Kazim Ali is the author of over twenty books of poetry, fiction, essay, and cross-genre work, most recently Sukun: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan, 2023) and The Man in 119 (Copper Canyon, 2026). His book Black Buffalo Woman: An Introduction to the Poetry and Poetics of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions) won the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation. He taught two short courses on the life and poetics of Lucille Clifton for the Writers’ Annex at the Community of Writers. He is a professor of Comparative Literature and Literary Arts and Associate Director of the Institute of Arts and Humanities at the University of California, San Diego. The Community of Writers has named Kazim as the 2026 Lucille Clifton Honorary Chair.
2021 Poetry Workshop Teaching Staff
Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body This Failure, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. His poems have been featured by Poetry, Harvard Review, and The New York Times, and his awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, and Poets and Writers. He is a poetry editor for The Los Angeles Review and teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. www.blasfalconer.com
Photo credit: Emily Petrie
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
Brenda Hillman is the author of eleven books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). A twelfth collection, Still House in the Desert, is forthcoming in fall 2026. Her first collection of prose, Three Talks, was published in 2023 by the University of Virginia Press. Hillman has co-edited and co-translated over a dozen books, including At Your Feet by Brazilian poet Ana Cristina Cesar, co-translated with her mother Helen Hillman. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, Hillman’s recent awards include the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for innovation in literature and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Pen (Oakland) in 2025. Hillman is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and currently directs the Poetry Program at Community of Writers; she lives in the Bay Area with her husband Robert Hass.
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
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.