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 of poems is Summer Snow: New Poems. His most recent book, A Third Commonness, is a collection of essays. Forthcoming from Ecco Press is a translation of Czeslaw Milosz: Poet in the New World. He first joined the Community of Writers in 1986, and directed the Poetry Program there for over 20 years.
Photo Credit © Miriam Berkley
Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has lived in the Bay Area since 1975. She has published four chapbooks and twelve full-length collections with Wesleyan University Press, including Still House in the Desert: An eco-contemplation, a finalist for the 2026 National Book Award and Extra Hidden Life, among the Days (2018), winner of the Northern California Book Award. Hillman has received the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award and the Pen (Oakland) Lifetime Achievement Award. Her book of essays, Three Talks, was published by University of Virginia Press in 2024. Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California, Hillman serves as Poetry Director of the Community of Writers.
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