Victoria Chang’s most recent book of poems is With My Back to the World, published in 2024 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the U.S. and Corsair/Little Brown in the U.K. It received the Forward Prize in Poetry for Best Collection and was named a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. OBIT (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, and the PEN/Voelcker Award. It was also a finalist for the Griffin International Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, as well as longlisted for the National Book Award. Other recent books include The Trees Witness Everything and her nonfiction book, Dear Memory. She has written several children’s books as well and Eureka is forthcoming from FSG Books for Young Readers in 2026. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Chowdhury International Prize in Literature, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. She is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
2025 Poetry Workshop Staff
Anthony Cody is a Latinx poet from Fresno, CA with lineage in the Bracero Program and Dust Bowl. His latest collection is The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023). Anthony’s debut collection, Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020) has been awarded a Whiting Award and an American Book Award, and has been recognized by the National Book Foundation, PEN America, the Los Angeles Times, Poets & Writers, among others. He teaches in the low-residency MFA at Randolph College, is visiting faculty at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is co-publisher of Noemi Press.
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’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
Jane Miller has written twelve poetry books, most recently Paper Banners and Who Is Trixie the Trasher? and Other Questions, and two collections of essays, Working Time: Essays on Poetry, Culture, and Travel and From the Valley of Bronze Camels: A Primer, Some Lectures, & A Boondoggle on Poetry. She is a recipient of a Wallace Foundation Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, The Western States Book Award, and the Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Jane has taught in several MFA programs, including The University of Arizona, The Michener Center for Writers, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Photo Credit: Valyntina Grenier
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.