Camille Dungy

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

Photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

Robert Hass

Robert Hass has published many books of poetry including Field GuidePraiseHuman WishesSun 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 PleasuresNow & 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 IssaPoet’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

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

Major Jackson

Major Jackson’s most recent books are The Absurd Man (Norton: 2020), Roll Deep (Norton: 2015), winner of the Vermont Book Award, and A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson (Michigan: 2022). His edited volumes include Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. Major Jackson lives in Nashville, Tennessee where he is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities and Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. For more information, please visit www.majorjackson.com.

Photo credit: Erin Patrice O’Brien

Ada Limón

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 five collections of poetry, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon), as well as Why Poetry (Ecco/Harper Collins). 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. A book of prose, Story of a Poem, will be published by Unnamed Press in April, 2023. http://matthewzapruder.com/

Photo credit: B.A. Van Sise