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’s latest collection from Wesleyan University Press is In a Few Minutes Before Later, published in 2022. A recent recipient of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement, Hillman has edited and co-translated many books by others, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Hillman lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and directs the Poetry Week at Community of Writers. 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 Matthew Zapruder is the author of I Love Hearing Your Dreams, forthcoming from Scribner in September, 2024. He is the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Father’s Day, Sun Bear, and Come on All You Ghosts, as well as 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. From 2016-17 he held the annually rotating position of Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. Story of a Poem is currently a finalist for a National Book Critic’s Circle Award. http://matthewzapruder.com/