Poetry Workshops Notable Alumni

KEN HAAS ‘s (’08, ’11, ’13, ’16, ’19, 20, ’22) poetry has appeared in over 50 journals and anthologies. He has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ken’s first full poetry collection, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, won a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Rubery Book Award. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Community of Writers. https://kenhaas.org/

Anthony S. Abbot (’91/’02): Winner of the 2015 NC Award for Literature from the State of North Carolina, Anthony S. Abbott is the author of seven books of poetry, two novels, and four books of literary criticism. His newest book, The Angel Dialogues, is the recipient of honorable mention in the 2015 Brockman-Campbell competition of the NC Poetry Society. His 2011 book of poems, If Words Could Save Us, was co-winner in the same competition in 2012. He served as the Charles A. Dana Professor of English Emeritus at Davidson College in North Carolina. https://anthonysabbott.com/

Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and Every Form of Ruin, both from the Pitt Poetry Series. Recipient of the Allen Tate Prize and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and more. She has received fellowships and scholarships from the Adirondack Center for Writing, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. Born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, she now lives with her family in Kansas City, Missouri, and works as a fiction acquisitions editor. She attended the Community of Writers in 2014. www.erinmolly.com

Lauren K. Alleyne (’08): Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of two collections of poetry, Difficult Fruit (2014), and Honeyfish (2019); two chapbooks, Dawn in the Kaatskills (2008) and (Un)Becoming Gretel (2022); as well as co-editor of Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry (2020). Her work has appeared in numerous publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Ms. Muse, Tin House, and The Caribbean Writer, among others. Her most recent honors include a nomination for the 2020 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Poetry, the longlist for the 2020 Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and the shortlist for the 2020 Library of Virginia Literary Awards. Her poetry was selected for the 2021 Best American Poetry anthology, the Academy of American Poets Poem a Day (2018, 2020, 2021, 2022), and was a finalist for 2019 Best of the Net. www.laurenkalleyne.com

Joan Baranow: (’90/’91/’92/’93/’94/’99/’01/’03/’06/’08/’11): Joan Baranow, Ph.D., is Professor of English at Dominican University of California, where she directs the MA Humanities and MFA Creative Writing programs. Her poetry has appeared in The Paris Review, Spillway, The Antioch Review, JAMA, The Gettysburg Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry also appears in anthologies that focus on healthcare issues. She has published two chapbooks and a full-length collection, entitled Living Apart. She is a recipient of Fellowships from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marin Arts Council, and the Ohio Arts Council. With her husband, physician and poet David Watts, she produced the PBS documentary Healing Words: Poetry & Medicine. Her second documentary, The Time We Have, is in post-production.

Judy Bebelaar (’08,’10) taught English and creative writing in San Francisco public high schools for 37 years. She has received national recognition for her success in helping students find joy in writing their lives. Her poetry has been published widely. Her chapbook, Walking Across the Pacific, was published in 2014 by Finishing Line Press. Her poems appear in Turning a Train of Thought Upside Down (Scarlet Tanager Press, 2012), The Widows’ Handbook (Kent State U. Press 2014) and in River of Earth and Sky (Blue Light Press, 2015). She is co author of the book And Then They Were Gone: Teenagers of Peoples Temple from High School to Jonestown, a history of her students, some who survived, and many who perished in the tragedy of Jonestown, Guyana in 1978, to be published by Sugartown Publishing in the fall of 2017. www.judybebelaar.com

Dan Bellm (‘92/’95/’97/’03): Counting (2023) is his latest chapbook of poems. His fourth full-length collection of poems, Deep Well, came out from the New Orleans-based press Lavender Ink in March 2017. He has published three other books of poetry: One Hand on the Wheel, Buried Treasure, and Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of a 2009 California Book Award and named one of the year’s ten best poetry books by the Virginia Quarterly Review. He also translates poetry and fiction from Spanish and French, including The Song of the Dead by French poet Pierre Reverdy (Black Square Editions, 2016), and Description of a Flash of Cobalt Blue by Mexican poet Jorge Esquinca (Unicorn Press, 2015). He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the California Arts Council, and taught literary translation in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. He serves as a volunteer interpreter and translator for refugees and asylum seekers with Centro Legal de la Raza in Oakland. www.danbellm.com

Michelle Bitting was short-listed for the 2020 Montreal International Poetry Prize, and a finalist for the 2021 Coniston Prize, Ruminate’s “The Waking” Flash Prose Contest, and the 2020 Reed Magazine Edwin Markham Prize. In 2021, her manuscript Nightmares & Miracles won the Wilder Prize and will be published by Two Sylvias Press in 2022. New poems are found in Air/Light, The Night Heron Barks, The New Guard/BANG!, Sugar House Review, Radar Poetry, Limp Wrist, SWWIM, Catamaran, and Pine Hills Review. Michelle is a Lecturer in Poetry and Creative Writing at Loyola Marymount University and Film Studies at U of Arizona Global. She attended the Community of Writers in 2005.

Laurel Ann Bogen (’80): Laurel Ann Bogen’s new book, Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015, was published by Red Hen Press in April, 2016. She is on the Board of Directors (Vice President) at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center and a founding member of the poetry performance ensemble Nearly Fatal Women. She continues teaching in the Writers’ Program at UCLA Extension as well as at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. She attended the Community of Writers in 1980.

Bruce Bond (’97): Bruce Bond’s collections of poetry include Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (Louisiana State University Press, 2017), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), Gold Bee (Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Black Anthem (University of Tampa Press, 2016), Choir of the Wells: A Tetralogy (Etruscan, 2013), The Visible (LSU, 2012), Peal (Etruscan Press, 2009), Blind Rain (LSU, 2008), Cinder ( Etruscan Press, 2003), The Throats of Narcissus (University of Arkansas, 2001), Radiography (TIL Best Book of Poetry Award, BOA, 1997), The Anteroom of Paradise (Colladay Award, QRL, 1991), and Independence Days (R. Gross Award, Woodley Press, 1990). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, Raritan, New Republic, Poetry, and many other journals, and he has received numerous honors including fellowships from the NEA, Texas Commission on the Arts, and other organizations. Presently he is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.

Susan Browne (‘88/’10): Susan Browne’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, The Sun, Subtropics, The Southern Review, Superstition Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, B O D Y, American Life in Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Love’s Executive Order, and 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. She has published three books of poetry, Buddha’s Dogs, Zephyr, and Just Living. Awards include prizes from Four Way Books, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, the River Styx International Poetry Contest, and The Fischer Poetry Prize. She received a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. She has also collaborated to create a word/music CD. Her third collection, Just Living, recently won the Catamaran Poetry Prize.  susanmariebrowne.com

Sharon Charde (’00, ’01, ’03, ’07): Sharon Charde, retired psychotherapist, won first prize in the Arcadia 2014 Ruby Irene chapbook contest and first prize in the 2014 Rash Awards, given by the Broad River Review. She has been published over sixty-five times in journals and anthologies of poetry and prose, and has earned seven Pushcart nominations, published three first-prize-winning chapbooks, Bad Girl At The Altar Rail, Four Trees Down From Ponte Sisto, and Incendiary, as well as a full-length collection, Branch In His Hand, adapted as a radio play by the BBC and broadcast in 2012. After Blue, for which she won honorable mention in Finishing Line Press’s 2013 chapbook contest, was published in September 2014. She has been awarded fellowships to VSC, VCCA, Yaddo, and the MacDowell Colony. www.sharoncharde.com

Ewa Chrusciel (‘08/’10):

Ewa Chrusciel has three books in Polish: Furkot (2003), Sopilki (2009), and Tobołek (2016), and two books in English: Strata (Emergency Press, 2010), Contraband of Hoopoe (Omnidawn Press, 2014), and Of Anunciations (Omnidawn Press, 2017). Her poems were featured in Jubilat, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, Spoon River Review, Aufgabe among others. She translated Jack London, Joseph Conrad, I.B. Singer as well as Jorie Graham, Lyn Hejinian, and other American poets into Polish. She is an associate professor at Colby-Sawyer College. http://www.echrusciel.net/

Anthony Cody (’18) is the author of Borderland Apocrypha (Omnidawn, 2020), winner of the 2018 Omnidawn Open Book Contest selected by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and The Rendering (Omnidawn, 2023). He is a 2022 Whiting winner, 2021 American Book Award winner, a 2020 Poets & Writers debut poet and a 2020 Southwest Book Award winner. Borderland Apocrypha was named a finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, the PEN America / Jean Stein Book Award, the California Book Award, the LA Times Book Award in Poetry, as well as longlisted for The Believer Magazine 2020 Editor’s Award in Poetry. A CantoMundo fellow from Fresno, California, Anthony has lineage in the Bracero Program and the Dust Bowl. His work has appeared in The Academy of American Poets: Poem-A-Day, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Colorado Review, The Boiler, ctrl+v journal, among others. Anthony co-edited How Do I Begin?: A Hmong American Literary Anthology (Heyday, 2011), as well as co-edited and co-translated Juan Felipe Herrera’s Akrílica (Noemi Press, 2022). His artwork has been exhibited at Fresno State, as well as in San Francisco at SOMArts. https://anthonycody.com/

Nicelle Davis (’08), is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, MHA, Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center, and with Red Hen’s WITS program. She is the creator of The Poetry Circus and collaborator on the Nevermore Poetry Festival. She currently teaches at Paraclete High School. www.nicelledavis.net

Nehassaiu deGannes (’94, ’03): Nehassaiu deGannes is a poet whose love of language encompasses a life in the theater. She has two award-winning chapbooks: Percussion, Salt & Honey (The Philbrick Prize for New England Poets, selected by Michael Harper) and Undressing The River (2011 Center For Book Arts Letterpress Award, selected by Kimiko Hahn and Sharon Dolin.) Her poems have also appeared in Callaloo, Poem Memoir Story, American Poetry Review, Caribbean Writer, Painted Bride Quarterly, Tuesday: An Art Project, TORCH, Encyclopedia Project, After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery Anthology, Crab Orchard Review, ARAVA Review and The Cave Canem XII Anthology. Nehassaiu’s fellowships and residencies include Cave Canem, The Vermont Studio Center, Soul Mountain and a Rhode Island State Council on The Arts Poetry Fellowship. She completed her MFA in Poetry at Brown University and The Graduate Acting Program at Trinity Rep Conservatory. www.nehassaiu.com

Shira Dentz (’05): Shira Dentz is the author of four books, SISYPHUSINA (Pank, 2020), winner of the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize 2021, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman Books, 2010) door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press, 2013) and how do i net thee, and two chapbooks, Leaf Weather (Tilt Press, 2009) and FLOUNDERS (Essay Press, 2016). Her books have been reviewed in many journals including American Book Review, Rain Taxi, and The Boston Review. Her writing has appeared widely in journals including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, Western Humanities Review, jubilat, and New American Writing, and featured in The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series, NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. Her awards include an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize. A graduate of the Iowa Writers‘ Workshop, she has a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Utah, and is currently Drunken Boat‘s Reviews Editor and Lecturer in Creative Writ ing at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
She can be found online at shiradentz.com.

Charles Douthat (‘04, ’09): Charles is a poet, retired litigator and visual artist.  A third generation Californian, he attended Stanford University and Hastings College of the Law in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Since 1980 he’s lived in Connecticut where he practiced trial law and was honored with membership in Best Lawyers in America.  He began writing poems and painting during a long, mid-life illness. Since then his poems have been published in many magazines and journals, including Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, and his paintings have been widely exhibited.  Charles’ book Blue for Oceans was awarded the 2011 PEN New England Award as the best book of poetry published that year by a New England author.  In 2019 he received an MFA in Fine Arts from Warren Wilson College. www.charlesdouthat.com.

Iris Jamahl Dunkle (’99, ’10) was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her poetry collections include Interrupted Geographies (Trio House Press, 2017) Gold Passage (Trio House Press, 2013) and There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air (Word Tech, 2015). Her work has been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet’s Market, Women’s Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. Her biography on Charmian London, Jack London’s wife will be published by University of Oklahoma Press in 2020. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She attended the Community of Writers in 1999 and 2010. https://www.irisjamahldunkle.com/

Keith Ekiss (’06): Keith Ekiss was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2005-2007. He is the author of Pima Road Notebook (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2010). As a translator, his books include The Fire’s Journey (Tavern Books, 2019), an epic poem by the Costa Rican writer Eunice Odio in four volumes and Territory of Dawn: The Selected Poems of Eunice Odio (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2016). He also translated March 10, NY (Abstracta Ediciones, 2014) by Mexican poet Jeannette Clariond. Ekiss’s creative non-fiction has been anthologized in Permanent Vacation: Living and Working in Our National Parks (Bona Fide Books, 2011). He is the recipient of fellowships, scholarships, and residencies from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, The Community of Writers, Santa Fe Art Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park.

Thomas Sayers Ellis was born and raised in Washington, DC. His first full collection, The Maverick Room, (Graywolf Press, 2005) received a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award and the 2006 John C. Zacharis First Book Award. Graywolf Press recently published Skin, Inc. a collection of poetry. He co-founded The Dark Room Collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1988, and earned an MFA from Brown University in 1995. His writing has appeared in The Nation, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House and Best American Poetry (1997, 2001, 2010 and 2015). In 2011, he exhibited the first photographic one-man show of go-go music titled “(Un)Lock It: the Percussive People in the Go-Go Pocket.” He has taught at Howard University, Sarah Lawrence College, The University of San Francisco and the University of Montana. Recently he co-founded Heroes Are Gang Leaders, a language/music group of poets and musicians, and recorded “Chuck Town” (for Chuck Brown) and was, shortly thereafter, awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.  www.tsellis.com

Blas Falconer (’12, ’16): Blas Falconer is the author of Forgive the Body This Failure ( Four Way Books, 2018); The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012);  A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007);  and The Perfect Hour (Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press, 2006).  He is also a co-editor for The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity(University of Arizona Press, 2011) and Mentor & Muse:  Essays from Poets to Poets (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Falconer’s awards include a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant, the New Delta Review Eyster Prize for Poetry, and the Barthelme Fellowship. He teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University.  www.blasfalconer.com

Ann Fisher-Wirth (‘92/’00/’09/ ’13): Ann Fischer-Wirth’s seventh book of poems, Paradise is Jagged (February 2023), is forthcoming from Terrapin Press. Her sixth book of poems, The Bones of Winter Birds, was published by Terrapin Press in February 2019. Her fifth book, Mississippi, is a poetry/photography collaboration with Delta photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. Her other books of poems are Dream Cabinet, Carta Marina, Blue Window, and Five Terraces, and the chapbooks The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows. With Laura-Gray Street she coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology, published by Trinity University Press early in 2013; a third edition was in January 2020. Her poems appear widely and have received numerous awards, including a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Rita Dove Poetry Award, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Award, three Mississippi Arts Commission fellowships, and thirteen Pushcart nominations including a Special Mention. She has received the 2023 Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She has had residencies at Djerassi, Hedgebrook, The Mesa Refuge, Camac/France, and Storyknife. A senior fellow and board member of Black Earth Institute, Ann was 2017 Anne Spencer Poet in Residence at Randolph College. www.annfisherwirth.com

Mark Fitzgerald (‘06, ’09): Mark Fitzgerald is the author of two books of poetry, Downburst (Cinnamon Press, 2019) and By Way of Dust and Rain (Cinnamon Press, 2010, 2019).  His work has appeared in various periodicals, including Santa Clara Review, Slipstream, Crab Creek Review, and Beltway Poetry Quarterly.  He has also been published in several anthologies, including Scratching Against the Fabric (unbound CONTENT), What Lies Beyond the Frame (unbound CONTENT), and Only Connect (Cinnamon Press). Mark received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Franklin and Marshall College and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from George Mason University—graduating with Phi Beta Delta honors. He has studied in Strasbourg, France and was awarded a fellowship to pursue his writing at Oxford. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Maryland and was recently awarded a writing fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

CB Follett (’04/’00/’95/’93/’91): CB Follett is the author of ten books of poetry, most recently Quatrefoil (2016). She also published, along with photographer Ginna Fleming, Duet, A Conversation of Words and Images (2014). Other notable collections include Of Gravity and Tides (2013), and several chapbooks, most recently the 4 chapbook series Boxing the Compass (2014-2015). The Turning of the Light won the 2001 National Poetry Book Award. She is Editor/Publisher of Arctos Press and was publisher and co-editor (with Susan Terris) of Runes: a Review of Poetry (2001-2008). Follett has numerous nominations for Pushcart Prizes for individual poems, as well as nine nominations as a individual poet; a Marin Arts Council Grant for Poetry;  and has been widely published both nationally and internationally. Follett was Poet Laureate of Marin County, CA from 2010-2013.

Jeanne Foster (Poetry, ’88; Writers Workshop, ’89,’92): Jeanne Foster’s latest poetry collection, Goodbye, Silver Sister, was released from Northwestern University Press, 2015. She is of Professor of Creative Writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Triquarterly, Ploughshares, Literary Imagination, and others. She is co-editor of Appetite: Food as Metaphor (BOA 2002). “The First Workshop: a Memoir of James Wright” was published in American Poetry Review. Her poetry collection, A Blessing of Safe Travel, won the Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Award (Princeton 1980). A finalist in the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival Poetry Contest 2015, she has received Woodrow Wilson, CAPS, MacDowell, and St. Lawrence Foundation grants.

Megan Gannon (’04): Megan Gannon is the author of Cumberland, a novel, and White Nightgown, a book of poems. Her poems have appeared in venues such as Ploughshares, Pleiades, Notre Dame Review, Crazyhorse, and Best American Poetry 2006. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Ripon College in Ripon, Wisconsin. www.megangannon.com

Ángel García (’12) is the author of Teeth Never Sleep, winner of the 2018 CantoMundo Poetry Prize, which will be published by the University of Arkansas Press in the Fall of 2018. Currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Ángel has earned a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Redlands and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Riverside. His work has been published in the  American Poetry Review, Miramar, McSweeney’s, Huizache, and The Good Men Project, among others.  In addition to his creative work, Ángel is also the cofounder of a non-profit organization, Gente Organizada, that works to educate, empower, and engage communities through grassroots organizing.

Veronica Golos (’09) is the author of two books. Vocabulary of Silence (Red Hen Press, 2011) was the winner of the 2011 New Mexico Book Award, containing poems translated into Arabic by Nizar Sartawi, and available in over 24 journals throughout the Middle East. A Bell Buried Deep was co-winner of the 16th Annual Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, nominated for a Pushcart Prize by Edward Hirsch and is set to be re-issued by Tupelo Press in 2014. Golos’ poems are included in The Poet’s Craft, University of Michigan Press; Collecting Life, from 3: A Taos Press, 2011, and in journals in the US and internationally. Golos is Acquisitions Editor for 3:A Taos Press, and co-editor of the Taos Journal of Poetry & Art. www.veronicagolos.wordpress.com 

Leah Naomi Green (’08) is the author of The More Extravagant Feast (Graywolf Press, 2020), selected by Li-Young Lee for the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. She is the recipient of a 2021 Treehouse Climate Action Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, as well as the 2021 Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. Her chapbook, The Ones We Have, received the 2012 Flying Trout Chapbook prize. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Paris Review, Tin House, Poem-a-Day, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Orion, Shenandoah, Ecotone, and Pleiades. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and is currently the Sherwood Anderson Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry at Guilford College. Green teaches Environmental Studies and English at Washington and Lee University. https://www.leahnaomigreen.com/

Saskia Hamilton (’89/ ’92) is the author of All Souls (Graywolf Press, 2023); Corridor  (Graywolf Press, 2014); Divide These (Graywolf Press, 2005); and As for Dream (2001). She is also the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005) and the coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Hamilton is the recipient of fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has worked for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. and the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She currently teaches at Barnard College in New York.

John Harvey (’95): John Harvey ran Slow Dancer Press from 1977 to 1999, publishing, amongst others, the work of Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton and James Schuyler in the UK. His own New & Selected Poems, Out of Silence, was published by Smith/Doorstop in 2014. His crime fiction has won major prizes in Great Britain, France and the US, and he is the recipient of the Crime Writers Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing. He has been awarded Honorary Degrees, Doctor of Letters, by the Universities of Nottingham and Hertfordshire. http://mellotone.co.uk/

Donna Henderson (’88, ’89, ’92, ’94, ’02, ’09, ’11) is the author of three collections of poems, two of which have been finalists for the Oregon Book Award in poetry. Her poems, essays, song lyrics, and reviews have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, performance venues, art installations, and recordings (most recently, on the CD I Dream Awake with composer Bill Whitley). Donna is also the vocalist and bandleader of the jazz and latin music band, Chuvarada. She maintains a psychotherapy (and other healing arts) practice in Maupin, Oregon, where she lives with her husband.

Christina Hutchins (’03,’06,’10,’13, ’16): Christina Hutchins’ Tender the Maker (Utah State University, 2015) won the May Swenson Award. She is also the author of The Stranger Dissolves (Sixteen Rivers, 2011), and the chapbooks, Radiantly We Inhabit the Air (Becker Prize, 2011) and Collecting Light (1999). Her poems have appeared in Antioch Review, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, The Women’s Review of Books. Her work has been awarded The Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, National Poetry Review Finch Prize, two Money for Women Awards, and the James Phelan Award. She has received fellowships from Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts and Summer Literary Seminars in St. Petersburg, Russia. She holds degrees from UC Davis, Harvard, and Graduate Theological Union, teaches in Berkeley, and was the first poet laureate of Albany, CA. www.christinahutchins.net

Patricia Spears Jones (’91/’92/’94): Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, anthologist, educator, and cultural activist. She is the winner of the 2017 Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers and the author of A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. Her work is anthologized in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song; Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin; and BAX 2016: Best American Experimental Writing. Her poems have been published in The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, The Ocean State Review, Ms., and Cutthroat, A Journal of the Arts. Patricia Spears Jones edited THINK: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat and Ordinary Women: An Anthology of New York City Women. Mabou Mines commissioned and produced her plays Mother and Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting. Patricia Spears Jones co-curated the Wednesday Night Series for St. Mark’s Church Poetry Project. She has taught graduate and undergraduate creative writing at Hollins University, Adelphi University, Hunter College, and Barnard College. She leads poetry workshops for the 92nd Street Y, The Workroom, Hugo House, Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Gemini Ink, and Brooklyn Poets. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute. https://psjones.com/

Marilyn Kallet (’96/’98/’05): Marilyn Kallet recently served two terms as Knoxville Poet Laureate, June 27, 2018-July 2020. She is the author of 19 books, including Even When We Sleep, 2022 and How Our Bodies Learned, 2018, poetry from Black Widow Press. She has translated Paul Eluard’s Last Love Poems and Benjamin Péret’s The Big Game, among others. Dr. Kallet is Professor Emerita at the University of Tennessee, where she taught for 37 years. She also hosted poetry workshops and residencies for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, in Auvillar, France, from 2009-2018. She has performed her poems across the United States as well as in France and Poland, as a guest of the U.S. Embassy’s “America Presents” program. Her poetry appeared recently in Still: The Journal of Appalachia, Plume and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium, among others. She is the author of two children’s books, Jack the Healing Cat and One For Each Night: Chanukah Tales and Recipes, Celtic Cat Publishing. http://marilynkallet.com/

Andrew Kaufman’s (’01, ’08) books include The Cinnamon Bay Sonnets, winner of The Center for Book Arts book competition,  Earth’s Ends, winner of  the Pearl Poetry Award, Both Sides of the Niger (Spuyten Duyvil Press), The Complete Cinnamon Bay Sonnets (Rain Mountain Press), and The Rwanda Poems: Voices and Visions from the Genocide (New York Quarterly Press). His poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals. The travel reflected in much of his work has been made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.  He has taught writing and literature at a number of colleges and universities and currently lives in New York City. www.andrewkaufman.wordpress.com

Keetje Kuipers’ (’05) collections of poetry include Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which won an A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, The Keys to the Jail (2014), and All its Charms (2019). A former Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University, Kuipers has also been a Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident and an Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College. She serves as a senior editor at Poetry Northwest and teaches on the faculty of the Hugo House in Seattle. www.keetjekuipers.com

Danusha Laméris (’00) is a poet, teacher, and essayist. She is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in:The Best American Poetry,The New York Times,TheAmerican Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, POETRY, and Ploughshares. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and winner of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. The 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award, she is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California, co-leads the Poetry of Resilience webinars with James Crews, and is on the faculty of Pacific University’s low-residency MFA program. Her third book, Blade byBlade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. danushalameris.com

Lester Graves Lennon (’17/’11/’09/’07/’05/’03/’01/’99) is the poetry editor for Rosebud magazine and an investment banker whose career in public finance exceeds 40 years.  His first book of poetry, The Upward Curve of the Earth and Heavens, can be found in 70 public and university libraries including the Los Angeles Public Library, Yale, Oxford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received his B.A. in English.  His second book of poetry, My Father Was A Poet, was published in 2013.  His third book, Lynchings: Postcards From America, will be published in January, 2022.  

Bonnie Long (’11,’14): After many years of working as a city manager, Bonnie Long retired and began writing poetry. Her first chapbook, Spine Still Holding, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2015. Her work has appeared in Spillway, The Squaw Valley Review, Marin Poetry Center Anthologies, and Solstice Writers’ Anthology. Bonnie lives in St. Helena, California with her husband John and standard poodles Cole and Emma.

Sabra Loomis (’89/’91/’03): Sabra Loomis is the author of House Held Together by Winds, Winner of the 2007 National Poetry Series Open Competition as selected by James Tate (HarperCollins, 2008). She is also the author of Rosetree and two chapbooks of poetry. Her poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including American Poetry Review, American Voice, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Heliotrope, Lumina, Cyphers, and St. Ann’s Review. Ms. Loomis has received awards from the Artists Foundation, the Yeats Society, and the British Council, as well as fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. She teaches frequently at the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts, and was on the faculty of the Poets’ House, Donegal, for many years. Sabra Loomis divides her time between New York City and Achill Island, Ireland.

Antonio de Jesús López (’17) has received scholarships to attend the Community of Writers, Tin House, the Vermont Studio Center, and Bread Loaf. He is a proud member of the Macondo Writers Workshop and a CantoMundo Fellow. He holds degrees from Duke University, Rutgers-Newark, and the University of Oxford. He is pursuing a PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in PEN/America, Insider Higher Education, Palette Poetry, The New Republic, Tin House, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. His debut poetry collection, Gentefication, was selected by Gregory Pardlo as the winner of the 2019 Levis Prize in Poetry. Antonio is currently fighting gentrification in his hometown as the newest and youngest councilmember for the City of East Palo Alto. www.barrioscribe.com

Glenna Luschei Ph.D. (’99): Glenna Luschei has published Solo Press books and poetry magazines for fifty years. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a D.H Lawrence Fellowship in New Mexico, an Honorary Doctorate of Literature from St. Andrew’s Presbyterian College in Laurinburg, North Carolina and a Master of Life Award from her alma mater, The University of Nebraska. She was named Poet Laureate of San Luis Obispo City and County for the year 2000. She served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. Luschei is the author of many chapbooks, special editions and trade books. Her latest books are Zen Duende: Collaborative Poems (Presa Press 2016) and The Sky is Shooting Blue Arrows (University of New Mexico Press, 2014). Three of her artist books have received prizes from the Rounce & Coffin Best Western books from Occidental College. She has taught many years for UCLA Arts Reach, for Chaplin College at the California Men’s Colony, for Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo and at Atascadero State Hospital. She is featured in the movie “Between Two Rivers.”

Fred Marchant (’92) is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which, Said Not Said, was published by Graywolf Press in May 2017. Graywolf also published his collections Full Moon Boat (2000) and The Looking House (2009). His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize from the Word Works. In 2002 Dedalus Press of Dublin Ireland brought out House on Water, House in Air, a new and selected poems. He edited and provided an introduction to Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947, published by Graywolf in 2008. In addition, he has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) two books of Vietnamese poetry, From a Corner of My Yard by Tran Dang Khoa, and Con Dao Prison Songs, by Vo Que. I have published poems, reviews, and essays in literary journals in this country, in Ireland and the U.K., and in Vietnam. He has been awarded residencies at Ucross, Yaddo, the McDowell Colony, and the Heinrich Boll Cottage. Over the years he has served on the Executive Board of PEN New England and the Advisory Board of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge MA. In 2009, the New England Poetry Club conferred upon him the May Sarton Award, an award given to a poet whose work has been an inspiration to other poets. www.fredmarchant.com

Diane Kirsten Martin’s (‘88/’92/’94/’02) work has appeared in Field, American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Zyzzyva, and many other journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets, and received a Pushcart Special Mention. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, a National Poetry Series finalist, was published in 2010 by Dream Horse Press. Her second collection, Hue and Cry, is out from MadHat Press. https://dianekmartin.com/

Beverly Matherne (’94): U.P. Poet Laureate Beverly Matherne is professor emerita of English at Northern Michigan University, where she directed the Master of Fine Arts Program and served as poetry editor of Passages North literary magazine.She is the author of seven bilingual books of poetry; her latest, Potions d’amour, thés, incantations / Love Potions, Teas, Incantations, from Harvard Square Press, was launched at the Great Lakes Poetry Festival in Marquette on April 26, 2023. Beverly has published widely in journals and reviews such as Great River Review, Metamorphoses, Plat Valley Review, Runes, Spillway, Western Humanities Review, and Verse as well as a host of Francophone publications, including Ancrages, Éloizes, Feux chalins, Feux follets, Language et Créativité, and Résonance. Her latest anthology publication, in which her award-winning poem “Pink Geraniums” appears, is Universal Oneness: An Anthology of Magnum Opus Poems from Around the World. beverlymatherne.com

Dawn McGuire (’95, ’97, ’01, ’04, ’07, ’10, ’12, ’17) is a neurologist and author of four poetry collections, Sleeping in Africa, Hands On, The Aphasia Cafe and American Dream with Exit Wound. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazine and anthologies, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Journal of American Neurology. McGuire has won several poetry awards, including winner of the 2013 Indie Book Award for Poetry, the Troubadour Prize (UK), the National League of American Pen Women, and the 2011 Sarah Lawrence/Campbell Corner Academy of Language Exchange Poetry Prize for “poems that treat larger themes with lyric intensity.” She is Adjunct Professor of Neurology at the Neurosciences Institute of Morehouse School of Medicine, and divides her time between Atlanta and Northern California.

Sara Michas-Martin (’04, ’08, ’10) is a poet and nonfiction writer who draws inspiration from science and the natural world. Her book Gray Matter (Fordham University Press), was chosen by Susan Wheeler for the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Current projects include a nonfiction manuscript (Black Boxes) that draws on medical, cultural and natural history to consider how the logic of the maternal body corresponds, or is in tension with, current ecological and social systems. Fire Season, a poetry manuscript in progress, takes on deep ecology and the ethics of care in a moment of environmental precarity. Her work has been supported by a Wallace Stegner fellowship in poetry from Stanford University, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, as well as fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and the Bread Loaf and Community of Writers’ conferences. Recent poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, CrazyHorse, Harvard Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Kenyon Review, KR Online, New England Review, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org and elsewhere.  www.saramichasmartin.com

Norman Minnick (’06): His collections of poetry are To Taste the Water (winner of the First Series Award from Mid-List Press), Folly (Wind Publications), and a chapbook of poems entitled Advice for a Young Poet (David Robert Books). Minnick is the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press) as well as Jim Watt’s landmark study of William Blake, Work Toward Knowing: Beginning with Blake (Kinchafoonee Creek Press), The Indianapolis Anthology(Belt Publications), and The Lost Etheridge: Uncollected Poems of Etheridge Knight (Kinchafoonee Creek Press). Norman Minnick’s second collection of poems, Folly, is published by Wind Publications. His first collection, To Taste the Water, won the First Series Award from Mid-List Press. He is the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press, 2010). www.buzzminnick.com

Berwyn Moore (’90/’92): Berwyn Moore is the author of three books of poetry, Sweet Herbaceous Miracle, winner of the 2017 John Ciardi Prize from BkMk Press, O Body Swayed, and Dissolution of Ghosts, both from Cherry Grove Collections. Her poems have been published widely in national journals, including Measure: A Review of Formal Poetry, Five Points Journal, Nimrod International Journal of Poetry and Prose, The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Journal of the American Medical Association, Cimarron Review and others. Moore’s poetry has received numerous awards, including the 2015 James Dickey Prize for Poetry from Five Points Journal and the 2007 Magliocco Prize for Poetry from Bellevue Literary Review. She has also received awards from The Pinch Journal, Margie: An American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod: International Journal of Poetry and Prose, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, New Millennium, Ruminate, Briar Cliff Review, and Negative Capability Press. She has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. In 2009, Moore was named the first Poet Laureate of Erie County, Pennsylvania.

Richard O. Moore (’96/’97): Richard Moore, a documentary filmmaker for public television, was one of the founders of KPFA—the first publicly supported radio station in the United States. He was born in Alliance, Ohio, and attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied poetry with Josephine Miles. He was associated with the San Francisco Renaissance and frequented Kenneth Rexroth’s Friday meetings for poets, philosophers, and poetry aficionados. During World War II, Moore was classified 4-F and counseled conscientious objectors. He wrote poetry for decades but shared little of it until poet Brenda Hillman encouraged him to publish. In 2010, Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp edited Moore’s book Writing the Silences, a collection representing more than 60 years of his work. Moore’s early exposures to Miles’s teachings, Rexroth’s poetry, and philosophers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein all influenced his writing. Hillman, in her foreword to Writing the Silences, explains that “Moore developed a signature style of poetry: open, spare verse that foregrounds philosophical inquiry.” Writing the Silences was a Northern California Book Award nominee. Moore published his second book, Particulars of Place, in 2015. Moore passed away in 2015 at the age of 95 in Mill Valley, CA.

Rusty Morrison (‘95/’96) has been the co-founder, co-publisher of Omnidawn since 2001. Her five books include After Urgency (won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize), the true keeps calm biding its story (won Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, James Laughlin Award, N.California Book Award, & DiCastagnola Award from PSA), and most recently: Beyond the Chainlink (Ahsahta; finalist for the NCIB Award & NCB Award). Her new book, Risk, will be published by Black Ocean on Spring 2024. She was awarded a fellowship by UC Berkeley Art Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses Program (in the program’s inaugural year of 2020). Her poems have appeared on the Poetry Foundation website, on their podcast series Poetry Now, in Colorado Review, Fence, Iowa Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction & poetry has appeared in Entropy; and her nonfiction at Harriet. Her critical essays appeared at Kenyon Review and Pleiades among other places. She is a recipient of fellowships from UC Berkeley’s Arts and Research Center, Civitella Ranieri, Djerassi, and other artist residencies. She has taught in MFA programs, been a visiting poet at colleges, and teaches workshops through Omnidawn and elsewhere. https://www.rustymorrison.com/

Collier Nogues (’06): Her poetry collections include the hybrid print/interactive volume The Ground I Stand On Is Not My Ground, selected by Forrest Gander as the winner of the 2014 Drunken Boat Poetry Book Contest, and On the Other Side, Blue (Four Way, 2011). She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she teaches undergraduate and MA creative writing and literature courses. Her creative and scholarly work has been supported by fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and the Hong Kong Research Grants Council, and her writing has appeared in Jacket2, ASAP/J, The Volta, At Length, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day Project, and elsewhere. She is a core collaborator in the Yale-NUS project DOCUMENT, which gathers artists, writers, and historians to explore transdisciplinary approaches to archives. She also edits poetry for Juked and curates Hong Kong’s English-language poetry craft talk series, Ragged Claws. www.colliernogues.com

Kathleen O’Toole is the author of the collections Meanwhile (David Robert Brooks, 2011) and Practice (Finishing Line Press, 2005). She has combined a more than thirty-year professional life in community organizing with teaching and writing. In 1991 she received an MA from Johns Hopkins University, and has taught writing at Hopkins and at the Maryland Institute College of Art. her poems have appeared in regional and national journals and magazines, including America, Christian Century, Little Patuxent Review, Margie, Natural Bridge, New Millennium Writings, Poetry, Poetry East, Potomac Review and Prairie Schooner. Find her on line in Beltway and Delaware Review. Anthologies in which her work has appeared include DC Poets Against the War and Inspired Results: Poets and Artists of Takoma Park, MD. Kathleen has attended the Community of Writers five times.  www.kathleenotoolepoetry.com

Melinda Palacio (’09) is a poet, author, and speaker. She lives in Santa Barbara and New Orleans. Her poetry chapbook, Folsom Lockdown, won Kulupi Press’ Sense of Place 2009 award. She is the author of the novel, Ocotillo Dreams (ASU Bilingual Press 2011), for which she received the Mariposa Award for Best First Book at the 2012 International Latino Book Awards and a 2012 PEN Oakland-Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature. Her first full-length poetry collection, How Fire Is a Story, Waiting, (Tia Chucha Press 2012) was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award, the Patterson Prize, and received First Prize in Poetry at the 2013 ILBA. Her new poetry book, Bird Forgiveness, is forthcoming from 3: A Taos Press in 2018. She is the City of Santa Barbara’s 10th Laureate.  www.melindapalacio.com

Photo Credit: Nell Campbell

Elizabeth Percer (’06) is the author of two novels, All Stories Are Love Stories (HarperCollins) and An Uncommon Education (HarperCollins), as well as Ultrasound, a book of poems. She is a three-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize and has twice been honored by the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation. She is also a Stanford Continuing Studies instructor and the founder of Scriblore, an editorial service dedicated to growing both the writer and the work.  www.elizabethpercer.com

Ruben Quesada (’07) is the author of Next Extinct Mammal (Greenhouse Review Press, 2011) and translator of Luis Cernuda: Exiled from the Throne of Night (Aureole Press, 2008). Quesada is also editor of the anthology Latino Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry (forthcoming, University of New Mexico Press), a collection of essays by contemporary Latino poets on the art and composition of poetry. Quesada is founding editor of Codex Journal and co-founder of Stories & Queer. He is a blogger for Ploughshares, essays editor for the Rumpus, and senior editor of Queen Mob’s Tea House. His writing has appeared widely, in journals such as the American Poetry Review, Guernica, Third Coast, and Rattle, among others. He has been a fellow and resident at CantoMundo, Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, Vermont Studio Center, Community of Writers, Red Lodge Clay Center, Santa Fe Art Institute, Lambda Literary Foundation Writer’s Retreat, and Idyllwild Arts Program. ubenquesada.com

Claudia Rankine (’93) is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her recent collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York. https://claudiarankine.com/

Photo Credit: John Lucas

Sojourner Kincaid Rolle (’94,’97) is a poet, playwright, an environmental educator and a peace activist. She was the Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, CA from 2015-2017. Her book of poems for young people, The Mellow Yellow Global Umbrella, was published as an e-book and as an audio book by Lucky Penny Press (2013). Her other books include Common Ancestry (Millie Grazie Press, 1999) and Black Street, (Center for Black Studies Research – 2009). Her poems have appeared in the publications California Quarterly, Coffee Press, Squaw Review and others, and in the following anthologies: The Geography of Home (Heyday Books, 1999), Rivertalk 2000, Poetry Zone I, II & III, The Poetry of Peace (Capra Press), A Crow Black as the Sun (Green Poet Press, 2011) and Corners of the Mouth: Celebrating 30 Years of the SLO Poetry Festival (2014 ). She has engaged young poets through her “Song of Place Poetry Project” and her work with City At Peace, Speak for the Creeks, the Annual Young Writers Poetry Contest and the MLK Poetry and Essay Contest. She hosts a monthly poetry event, The Poetry Zone, and for the past 13 years has organized an annual tribute to poetry icon Langston Hughes.  Rolle is a two-time recipient of the California Arts Council’ Artist-in-Residence program and for eight years led poetry workshops in schools throughout the South County as a part of the Santa Barbara Public Library’s Elli program.

Mira Rosenthal (’00) is a past fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and Stanford University’s Stegner Fellowship, and her work appears regularly in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, The New York Review of Books, Harvard Review, PN Review, Threepenny Review, A Public Space, and Oxford American. Her first book of poems, The Local World, received the Wick Poetry Prize, and her second book, Territorial, was selected by Terrance Hayes for the Pitt Poetry Series. Her translations of Polish poetry include Krystyna Dąbrowska’s Tideline and Tomasz Różycki’s Colonies, which won the Northern California Book Award and was shortlisted for numerous other prizes, including the International Griffin Poetry Prize and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. Her other honors include the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award, two Fulbright Fellowships, a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, and residencies at MacDowell and Hedgebrook. You can listen to her read her work at the 92nd St. Y, Slate, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, and Stanford Storytelling Project’s “Off the Page.” www.mirarosenthal.com

Marjorie Saiser (’00): Marjorie Saiser is the author of five books of poetry and co-editor of two anthologies.  Her work has been published in American Life in Poetry, The Writer’s Almanac, Nimrod, Rattle.com, PoetryMagazine.com, RHINO, Chattahoochee Review, Poetry East, Poet Lore, and other journals. She has received the WILLA Award and nominations for the Pushcart Prize.  www.poetmarge.com.

Natasha Sajé (’92) is the author of three books of poems, including Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014, a book of poetry criticism; Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014): and many other essays. Her honors include the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America, the 2002 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, and a Camargo Fellowship in France. Sajé is a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, and a member of poetry faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. in Writing Program. www.natashasaje.com

June Sylvester Saraceno (’06): Her debut novel Feral, North Carolina, 1965 was published in 2019 from Southern Fried Karma Press. Her third full-length collection of poetry, The Girl From Yesterday, was released in January 2020 by Cherry Grove Collections. Previous poetry books include of Dirt and Tar, Cherry Grove Collections, 2014; Altars of Ordinary Light, Plain View Press, 2007; and a chapbook of prose poems, Mean Girl Trips, Pudding House Publications, 2006. Her work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies including Southwestern American Literature, Tar River Poetry, Steel Toe Review, Smartish Pace and many more. She is a professor and English Program Chair at Sierra Nevada College (SNC), director of the Writers in the Woods literary speaker series, founding editor of the Sierra Nevada Review, and founder of the annual Tahoe Poetry Slam. www.junesaraceno.com.

Shelley Savren (’01): Shelley Savren’s new books, Welcome to Poetryland: Teaching Writing to Young Children and The Form of Things Unknown: Teaching Writing to Teens and Adults, which document 40 years of teaching poetry – complete with memoir, poetry-writing exercises and model poems by professionals and students – were published by Rowman & Littlefield in June 2016. Shelley lost her battle with cancer July 3, 2017. www.shelleysavren.com

Born in St. Thomas, U.S.V.I. and raised in Apopka, Florida, Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her other honors include an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review, a Daniel Varoujan Award and the Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from CantoMundo, Cave Canem, MacDowell Colony and the Poetry Project. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times and elsewhere. Nicole holds an MLA in Africana studies from the University of South Florida and an MFA in creative writing from New York University. She is the executive director at Cave Canem Foundation, Inc.

Anne Shaw (’10): Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, winner of the 2007 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and of Dido in Winter (Persea, 2013). Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in numerous journals, including Harvard Review, New American Writing, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She has also been featured on Poetry Daily and From the Fishouse. She is also a visual artist, currently studying at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.anneshaw.org

Kent Shaw (’04): Kent Shaw’s first book, Calenture, was published in 2008. He has since published work in The Believer, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly and elsewhere. He has been awarded a residency at the MacDowell Colony. He is currently an Assistant Professor at West Virginia State University.

Scot Siegel‘s books of poems include The Constellation of Extinct Stars and Other Poems (County Clare, Ireland: Salmon Poetry, 2016), Thousands Flee California Wildflowers (Salmon Poetry, 2012), and Some Weather (Plain View Press, 2008). He is also the author of two chapbooks, Skeleton Says (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Untitled Country (Untitled Country, 2009). Honors include fellowship-residencies with Playa at Summer Lake, Honorable Mention in Nimrod International’s Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize Contest (Philip Levine, Judge), finalist in Aesthetica Magazine’s (UK) Creative Works Contest, and Oregon State Library-Poetry Northwest “150 Outstanding Oregon Poetry Books,” among others. Siegel published the literary journal Untitled Country Review (2010-2013). www.scotsiegel.com

Kevin Simmonds is a poet, composer, musician and performer. His books include The Monster I Am Today (Northwestern UP 2021), the poetry collection Bend to it (Salmon Poetry, 2014), Mad for Meat (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Ota Benga Under My Mother’s Roof, the edited edition of the late Carrie Allen McCray’s final work of poetry (University of South Carolina Press, 2012), and the poetry anthology Collective Brightness: LGBTIQ Poets on Faith, Religion & Spirituality (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2011). Kevin received a Fulbright fellowship to Singapore where he started the first-ever poetry workshop in Changi Prison. He has published poems, essays and reviews inAmerican Scholar, FIELD, jubilat, Kyoto Journal, Massachusetts Review, Poetry, Rhino and Salt Hill, and in the anthologies Beyond the Frontier, Ecopoetry, Gathering Ground, The Ringing Ear, To Be Left with the Body and War Diaries. www.kevinsimmonds.com

Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collections Terrible Blooms (Copper Canyon Press) and Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Tin House, Harvard Review, New England Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, and others. She has received awards and fellowships from the Pushcart Prize, NEA, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. She is a freelance editor in San Francisco.

Barbara Buckman Strasko is the author of the collection of poetry Graffiti in Braille (Word Press, 2012). Strasko was the first Poet Laureate of Lancaster County and the 2009 River of Words Teacher of the Year. Her poem “Bricks and Mortar ‘ was selected to be engraved in granite and bronze in the main square of her city in Lancaster PA.
www.word-press.com/strasko.html

Judith Taylor‘s newest book, Sex Libris, was published by What Books Press in 2013. She’s the author of two previous poetry collections, Curios and Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom, and a chapbook, Burning. Taylor is the co-editor of Air Fare: Stories, Poems and Essays on Flying. Her work has been included in numerous anthologies and journals. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. Currently, she teaches private classes, travels, takes photographs, and co-edits the online poetry journal POOL. www.judithtaylorpoet.com

Lynne Thompson (’97,’02): Lynne Thompson is the author of two full-length collections of poetry: Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, and Start With A Small Guitar (2013). A Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of a Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles in 2015, her poems have appeared in numerous journals including the African American Review, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as the recent anthology Wide Awake, Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond. Thompson has served as a Preliminary Judge for the Kate & Kingsley Tufts Awards and she is Reviews & Essays Editor for the California journal, Spillway.

Francine Marie Tolf‘s memoir, Joliet Girl, and her first full-length collection of poems, Rain, Lilies, Luck, were published by North Star Press of St. Cloud in 2010. Prodigal (Pinyon Publishing) was released in 2012. Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Water~Stone, Rattle, New Letters, Margie and Southern Humanities Review. Francine received a Squaw Valley poetry fellowship in 2002 and has since received grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Barbara Deming / Money for Women Foundation, and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was a nonfiction winner in the 2006-07 Loft Mentor Series contest and has twice been awarded Honorable Mention in the Pablo Neruda Poetry Contest. Francine is the author of three poetry chapbooks (two from Pudding House and one from Plan B). Sample her work at www.francinemarietolf.com.

Sally Van Doren, a poet and artist, is the author of three poetry collections, Promise (LSU Press 2017), Possessive (2012) and Sex at Noon Taxes (2008) which received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.  She has taught at the 92^nd Street Y in New York, Washington University and the St. Louis Public schools and is a curator for the St. Louis Poetry Center. A graduate of Princeton (BA) and the University of Missouri-St. Louis (MFA), she posts daily excerpts from her ongoing poem, The Sense Series, via Instagram@sallyvandoren. Her poems have appeared widely in literary magazines such as American Poet, Boulevard, The New Republic and The Southern Review.  Three of her poems were chosen as the Poem-A-Day on poets.org and her poem, “Preposition,” is featured as an animated film in the PBS Poetry Everywhere program. She attended the Community of Writers in 2001, 2003 and 2006. www.sallyvandoren.com

Valerie Wallace’s debut poetry collection House of McQueen (March 2018) was chosen by Vievee Francis for the Four Way Books Intro Prize in Poetry. Her work was chosen by Margaret Atwood for the Atty Award, and she has received an Illinois Arts Council Literary Award and the San Miguel de Allende Writers Conference Award in Poetry, as well as many grants to support her work, for which she is extremely grateful. Valerie manages the Hillary Gravendyk Scholarship for first-time attendees to the SVCW Poetry Workshop. She attended the Community of Writers in 2010.

Paul Watsky, who lives and works in San Francisco and Inverness, CA, is co-translator with Emiko Miyashita of Santoka (PIE Books, 2006); two collections of his own, Telling The Difference and Walk-Up Music (Fisher King Press 2010, 2015), the latter receiving a Kirkus Recommended Review; and has work in The Carolina Quarterly, Interim, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere. A onetime assistant professor of English at San Francisco State University, he retrained as a clinical psychologist and Jungian analyst, career threads which now intertwine. As Poetry Editor of Jung Journal: Culture and Psyche, he delivered a paper in 2016 entitled “Ecocidal Themes in Japanese and English Language Poetry” at the international Jungian congress in Kyoto, and as a psychotherapist specializes in issues related to creativity in the arts and sciences. Paul attended the Community of Writers in 2007, 2009, 2011, 2013, and 2017. www.paulwatskypoetry.com

David Watts (’90,’91,’92,’93,’97,’99,’02,’04,’13): David Watts has won the Talent House Press award for the chapbook, Making, and was runner-up in The Francis Lock Prize competition for the most imaginative poem, “loss.” Seven books of poetry, two CD’s of word-jazz, two collections of short stories (Random House and U. Iowa Press) and four anthologies have been published. Essays that focus on writing and healing have been published by The NEJM, The Examined Life, and California Medicine. His mystery novel, The Lucifer Connection, was released in the summer of 2015 and his futuristic novella, Future Perfect, will be published March, 2016 by Flannigan-Wale of London. He created a summer writers workshop, Writing the Medical Experience, hosted by SVCW, Sarah Lawrence College and Dominican University. He was Executive Producer (with Joan Baranow) for the Documentary, “Healing Words: Poetry and Medicine,” which aired on PBS during 2008-9. He has taught poetry at the Fromm Institute for twenty years. www.davidwattsbooks.com

Charles Harper Webb (’91): Charles Harper Webb’s eleventh collection of poems, Brain Camp, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2015. A Million MFAs Are Not Enough, a book of essays on contemporary American poetry, was published by Red Hen Press in 2016. Recipient of grants from the Whiting and Guggenheim foundations, Webb teaches Creative Writing at California State University, Long Beach. He attended the Community of Writers in 1991.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, Sarah Lawrence College alumna, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess, Post Pardon, Black Pearl, Perfect on Accident, and “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. Published by Virtual Artists Collective, her debut full-length collection, Hurrah’s Nest, was a finalist for the 2013 Wheatley Book Awards, 82nd California Book Awards, and nominated for a 44th NAACP Image Awards. Her second collection, A Penny Saved, inspired by the true-life story of Polly Mitchell, was published by Willow Books, an imprint of Aquarius Press in 2012. Her latest full-length collection, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, was published by Augury Books and nominated for the 29th Lambda Literary Awards. Most recently, Arisa co-authored, with Laura Atkins, Biddy Mason Speaks Up, a middle-grade biography in verse on the midwife and philanthropist Bridget “Biddy” Mason, which is the second book in the Fighting for Justice series. Biddy Mason Speaks Up was awarded the Maine Literary Award for Young People’s Literature, Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction, and the Independent Publisher Book Awards Silver Medal for Multicultural Juvenile Nonfiction. Forthcoming in March 2021 is the poetic memoir Who’s Your Daddy and the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, co-edited with Miah Jeffra and Monique Mero and published by Foglifter Press.

Arisa was awarded a 2013-14 Cultural Funding grant from the City of Oakland to create the libretto and score for Post Pardon: The Opera, and received, in that same year, an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation to fund the dear Gerald project, which takes a personal and collective look at absent fathers. As the creator of the Beautiful Things Project, Arisa curates poetic collaborations that center narratives of women, queer, and trans people of color.

A native New Yorker, living in central Maine, Arisa is an assistant professor in creative writing at Colby College and serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press. She also volunteers as an advisory board member for Gertrude and a community advisory board member for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.

Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018). Her full-length poetry collection is Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020), longlisted for the 2021 PEN America Open Book Award. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers and is a Spring 2021 ARC Poetry Fellow at UC Berkeley. She attended the Community of Writers in 1994 and 2003.  mawsheinwin.com

Photo by Annabelle Port

Sholeh Wolpé is a poet, playwright and literary translator. Born in Iran, she spent most of her teen years in Trinidad and the UK before settling in the United States. She is a recipient of the 2014 PEN/Heim, 2013 Midwest Book Award and 2010 Lois Roth Persian Translation prize. Wolpé is the author of three collections of poetry and three books of translations, and is the editor of three anthologies. Her upcoming book, Attar’s Conference of the Birds, was released by W.W. Norton in March, 2017. Sholeh lives in Los Angeles and attended the Community of Writers in 2004. www.sholehwolpe.com

Mark Wunderlich’s collections of poetry include The Anchorage (1999), winner of the Lambda Literary Award, and Voluntary Servitude (2004). His honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. He has also been awarded the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. His poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies, including The New Young American Poets (2000, ed. Kevin Prufer), and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry (2000, ed. Timothy Liu). He attended the Poetry Workshop at the Community of Writers in 1993. www.markwunderlich.com

For years Bill Yake directed investigations into the toxic contamination of water, fish, and sediment for the Washington State Department of Ecology while writing poetry on the sly. Now his hidden life and perceptions have been revealed in two collections of poetry; This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain(2003) and Unfurl, Kite, and Veer (2010) both from Radiolarian Press, Astoria OR. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies serving the environmental and literary communities – from Wilderness Magazine to Anthropology and Humanism, from Open Spaces Quarterly to Fine Madness, fromRattle to ISLE – Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. Recently two of his tree-inspired poems were featured in Between Earth and Sky, a book by the instigator of forest canopy research, Nalini Nadkarni. Bill’s poetry has also won the Alligator Juniper Award (2003) and the James M. Snydal Prize (2004), and his poem “The Lowly, Exalted” was featured in anexhibition celebrating invertebrates in art.

Emily Jungmin Yoon is the author of Ordinary Misfortunes, the 2017 winner of the Sunken Garden Chapbook Prize by Tupelo Press and selected by Maggie Smith, and A Cruelty Special to Our Species, published by Ecco Books in September 2018.

Born in Busan, Republic of Korea, since the age of 10, she has lived in Canada and the US and currently lives in Chicago. She has also accepted awards and fellowships from Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, AWP’s WC&C Scholarship Competition, Aspen Words, and elsewhere. In 2017, she received the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Her poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, POETRY, The New York Times Magazine, Korean Literature Now, and elsewhere.

Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the NEH, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the NEA. He’s received a Pushcart Prize, and his book, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of Hands, Days, Braver Deeds, (Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize), No Other Life, (William Carlos Williams Award), Pleasure, and Even So: New and Selected Poems. His latest chapbook, Adversary, was recently released by Miramar Editions. His print work is represented in collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and The Getty Center for the Arts. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the PSA. He teaches creative writing, and directs the Cowell Press at UC Santa Cruz.

Songbirds of the Nine Rivers, by Joseph Zaccardi, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in April 2023. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Cincinnati Review, Poetry East, Rattle, and elsewhere. Joe served as the poet laureate of Marin County, California, from 2013 to 2015, and edited Changing Harm to Harmony: Bullies and Bystanders Project.

www.josephzaccardi.com

Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. Before a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017),explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family. Zamora is a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University, and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign.