KIM ADDONIZIO’S latest books are Lucifer at the Starlite and Ordinary Genius: A Guide for the Poet Within. She has also authored two novels, Little Beauties and My Dreams Out in the Street. Her awards include two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim. She teaches privately in Oakland, California, and online at www.kimaddonizio.com.
AI authored seven books, including Vice, which won the National Book Award in 1999.
ANGELA BALL’S books of poetry include Kneeling Between Parked Cars, Possession, Quartet, and The Museum of the Revolution. Her newest collection, Night Clerk at the Hotel of Both Worlds, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2007, received both the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award and the Donald Hall Prize from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. The recipient of a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a Professor of English at the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi.
STEPHEN BERG’S most recent books are Cuckoo’s Blood; The Elegy on Hats; and Rimbaud: Versions & Intentions (…still unilluminated I…).
GERALD COSTANZO teaches in the Creative Writing Program at Carnegie Mellon University and serves as Director of Carnegie Mellon University Press. His most recent collections of poems are Great Disguise and Nobody Lives on Arthur Godfrey Boulevard. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships as well as Fellowships from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Falk Foundation. He lives in Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and in Portland, Oregon.
PETER COVINO is an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. Winner of the 2007 PEN America/Osterweil Award for Emerging Poets, he is the author of Cut Off the Ears of Winter as well The Right Place to Jump. Recent poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, and others. He is also the founding editor of Barrow Street.
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING’S most recent book of poems is Rope (Penguin, 2009). She teaches at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.
STEPHEN DUNN is the author of fourteen books of poetry, including the recently published What Goes On: Selected and New Poems, 1995-2009. His book Different Hours was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 2001. He lives in Frostburg, Maryland.
TOM DVORSKE’S work has appeared in Sentence, Passages North, Texas Review, Spork, Poems & Plays, and The Louisville Review. He is the author of the chapbook What You Know (Lazy Frog Press, 2002). Currently, he lives in Lake Charles, Louisiana, with his wife and daughter.
AMY GERSTLER’S twelve books include Dearest Creature; Ghost Girl; Medicine; Nerve Storm; and Bitter Angel, which was awarded the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Village Voice, Bookforum, Artforum, Los Angeles Magazine, and numerous other publications. She is a core faculty member at the Bennington Writing Seminars, Bennington College, Vermont, and lives in Los Angeles, California.
JACK GILBERT is the author of Refusing Heaven, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2006; The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992; Monolithos, which was short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize; and Views of Jeoparder, the 1962 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize.
LINDA GREGG is the author of seven poetry collections: Too Bright to See; Alma; The Sacraments of Desire; Chosen by the Lion; Things and Flesh; In the Middle Distance; and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems. In 2006, she received the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry for career achievement. She lives in New York City.
BETH GYLYS is an Associate Professor at Georgia State University. She has published two collections of poetry—Spot in the Dark (Ohio State University Press, 2004) and Bodies That Hum (Silverfish Review Press, 1999). Her work has appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Antioch Review, Kenyon Review, and Ploughshares.
MARK HALLIDAY teaches at Ohio University. His fifth book of poems, Keep This Forever, was published by Tupelo Press in 2008.
JAMES HARMS is the author of five collections of poetry: After West, Freeways and Aqueducts, Quarters, The Joy Addict, and Modern Ocean (all published by Carnegie Mellon University Press). His awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, three Pushcart Prizes, and the PEN/Revson Fellowship. He founded and now directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing at West Virginia University, where he is a Professor of English. He also directs New England College’s M.F.A. Program in Poetry.
ROBERT HASS’S books of poetry include Time and Materials, which won the 2007 National Book Award; Sun Under Wood: New Poems; Human Wishes, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1996; Praise; and Field Guide, winner of the 1973 Yale Younger Poets Prize. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. He lives in California with his wife and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
BOB HICOK’S most recent collection, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), was awarded the 2008 Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. His other books include Insomnia Diary (Pitt, 2004); Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Plus Shipping (BOA, 1998); and The Legend of Light (University of Wisconsin, 1995), which received the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year. A recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, his work has been selected for inclusion in five volumes of Best American Poetry.
EDWARD HIRSCH’S most recent book of poems is Special Orders. He is President of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
TONY HOAGLAND has published four collections of poetry: most recently, Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, from Graywolf Press. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the low-residency program at Warren Wilson College.
CYNTHIA HUNTINGTON’S most recent book of poems, The Radiant, was published by Four Way Books in 2003. She has also published a prose memoir, The Salt House. She lives in Vermont and is a Professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her latest work in progress, set in the dunes of Provincetown, is titled White Heat: A Hallucinatory Memoir.
DENIS JOHNSON is the author of several novels, plays, and books of verse. His novel, Tree of Smoke, won the 2007 National Book Award.
ROBERT KELLY has published more than fifty collections of poetry, including Kill the Messenger Who Brings Bad News; Red Actions: Selected Poems, 1960-1993; Lapis; and Under Words. He has received an Award for Distinction from the National Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. He currently serves as Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature and Co-Director of the Program in Written Arts at Bard College, where he has taught since 1961.
YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA’S many books include Pleasure Dome: New & Collected Poems, 1975-1999 and Blues Notes: Essays, Interviews & Commentaries. He has received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He lives in New York City, where he is Distinguished Senior Poet in New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program.
MAXINE KUMIN’S sixteenth collection of poetry, Still to Mow, published by W.W. Norton & Co., Inc., in 2007, has just come out in paperback. Her awards include the Pulitzer Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award, the Robert Frost Medal, and the Paterson Prize. From 1981 to 1982, she served as Poet Laureate of the United States. Currently, she and her husband live on a farm in Warner, New Hampshire.
DAVID LEHMAN’S latest books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook/Schocken) and Yeshiva Boys, a collection of poems (Scribner). He is the editor of The Oxford Book of American Poetry, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, and the author of such books as Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man and The Daily Mirror: A Journal in Poetry. He lives in New York City.
DONNA MASINI is the author of two collections of poems—Turning to Fiction (W.W. Norton & Co., 2004) and That Kind of Danger (W.W. Norton & Co., 1998). Her poems have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, Open City, TriQuarterly, The Paris Review, and Parnassus. A recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, and a Pushcart Prize, she is an Associate Professor of English at Hunter College. She lives in New York City.
JANE MILLER’S 2008 book. Midnights, is Saturnalia Press’s artist/poet Collaboration Series #4 (with visual art contributed by Beverly Pepper and an introduction by C.D. Wright). Her other recent work is the book-length sequence, A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), which received the 2006 Audre Lorde Prize in Poetry. Among her earlier collections are Wherever You Lay Your Head; Memory at These Speeds: New & Selected Poems; The Greater Leisures, a National Poetry Series Selection; and August Zero, winner of the Western States Book Award.
STEVE ORLEN published six books of poetry, most recently The Elephant’s Child: New & Selected Poems, 1978-2005 (Ausable Press, 2006). For more than thirty years, he taught creative writing at the University of Arizona and, for nearly twenty years, at Warren Wilson College.
KEVIN PRUFER’S books include In a Beautiful Country (Four Way Books, 2011); National Anthem (Four Way Books, 2008); and Fallen from a Chariot (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2005). The recipient of three Pushcart Prizes, he teaches at the University of Houston.
MARTHA RHODES is the author of three collections of poetry: At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance, and Mother Quiet. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the M.F.A. Program at Warren Wilson College. She is also the founding editor and director of Four Way Books.
J. ALLYN ROSSER’S third collection of poems, Foiled Again, won the 2007 New Criterion Poetry Prize and was published by Ivan R. Dee. Her previous books are Misery Prefigured and Bright Moves. She has received numerous awards for her work, among them the Morse Poetry Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Award for Younger Poets from the Academy of American Poets, the Wood and Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry, and Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. Rosser currently teaches at Ohio University.
MICHAEL RYAN has published four books of poems, an autobiography, a memoir, and a collection of essays about poetry and writing. He has been a National Book Award Finalist and the winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Award.
RAVI SHANKAR is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and founding editor of the international online journal of the arts, Drunken Boat (www.drunkenboat.com). He has published one book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove Collections, 2004), and, more recently, co-edited Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from Asia, the Middle East and Beyond (Norton, 2008).
ALAN SHAPIRO, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has published ten books of poetry: most recently, Old War (Houghton Mifflin, 2008). He has won the Kingsley Tufts Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and a Guggenheim, among other prestigious awards. Since 1995, he has taught in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina.
RICHARD SHELTON is a Regents’ Professor in the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program. He is also the author of eleven books of poetry and two memoirs. In 2000, he received a grant from the Lannan Foundation for the commitment he has made, over the last thirty-five years, to developing and directing writing workshops in the Arizona state prison system.
PATRICIA SMITH is the author of five books of poetry, including Blood Dazzler, a 2008 National Book Award finalist, and Teahouse of the Almighty, winner of the 2007 Paterson Poetry Prize. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, a Cave Canem faculty member, and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She teaches at the College of Staten Island and in the Stonecoast M.F.A. Program at the University of Southern Maine.
MARK STRAND is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Man and Camel, Blizzard of One, Dark Harbor, and Reasons for Moving. His honors include the Pulitzer Prize, the Bollingen Prize, three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a MacArthur Foundation Award, and the Edgar Allen Poe Prize from the Academy of American Poets. He teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and lives in New York City.
JAMES TATE’S latest book is Ghost Soldiers. He has received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at the University of Massachusetts.