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
Forrest Gander, a writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in northern California. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Twice Alive, Be With, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, and the collaboration, Knot, with photographer Jack Shear. Gander’s translations include It Must Be a Misunderstanding by Coral Bracho, Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Best Translated Book Award), and Names and Rivers: Poems by Shuri Kido. He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations.
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 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
Sharon Olds is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including most recently National Book Award Finalist Balladz (2022), Arias (2019), which was short-listed for the 2020 Griffin Poetry Prize, and Odes (2016). Her 2012 collection Stag’s Leap won both the Pulitzer Prize and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, where she helped to found workshop programs for residents of The Sigismund Goldwater Memorial Hospital on Roosevelt Island, and for veterans of the wars Iraq and Afghanistan. She lives in New York City. www.sharonolds.net
Photo Credit: Brett Hall Jones
Gregory Pardlo is an essayist and Pulitzer Prize-winning for poet. His most recent book is Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His poetry collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts for translation. His first poetry collection Totem won the APR/Honickman Prize in 2007. He is Poetry Editor of Virginia Quarterly Review and Director of the MFA program at Rutgers University-Camden. www.pardlo.net
Photo credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Poet & scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we (forthcoming 2023), semiautomatic, and the new black. Her work has twice garnered the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and appears internationally. Her honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in such communities as Poets at the End of the World, Cave Canem, & the Community of Writers. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
