Kazim Ali is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction, essay, and cross-genre work, most recently Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2023) and The Man in 119 (Copper Canyon, 2026). His book Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions) won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation. He taught two short courses on the life and poetics of Lucille Clifton for the Writers’ Annex at the Community of Writers. He is a professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego.
2018 Poetry Staff
Mónica de la Torre is a poet and translator, she has published six collections of poetry as well as edited, translated, and collaborated on other books. She has served as poetry editor of The Brooklyn Rail and senior editor of BOMB Magazine, and teaches poetry at Brooklyn College. Her most recent book is Repetition Nineteen. She served on the teaching staff at the Community of Writers in 2018. (Photo by Bruce Pearson)
Photo Credit by Bruce Pearson
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
Sharon Olds has written thirteen books of poetry. Balladz was a finalist for the National Book Award, and Stag’s Leap (2012) received the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds holds the Erich Maria Remarque Chair at New York University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of Coler-Goldwater Hospital, and for veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Poet & scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we (NAACP Image Award; National Book Award Finalist), semiautomatic (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Pulitzer Prize finalist), and the new black (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). She publishes widely and has been translated into French, Polish, Slovenian, and Spanish. Among the honors for her body of work are the Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award. Her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
She has been named the 2025 Lucille Clifton Honorary Poetry Chair of the Community of Writers Poetry Program.
Photo Credit: Stéphane Robolin
Dean Young’s numerous collections of poetry include Strike Anywhere (1995), winner of the Colorado Prize for Poetry; Skid (2002), finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; Elegy on Toy Piano (2005), finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Primitive Mentor (2008), shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize. He has also written a book on poetics, The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction (2010). His poems have appeared frequently in The Best American Poetry. He holds the Livingston Chair of Poetry at the University of Texas, Austin. His most recent book is Shock by Shock, published by Copper Canyon Press in 2015.