Cornelius Eady first joined the conference staff in 1992. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; The Gathering of My Name, a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize; and Brutal Imagination, a National Book Award finalist. His honors include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award; a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award; and Guggenheim, NEA,
and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships. A cofounder of Cave Canem, a national organization for African American poetry and poets, Eady teaches at SUNY Stony Brook Southampton. His most recent book is The War against the Obvious. www.corneliuseady.com
2021 Anthology Launch Readers
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer/translator Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert, and has degrees in geology and literature. A signal voice for environmental poetics, his work often focuses on human and ecological intimacies. He is the author of Twice Alive, and Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, as well as the collaboration, Knot, with photographer Jack Shear. His latest books are Mojave Ghost: a Novel-Poem and Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.
Photo Credit: Ashwini Bhat
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. Her first collection of prose, Three Talks (2024) is available from University of Virginia Press.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
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
Gregory Pardlo is the author of Spectral Evidence, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, and Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He divides his time between New York and the United Arab Emirates where he is Head of the Literature and Creative Writing Program at NYU Abu Dhabi. www.pardlo.net
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.