And Other Poems. He also wrote The Poetic Species: A Conversation with Edward O. Wilson and Robert Hass. His most recent book is Summer Snow: New Poems. He directed the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers for over 20 years.
Photo Credit © Miriam Berkley
Brenda Hillman’s most recent books are In a Few Minutes Before Later (Wesleyan University Press, 2022) and Extra Hidden Life among the Days (Wesleyan University Press, 2018). Hillman has co-edited and co-translated numerous volumes, including Ana Cristina Cesar’s At Your Feet (Parlor Press, 2018), co-translated from Portuguese with her mother Helen Hillman. Her awards for poetry include the 2020 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for Innovation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California, co-directs Poetry Week at Community of Writers and currently serves as a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets.
Photo credit: University of Arizona Poetry Center
Sharon Olds is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including most recently National Book Award Finalist Balladz (2022), Arias (2019), which was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Odes (2016). Her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of The Sigismund Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of the wars Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City. www.sharonolds.net
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Gregory Pardlo is an essayist and Pulitzer Prize-winning for poet. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His poetry collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts for translation. His first poetry collection Totem won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. www.pardlo.net
