Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has edited three anthologies, including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her honors include the 2021 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, and NEA Fellowships in both poetry and prose. She lives in Colorado where she is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University. www.camilledungy.com
2020 Poetry Workshop Staff
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 is the author of eleven books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). A twelfth collection, Still House in the Desert, is forthcoming in fall 2026. Her first collection of prose, Three Talks, was published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press. Hillman has co-edited and co-translated over a dozen books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar, co-translated with her mother Helen Hillman. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, Hillman’s recent awards include the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Pen (Oakland) in 2025. Hillman is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and currently directs the Poetry Program at Community of Writers; she lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.
http://blueflowerarts.com/artist/brenda-hillman/
Photo credit: Louisa Michaels
Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems, and a collection of essays, A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, John S. Guggenheim Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts, he has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Poetry London. Major Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is host of the acclaimed podcast The Slowdown and serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. www.majorjackson.com.
Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She is the author of six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Her book Bright Dead Things was nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Her work has been supported most recently by a Guggenheim Fellowship. She grew up in Sonoma, California and now lives in Lexington, Kentucky where she writes, teaches remotely, and hosts the critically-acclaimed poetry podcast, The Slowdown. Her new book of poetry, The Hurting Kind, was published by Milkweed Editions in May 2022.
Photo credit: Brett Hall Jones
Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of the poetry collections I Love Hearing Your Dreams (Scribner, 2024), and How to Continue (The Economy Press, 2025). His previous books also include Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins) and Story of a Poem (Unnamed). He is editor-at-large at Wave Books, where he edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations. He has taught several short courses for the Writers’ Annex at the Community of Writers including on W.S. Merwin and Sylvia Plath. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California, and plays music with both The Figments and We Are Leaves. matthewzapruder.com