GRABBED
OUR CONTRIBUTORS
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A gender-inclusive anthology of poetry and prose that addresses the physical and psychological act of being “grabbed,” or in any way assaulted.
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The twenty-first century has brought unprecedented evidence of the prevalence of sexual abuse and assault. Finally, the world is beginning to recognize the depraved and hypocritical actions of celebrities, politicians, CEOs, and Hollywood moguls. People everywhere are speaking out in outrage, to express support for the victims of the assaults, and to raise their voices against a culture that has allowed this behavior to continue for too long.
The editors of this gender-inclusive anthology asked writers and poets to contribute pieces about what being “grabbed” means to each of them. The result is a collection of emotional works in prose and poetry addressing a range of injustices including all forms of sexual misconduct—from an unwanted caress to rape.
The writers represented here have mined their collective experiences to reveal their most vulnerable moments—for some, these are stories that have never been shared before. In reading this book, we understand what it means to be “grabbed” emotionally, psychologically, and physically. In the aftermath of violation, we take a moment to hold humanity in our own hands.
The editors of this gender-inclusive anthology asked writers and poets to contribute pieces about what being “grabbed” means to each of them. The result is a collection of emotional works in prose and poetry addressing a range of injustices including all forms of sexual misconduct—from an unwanted caress to rape.
The writers represented here have mined their collective experiences to reveal their most vulnerable moments—for some, these are stories that have never been shared before. In reading this book, we understand what it means to be “grabbed” emotionally, psychologically, and physically. In the aftermath of violation, we take a moment to hold humanity in our own hands.
THE GRABBED EDITORS
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Richard Blanco’s mother, seven months pregnant, and the rest of the family arrived as exiles from Cuba to Madrid where he was born. Forty-five days later, the family immigrated once more to New York City, and eventually settled in Miami. Only a few weeks old, Blanco already belonged to three countries, a foreshadowing of the negotiations of cultural identity, community, and belonging that would shape his life and continue to inform his work. As a poet, memoirist, and essayist, Blanco is a sought-after speaker who captivates audiences around the nation and the world with his dynamic storytelling and powerful readings. Advocating for diversity, LGBTQ rights, immigration, arts education, cultural exchange, and other important issues of our time, Blanco routinely speaks at a variety of venues and functions, including fundraisers and galas, professional development conferences, middle and high schools, universities, commencement ceremonies, writing conferences, and literary festivals.
In 2013, Blanco was selected by President Obama as the fifth inaugural poet in U.S. history, joining the ranks of such luminary poets as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou. He stands as the youngest, first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Since 2016 he has served on the Obama Foundation’s storytelling committee. A committed proponent of the civic role that poetry can fulfill in the public realm, Blanco’s work addresses sociopolitical matters that affect us collectively. He is the contributing poet to “The Village Voice,” a bi-monthly segment on Boston public radio station WGBH that discusses news topics through the lens of socially conscious poetry. In addition, he has written and performed occasional poems in support of organizations and events such as the re-opening of the U.S. embassy in Cuba, Freedom to Marry, the Tech Awards of Silicon Valley, and the Boston Strong benefit concert following the Boston Marathon bombings. In 2017, Two Ponds Press published Boundaries, featuring Blanco’s poems paired with Jacob Hessler’s photos. Together, their work investigates the boundaries of race, gender, class, and ethnicity, among many others; and challenges the physical, imagined, and psychological dividing lines—both historic and current—that shadow the United States. His latest book of poems, How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019), both interrogates the American narrative, past and present, and celebrates the still unkept promise of its ideals. About this collection, poet Carolyn Forché reflects: “In this timely collection, Richard Blanco masterfully embraces his role as a civic poet, confronting our nation’s riddled history in the light of conscience. At once personal and political, these lyric narratives decry injustice and proclaim our hopes.” |
The Academy of American Poets chose Blanco to serve as its first Education Ambassador. He writes lesson plans for the Academy, visits students at all grade levels, and conducts workshops for educators on innovative and easy ways to teach poetry. He is also a frequent poet-in-residence at high schools across the country, offering interdisciplinary programs for both students and educators, customized to meet each school’s particular needs. As a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Florida International University, he developed courses on the intersections of poetry, community, art and current events. He has also served as artist-in-residence at Colby College, and has taught at Georgetown University, Wesleyan University, American University, and many literary centers throughout the country. Blanco is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow and a Phi Beta Kappa Alumnus Member. A builder of cities as well as poems, Blanco holds degrees in civil engineering and creative writing from Florida International University. In addition, he has received honorary doctorates from Macalester College, the University of Rhode Island, the University of Southern Maine, and Colby College.
Blanco’s first book of poetry, City of a Hundred Fires, was published in 1998 to critical acclaim, winning the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press. The collection explored his cultural yearnings and contradictions as a Cuban-American, and the emotional details of his transformational first trip to Cuba. Blanco’s wanderlust journeys through Europe and the Americas inspired his second book, Directions to The Beach of the Dead(University of Arizona Press, 2005), which received the Beyond Margins Award from the PEN American Center for its explorations of place, culture, family, and love. Looking for The Gulf Motel, published in 2012 by University of Pittsburgh Press, relates Blanco’s complex navigation through his cultural, sexual, and artistic identities. The book received the Paterson Prize, the Thom Gunn Award, a Maine Literary Award, and was translated into a Spanish bilingual edition by Valparaíso Ediciones. The University of Pittsburgh Press has published chapbooks of his occasional poems, including his presidential inaugural poem “One Today,” “Boston Strong,” and “Matters of the Sea.” “One Today” was also published as a children’s book in collaboration with the renowned illustrator, Dav Pilkey.
In his first prose publication, For All of Us, One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey (Beacon Press, 2013), Blanco shared the emotional details of his experiences as presidential inaugural poet, reflecting on his understanding of what it means to be an American and his life-changing role as a public voice. Blanco’s critically acclaimed memoir, The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood (Ecco Press, 2014), is a poignant, hilarious, and inspiring memoir that explores his coming-of-age as the child of Cuban immigrants and his attempts to understand his place in America while grappling with his burgeoning artistic and sexual identities. The book won the 2015 Lambda Literary Award for Memoir and a 2015 Maine Literary Award, and it has been selected for first-year reading programs at several colleges, including Duke University, FIU, and Oklahoma City University.
Whether speaking as the Cuban Blanco or the American Richard, the homebody or the world traveler, the shy boy or the openly gay man, the civil engineer or the civic-minded poet, Blanco’s writings possess a story-rich quality that illuminates the human spirit. His work asks those universal questions we all ask ourselves on our own journeys: Where am I from? Where do I belong? Who am I in this world?
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Caridad Moro is the author of TORTILLERA, the winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize for Florida which will be published by Texas Review Press in the Spring of 2021, as well as the chapbook Visionware, published by Finishing Line Press as part of its New Women's Voices Series.
She is the recipient of an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant and a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in poetry. Her work has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes, The Best of the Net and a Lambda Literary Award. Recent work can be found at The Best American Poetry Blog, Rhino, Go Magazine, Fantastical Florida, Notre Dame Review and others. Moro is also an Associate Editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal, as well as a career educator who has been honored as the recipient of an Educational Leader Award from Unity Coalition for her work with LGBTQ youth and as a Francisco R. Walker Teacher of The Year Nominee. She resides in Miami, FL with her wife and son. |
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Nikki Moustaki, author of the memoir, The Bird Market of Paris (Henry Holt, 2015), holds an MA in poetry from New York University, an MFA in poetry from Indiana University, and an MFA in fiction from New York University, and has taught creative writing at those universities, as well as at The New School in New York City and Miami Dade College in Florida. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant in poetry, along with many other national writing awards. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in various literary magazines, anthologies, and college textbooks.
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Nikki has been published in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Publisher’s Weekly, The Village Voice, and The Miami Herald, among others, and her work has been featured in Glamour, Oprah’s O Magazine, Elle Magazine, and NPR. She is the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Poetry (2001) and she has a poetry collection, Extremely Lightweight Guns, forthcoming by Red Hen Press (2020).
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Elisa Albo’s poetry chapbook Passage to America recounts her family immigrant story and Each Day More is a collectionof elegies, both personal and public (Main Street Rag). Her narrative poems about family, food, and humanity are largely works of witness and have appeared in numerous journals including Alimentum, Bomb Magazine, The Connecticut River Review, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, International Literary Quarterly, The MacGuffin, MiPoesias, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, The Potomac: A Journal of Poetry & Politics, Sixfold, Swamp Ape Review, SWWIM Every Day and Zing Magazine. |
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Her work appears in anthologies including Having a Wonderful Time (Simon & Shuster); Irrepressible Appetites (Rock Press); Tigertail: A South Florida Annual (several issues); Howl, 2016! Poems, Rants, and Essays on the Election (Prism Light Press); Two Countries: Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen Press, 2017), Vinegar and Char (University of Georgia Press, 2018), and the zine The Shelter of Politics (Brackish Daughters, 2018). She is an associate editor for South Florida Poetry Journal and has been interviewed on NPR.
A professor as well as a poet, Elisa was born in Havana and raised in central Florida, has a BA in English from the University of Florida, a Master in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from Florida International University. At Broward College for over 25 years, she teaches composition, creative writing, ESL, literature, and Honors courses, and is the recipient of an Endowed Teaching Chair Award and Professor of the Year. She lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
A professor as well as a poet, Elisa was born in Havana and raised in central Florida, has a BA in English from the University of Florida, a Master in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) and an MFA in Creative Writing, both from Florida International University. At Broward College for over 25 years, she teaches composition, creative writing, ESL, literature, and Honors courses, and is the recipient of an Endowed Teaching Chair Award and Professor of the Year. She lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.
THE GRABBED FOREWORD, BY JOYCE MAYNARD
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Joyce Maynard is the author of nine novels and three memoirs, including The New York Times bestselling novels To Die For and Labor Day (both adapted for film) and the best-selling memoir, At Home in the World—translated into sixteen languages. Her most recent memoir, The Best of Us—about finding her husband and losing him to cancer four years later—was published in Fall, 2017. Her new novel—her tenth—will be published in Winter, 2020. In 2002 Maynard founded The Lake Atitlan Writing Workshop in San Marcos La Laguna, Guatemala, where she hosts a weeklong workshop in personal storytelling every winter, as well as a summer memoir workshop in her home state of New Hampshire. She is a fellow of The MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Forty-six years after dropping out of college at age 18, Joyce Maynard returned to college at Yale in the fall of 2018 to resume her studies.
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THE GRABBED AFTERWORD, BY PROFESSOR ANITA HILL
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Anita Hill is a University Professor of Law, Public Policy and Women’s Studies in the Heller Graduate School of Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, and the Chair, Commission to Eliminate Sexual Harassment and Advance Equality in the Workplace. Hill is the youngest of 13 children from a farm in Oklahoma, and received her J.D. from Yale Law School in 1980. She began her career in private practice in Washington, D.C. There she also worked at the U. S. Education Department and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In 1989, Hill became the first African American to be tenured at the University of Oklahoma, College of Law, where she taught contracts and commercial law. Currently, at Brandeis University, she teaches courses on gender, race, social policy and legal history. Along with Provost Steve A. N. Goldstein, Hill is responsible for implementing Fulfilling the Promise: The Brandeis University Strategic Plan. As counsel to Cohen Milstein, she advises on class action workplace discrimination cases. |
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In December of 2017, Professor Hill became the Chair of the Hollywood entertainment industry’s Commission to Eliminate Sexual Harassment and Advance Equality in the Workplace. In that role she will establish a best practices and policies framework for addressing workplace abuses and discrimination and creating more equitable work environments throughout the industry.
Hill’s latest book is Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home (Beacon Press, 2011), an analysis of the housing market collapse of 2008 and its impact on gender and racial equality. Hill adds this work to numerous other publications including books and articles on subjects ranging from bankruptcy to equal educational opportunity. Professor Hill continues to push the envelope in pursuit of equality, teaming up with MacArthur Genius Award-winning artist Mark Bradford as he created an exhibit for the 2017 Venice Biennale International Arts Festival opening in May in Venice, Italy.
Hill’s latest book is Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race and Finding Home (Beacon Press, 2011), an analysis of the housing market collapse of 2008 and its impact on gender and racial equality. Hill adds this work to numerous other publications including books and articles on subjects ranging from bankruptcy to equal educational opportunity. Professor Hill continues to push the envelope in pursuit of equality, teaming up with MacArthur Genius Award-winning artist Mark Bradford as he created an exhibit for the 2017 Venice Biennale International Arts Festival opening in May in Venice, Italy.
THE GRABBED CONTRIBUTORS
Photo Credit: J. Tomás López
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Lynne Barrett’s third story collection, Magpies (Carnegie Mellon), received the Florida Book Awards fiction gold medal, and she is the editor of Making Good Time: True Stories of How We Do, and Don’t, Get Around in South Florida, recently published by Jai-Alai Books. Her stories and essays can be found in The Hong Kong Review, Orange Blossom Review, New Flash Fiction Review, Mystery Tribune, The Southern Women’s Review, Flash! Writing the Very Short Story, and Just to Watch Them Die: Crime Stories Inspired by the Songs of Johnny Cash. An Edgar Award recipient for best mystery short story, she teaches at Florida International University and edits The Florida Book Review. More at www.LynneBarrett.com
Twitter: @LynneBarrett Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LynneBarrettauthor/ Website: www.LynneBarrett.com |
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Ellen Bass’s newest book, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in April 2020. Among her previous books are Like a Beggar (2014), The Human Line (2007), and Mules of Love (2002). She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (1973). Among her honors are three Pushcart Prizes, The Lambda Literary Award, The Pablo Neruda Prize, Larry Levis Prize, New Letters Prize, and Fellowships from the NEA and the California Arts Council. Her poetry appears frequently in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Bass is also coauthor of the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (1988, 2008) and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth and Their Allies (1996). A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and at the Santa Cruz County jails, and she teaches in the low-residency MFA program in writing at Pacific University. www.ellenbass.com
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Ruth Behar, the Pura Belpré Award–winning author of Lucky Broken Girl, was born in Havana, grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. In addition to writing for young people, her work includes poetry, memoir, and acclaimed travel books, An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy, which explore her return journeys to Cuba and her search for home. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Other honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and being named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. She teaches anthropology at the University of Michigan and lives in Ann Arbor. Her new middle-grade novel, Letters from Cuba, is inspired by her grandmother's escape from Poland to Cuba on the eve of WWII.
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Angela Bonavoglia writes on social, health and women’s issues, politics, film, TV, and all things Catholic. Most recently, she authored Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. Her first book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion (foreword by Gloria Steinem) features her interviews with celebrities and other prominent people about their abortion experiences (1920s-1980s). Her work has appeared in many venues, including Ms., The Nation, the Chicago Tribune, Salon,Women’s Media Center, Medium, and HuffPost. Blindsided is adapted from a work-in-progress, her memoir of a second-wave feminist. Find her on Twitter @angiebona or at www.angelabonavoglia.com. |
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Laure-Anne Bosselaar is the author of The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, Small Gods of Grief, winner of the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry for 2001, and of A New Hunger – an ALA Notable Book. Her poetry was featured on Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ “Poem-a-Day” website, and in reviews such as Orion, Georgia Review, Ploughshares and Harvard Review. Garrison Keillor read four of her poems on NPR’s “A Writer’s Almanac.” A Pushcart Prize recipient, and the editor of four anthologies, she taught at Emerson College, Sarah Lawrence College, UCSB, and teaches at the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program of Pine Manor College, in Boston. Her latest book, These Many Rooms, came out from Four Way Books in 2019.
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Oliver Brantome is an English and art history student at Florida International University. Their work has been published in Apogee Literary Journal and Into The Void Magazine. They reside in Miami, Florida. Instagram: @venom_versed
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Jericho Brown is the author of three collections of poetry: The Tradition (2019), a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and the winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was named one of the best of the year by Library Journal, Coldfront, and the Academy of American Poets; and Please(New Issues, 2008), which won the 2009 American Book Award.
The New York Times Book Review notes his most recent collection The Tradition: “In Brown’s poems, the body at risk — the infected body, the abused body, the black body, the body in eros — is most vulnerable to the cruelty of the world. But even in their most searing moments, these poems are resilient out of necessity, faithful to their account of survival, when survival is the hardest task of all: “So the Bible says, in the beginning, / Blackness. I am alive.” |
Photo Credit: Stephanie Mitchell
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Brown is the recipient of the Whiting Writers Award and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Krakow Poetry Seminar in Poland; he was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and the Hurston Wright Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The Best American Poetry.
Jericho Brown grew up in Louisiana and worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
Jericho Brown grew up in Louisiana and worked as a speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before earning his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of New Orleans and graduated magna cum laude from Dillard University. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University in Atlanta.
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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Award. She and E. J. Koh co-translated The Lightest Motorcycle in the World by Korean poet Yi Won, forthcoming June 2021 from Zephyr Press. She has received fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association, and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Best New Poets, Best Small Fictions, and more. She serves as the poetry editor for Hyphenmagazine and as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair. www.marcicalabretta.com |
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Nicole Callihan’s poems appear in PEN-America, Copper Nickel, Tin House, and American Poetry Review. Her novella, The Couples, was published by Mason Jar Press in summer 2019. ELSEWHERE, her latest poetry collection, a collaboration with Zoë Ryder White, won the 2019 Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize. Find out more at www.nicolecallihan.com. |
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Brenda Cárdenas’ books and chapbooks include Boomerang; Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison; Achiote Seeds/Semillas de Achiotewith Cristina García, Emmy Pérez, and Gabriela Erandi Rico; and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Cárdenas’ work has appeared or is forthcoming in Latino Poetics: The Art of Poetry, Hope Is the Thing: Wisconsinites On Hope and Resilience in the Time of COVID-19, Court Green, Ghost Fishing: An Eco Justice Anthology, POETRY, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, Angels of the Americlypse: New Latin@ Writing, the Library of Congress’ Spotlight on U.S. Hispanic Writers, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, and many others. |
She has served as Milwaukee’s Poet Laureate, co-taught the inaugural workshop for Letras Latina’s Pintura:Palabra: A Project in Ekphrasis at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and currently teaches Creative Writing and U. S. Latinx Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
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Yvonne Cassidy was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland and moved to New York in 2011. Yvonne is the author of four novels published by Hachette: The Other Boy, What Might Have Been Me, How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? and I’m Right Here. In addition to being published widely in Europe, How Many Letters Are In Goodbye? was published in the U.S. by Llewellyn YA imprint Flux and was selected for the American Library Association “Rainbow Book List” in 2017. In addition to fiction, Yvonne has written for leading Irish magazine and newspaper titles as well as for television. She has taught creative writing extensively and currently teaches for the Irish Arts Center and the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan. Yvonne is a member of the Honorary Committee of writing non-profit Narrative 4 and a member of New York Writers Workshop.She lives in Manhattan with her wife Danielle. Website: yvonnecassidy.com, Facebook: @YvonneCassidybooks, Instagram: @YvonneCassidyauthor, Twitter: @YvonneCassidyNY.
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Cathleen Chambless is from Miami, Florida. She graduated with her MFA in poetry from FIU. She is also a visual artist and activist. Her work has appeared in Jai-Alai, Fjords Review, Grief Diaries, Storm Cycle 2014 & 2015, The Southern Women’s Review and Wussy Mag. Her debut collection of poetry, Nec(Romantic), was a finalist for the Bisexual Book Awards in 2016.
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Jessica Cuello is the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). She has been awarded The 2017 CNY Book Award, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. |
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Silvia Curbelo is the author of two full-length poetry collections, Falling Landscape and The Secret History of Water, both from Anhinga Press, and two chapbooks. She has received poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, the Cintas Foundation and the Writer’s Voice. Other awards include the Jessica Noble Maxwell Poetry Prize from American Poetry Review, the James Wright Poetry Prize from Mid-American Review, and a 2019 Professional Development Artist Grant from the Tampa/ Hillsborough County Arts Council. Her poems have been published widely in literary magazines and more than three dozen anthologies, including Poems, Poets, Poetry (Bedford/St. Martin) and the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. A native of Cuba, Silvia lives in Tampa, FL.
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Debra Dean is the bestselling author of four critically acclaimed books that have been published in twenty-one languages. Her debut novel, The Madonnas of Leningrad, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, a #1 Booksense Pick, a Booklist Top Ten Novel, and an American Library Association Notable Book of the Year. Her newest book, Hidden Tapestry, tells the true story of Belgian-American artist Jan Yoors – childhood vagabond, wartime resistance fighter, New York bohemian – and the two women who agreed to share his life. New York Times bestselling author Ross King calls it “one of the most remarkable artistic stories of the twentieth century.”
A native of Seattle, Debra and her husband live in Miami, where she teaches on the creative writing faculty at Florida International University. |
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Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio in 1952. A 1970 Presidential Scholar, she attended Miami University of Ohio, Universität Tübingen in Germany and the University of Iowa. In 1987 she received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, and from 1993-1995 she served as U.S. Poet Laureate. Author of a novel, a short story collection, a book of essays, and nine volumes of poetry -- most recently Sonata Mulattica, her poetic tribute to 19th century Afro-European violin prodigy George Bridgetower (2010 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award) and Collected Poems 1974-2004 (2016 NAACP Image Award) -- she also edited The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry (2011) and, in 2018/19, a weekly poetry column for The New York Times Magazine. Her song cycle Seven for Luck, with music by John Williams, was premiered by the Boston Symphony, and her play The Darker Face of the Earth had successful runs at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Kennedy Center in Washington and the Royal National Theatre in London, among other venues. A new song cycle, Standing Witness, with music by Richard Danielpour, will premiere at Tanglewood in the summer of 2021.
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Photo Credit: Fred Viebahn
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Rita Dove's numerous honors include the 1996 National Humanities Medal from President Clinton and in 2011 the National Medal of Arts from President Obama – the only poet ever to receive both medals – as well as the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Lifetime Achievement Medals from the Library of Virginia and the Fulbright Commission, and 28 honorary doctorates. She has served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs and as chancellor of the honor society Phi Beta Kappa. An elected member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia, where she has taught since 1989.
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Denise Duhamel’s most recent book of poetry is Second Story(Pittsburgh, 2021). Her other titles include Scald; Blowout;Ka-Ching!; Two and Two; Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems; The Star-Spangled Banner; andKinky.She and Maureen Seaton have co-authored four collections, the most recent of which is CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). And she and Julie Marie Wade co-authored The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (Noctuary Press, 2019). She is a Distinguished University Professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami. |
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Iris Jamahl Dunkle was the 2017-2018 Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, CA. Her newest poetry collection West : Fire : Archive will be published by Mountain/ West Poetry Series in 2021. Her other 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 biography Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer is forthcoming from the University of Oklahoma Press. Her poem “Listening to the Caryatids on the Palace of Fine Arts” poem will be featured on 100 buses as part of the San Francisco Beautiful and Poetry Society of America Muni Art 2020 campaign. Her works have been published in Tin House, San Francisco Examiner, Fence, Los Angeles Review of Books, Split Rock Review, Taos Poetry Journal, Pleiades, Calyx, Catamaran, Poet's Market, Women's Studies and Chicago Quarterly Review. Dunkle teaches at Napa Valley College and is the Poetry Director of the Napa Valley Writers' Conference.
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Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, is the poet laureate of Mississippi and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the N.E.A., the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and three of prose, most recently, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, which was a Goodreaders Favorite and an Atlanta Journal ConstitutionBest Book. She lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children In Oxford, MS. https://www.bethannfennelly.com/ |
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Vanessa Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist working as a novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and journalist. Her debut novel, White Light, was published in 2015, to critical acclaim. Named one of the Best Books of the year by NPR, it also won an International Latino Book Award. Her plays have been produced in Edinburgh, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, and other cities around the world. These include the immersive hit, Amparo, winner of the Ruth Foreman Award for pioneering theatre. The play, which was sold out for eight months, was called “Miami’s Hottest Ticket,” by People en Español. |
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She's also written for Sesame Street and is currently adapting the National Award Winning book Waiting for Snow in Havana for the screen. As a journalist, feature writer, and essayist, her pieces have appeared in The LA Times, ESPN, The Miami Herald, The Guardian, The Hill, The Washington Post, Narrative.ly,The Huffington Post, and American Theatre Magazine, among numerous other publications. She holds a PhD from the University of California Irvine in English (with a focus in Creative Nonfiction), an MFA from the University of Miami (in fiction), and a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (English and Art History). For more: www.vanessagarcia.org
Photo Credit: Judy Watson Tracy
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Terry Godbey’s four poetry collections are Hold Still, Flame, Beauty Lessons and Behind Every Door. A winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Award, she has published widely in literary magazines and is also a wildlife photographer who wanders in the woods every chance she gets. See more of her writing and photos at www.terrygodbey.com |
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Catherine Gonick’s poetry has appeared in literary magazines including Notre Dame Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Lightwood, Forge, Sukoon, and PoetsArtists, and in anthologies including in plein air, and forthcoming, Poemas Antivirus. She was awarded the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize for Poetry and was a finalist in the National Ten-Minute Play Contest with the Actors Theatre of Louisville. She is part of a company that mitigates the effects of climate change. |
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Miriam Bird Greenberg is a poet and occasional essayist with a fieldwork-derived practice. The author of In the Volcano’s Mouth (University of Pittsburgh), winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, her work has appeared in Granta, Poetry, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She's currently completing a hybrid-genre manuscript about the economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions, and has also written about nomads, hitchhikers, and hobos living on America's margins. A high school dropout and former hitchhiker herself, she's held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center. Her limited-edition letterpress artist book The Other World, designed in collaboration with master printer Keith Graham, was published by the Center for Book Arts in October 2019; she's also the author of the chapbooks All night in the new country(Sixteen Rivers Press) and Pact-Blood, Fever Grass (Ricochet Editions). Instagram at @tapirwhorf and Twitter at @ornithomancy |
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Jennifer Michael Hecht is a poet and historian. Her most recent book of poetry is Who Said (Copper Canyon), her second, Funny, won the Felix Pollak prize from the University of Wisconsin Press and her first, The Next Ancient World, won the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award. Hecht’s poetry appears in The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, The New Republic, and The Kenyon Review. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University and is the author of four prose books including Stay: A History of Suicide and the Arguments Against It (Yale) and Doubt: A History (HarperOne), an examination of religious and philosophical doubt throughout history. Hecht’s The End of the Soul (Columbia) won Phi Beta Kappa’s 2004 Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in intellectual history. She is completing a book on poetry for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. |
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Vicki Hendricks is the author of noir novels Miami Purity, Iguana Love, Voluntary Madness, Sky Blues, and Cruel Poetry, an Edgar Award Finalist in 2008. Her short stories are collected in Florida Gothic Stories. She currently lives in central Florida, the rural locale of her most recent novel Fur People. |
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Michael Hettich's books of poetry include To Start an Orchard (2019), Bluer and More Vast: Prose Poems (2018), The Frozen Harbor (2017) and Systems of Vanishing (2014). His work has appeared widely in journals and in some anthologies as well. His awards include three Fellowships from the Florida Arts Council, The Tampa Review Prize in Poetry, the David Martinson/Meadowhawk Prize and a Florida Book Award. His website in michaelhettich.com. |
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Brenda Hillman is the author of ten collections of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, including Extra Hidden Life, Among the Days (2018) which won the Northern California Book Award. She has edited and co-translated numerous books, most recently At Your Feet by Ana Cristina Cesar— co-translated with Helen Hillman. Sobre un dia, en el mundo a collection of Hillman’s work in Spanish, has been translated by Ezequiel Zaidenwerg. She currently serves as a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets, co-directs the Poetry Program of the Community of Writers and teaches at Saint Mary’s College of California. https://blueflowerarts.com/artist/brenda-hillman/
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Laura Lee Huttenbach, an Atlanta native and a graduate of the University of Virginia, has written for numerous publications and is the author of two books. The Boy is Gone is the oral history of a Kenyan independence leader whom she met while backpacking in Africa. Running with Raven is the story of Robert “Raven” Kraft, a South Beach legend who has run eight miles every day for the past 45 years and inspired more than 3,000 followers to lace up their running shoes and join him. Laura Lee lives in New York City with her husband and young son. To learn more about her work, visit www.LLHuttenbach.com.
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Bosch Jones is a poet, artist, & performer residing in South Florida. Poems have appeared in the Paris Review, La Presa, Cathexis Northwest Press, South Florida Poetry Journal, IMPACT magazine, Blood and Tears: a collection of poems for Mathew Shepard. |
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Jen Karetnick is the author of five full-length poetry collections, including Hunger Until It's Pain (Salmon Poetry, forthcoming spring 2023); The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, September 2020); and The Treasures That Prevail (Whitepoint Press, September 2016), finalist for the 2017 Poetry Society of Virginia Book Prize. She is also the author of five poetry chapbooks, including The Crossing Over (March 2019), winner of the 2018 Split Rock Review Chapbook Competition. Her poems have been awarded the Hart Crane Memorial Prize, the Romeo Lemay Poetry Prize, the Anna Davidson Rosenberg Prize, and two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, among others. Her work appears recently or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, The Comstock Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Missouri Review (online), Poet Lore, Terrain, Under a Warm Green Linden, and elsewhere. Co-founder and managing editor of SWWIM Every Day, Jen is currently a Deering Estate Artist-in-Residence. Find her on Twitter @Kavetchnik and Instagram @JenKaretnick, or see jkaretnick.com.
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Gerry LaFemina’s latest books are the poetry collection The Story of Ash (Anhinga, 2018) and a volume of prose poems, Baby Steps for Doomsday Prepping (Madville, 2020). His essays on poets and prosody, Palpable Magic, came out on Stephen F Austin University Press and his textbook, Composing Poetry: A Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically was released by Kendall Hunt. A noted literary arts activist who has served on the Board of Directors of the AWP and edited numerous literary journals and anthologies, LaFemina is the former director of the Center for Literary Arts at Frostburg State University, where he is a Professor of English, serves as a Poetry Mentor in the MFA Program at Carlow University and is a current Fulbright Specialist in Writing, Literature, and American Culture. |
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Lucia Leao is a full-time translator. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as SWWIM, South Florida Poetry Journal, Chariton Review and Gyroscope Review. She has a master's degree in Brazilian literature from UERJ (Rio de Janeiro) and a master's degree in print journalism from University of Miami. |
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Mia Leonin is the author of four poetry collections: Fable of the Pack-Saddle Child (BkMk Press), Braid, Unraveling the Bed, and Chance Born (Anhinga Press), and a memoir, Havana and Other Missing Fathers (University of Arizona Press). Leonin has been awarded fellowships from the State of Florida Department of Cultural Affairs for her poetry and creative nonfiction, two Money for Women grants by the Barbara Deming Fund, and she has been a fellow at the National Endowment for the Arts/Annenberg Institute on Theater and Musical Theater. Leonin has published poetry and creative nonfiction in New Letters, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Notre Dame Review, Guernica, Indiana Review, Witness, North American Review, River Styx, Chelsea, and others. She has written extensively about Spanish-language theater and culture for the Miami Herald, New Times, ArtburstMiami.com, and other publications. Leonin’s poetry has been translated to Spanish and she has been invited to read at the Miami International Book Fair, Poesia en el Laurel in Granada, Spain, and in Barcelona, Spain. Leonin teaches creative writing at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.
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Gail Carson Levine’s first poetry collection for adults, Transient, came out in July from Nightshade Press. Her poems have appeared in: The Louisville Review; The Sugar House Review; The Lullwater Review; The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks; Bigger Than They Appear: Anthology of Very Short Poems; On the Dark Path, An Anthology of Fairy Tale Poetry; and the second anthology of the Cancer Poetry Project. In May 2016, she completed her MFA in poetry at NYU. She’s best known for her books for children, most notably Ella Enchanted |
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Kyle Carrero Lopez is a Black poet of Cuban-American heritage. He lives in Brooklyn, reads poetry submissions for Homology Lit, and is a founding member of LEGACY, a Black queer production collective. His newest poems are published or forthcoming in Frontier Poetry, Hobart, POETRY, & The Breakbeat Poets Volume IV: LatiNEXT (Haymarket Books, 2020). He received an MFA in Poetry from NYU, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Twitter and Find Kyle on Twitter @kylecarrerolo and on Instagram @kylecarrerolopez. |
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Trish MacEnulty is the author of The Pink House, Wait Until Tomorrow: A Daughter’s Memoir, and several other books. Most recently, she edited Howl: 2016, an anthology of poems, essays and rants.
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Rita Maria Martinez loves all things Jane Eyre. Her poetry collection--The Jane and Bertha in Me (Kelsay Books)—is inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s fiery governess and infamous madwoman. The poet's work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears in publications like the Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and The Best American Poetry Blog. Her poetry also appears in the textbook Three Genres: The Writing of Fiction/Literary Nonfiction, Poetry and Drama and in the anthology Caña Quemada: Contemporary Cuban Poetry in English and Spanish. Martinez’s recent poetry raises awareness about the challenges and triumphs inherent in navigating life with chronic daily headaches (CDH) and migraines. Martinez lives in Florida; earned an MFA from FIU; and is an independent reading and writing tutor who helps students diagnosed with dyslexia, autism, ADD, and ADHD. Visit Rita Maria Martinez's website at www.comeonhome.org/ritamartinez or follow her on Twitter @cubanbronteite.
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Caitlin Grace McDonnell was a New York Times Fellow in poetry at NYU and has received fellowships from Yaddo, Blue Mountain Center and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her poems and essays have been published widely, and she published a chapbook of poems Dreaming the Tree (Belladonna 2003) and a book Looking for Small Animals (Nauset press 2012). Currently, she teaches English at CUNY, lives in Brooklyn with her daughter, and is at work on novel. |
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Freesia McKee is author of the chapbook How Distant the City (Headmistress Press, 2018). Her words have appeared in Flyway, Bone Bouquet, So to Speak, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Virga, Painted Bride Quarterly, CALYX, About Place Journal, South Dakota Review, New Mexico Review, and the Ms. Magazine Blog. Freesia is a staff book reviewer for South Florida Poetry Journal. Her reviews have also appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades Book Review, Gulf Stream, and The Drunken Odyssey. Freesia was the winner of CutBank Literary Journal’s 2018 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry, chosen by Sarah Vap. Find her online at freesiamckee.com or on Twitter at @freesiamckee. |
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M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-completed educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind, forthcoming from Regal House Publishing (2021). Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, M.B. is Associate Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com
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David McLoghlin is a poet and literary translator from Ireland who lived in Brooklyn, NY, between 2010 and 2020, where he was an MFA candidate at NYU’s Creative Writing Program. He returned to live in Ireland in June 2020. Parts of Waiting for Saint Brendan and Other Poems (Salmon Poetry, 2012) are an argument with Ireland, as well as a spiritual journey and a search for belonging. Santiago Sketches (Salmon Poetry, 2017) is set entirely in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and refutes the tacit notion in Irish Studies and the Irish canon that the subject and the setting for work by Irish poets must be Ireland. Among other themes, his writing addresses the complications of having emigrated to the USA twice (both as an adult and as a “third culture kid” in the 1980s), and the half-life of surviving clerical sexual abuse.
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In Waiting for Saint Brendan this subject matter is dealt with in a mode somewhere between confessional and neo-confessional modes, sometimes direct, and sometimes told “aslant“. Image and metaphor are employed both to communicate experiences that are difficult to express in prose, and to protect and liberate both the writer and those who can’t speak yet: to try to provide a way out, and through. His third collection of poetry, “Crash Centre”, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2021, and it develops and expands on the subject matter pertaining to sexual violence first explored in Waiting for Saint Brendan. www.davidmcloghlin.com
Ana Menéndez has published four books of fiction: Adios, Happy Homeland!, The Last War, Loving Che and In Cuba I Was a German Shepherd, whose title story won a Pushcart Prize. She has worked as a journalist in the United States and abroad, lastly as a prize-winning columnist for The Miami Herald. As a reporter, she wrote about Cuba, Haiti, Kashmir, Afghanistan and India, where she was based for three years. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Vogue, Bomb Magazine, The New York Times and Tin House and has been included in several anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Latino Literature. She has a B.A. in English from Florida International University and an M.F.A. from New York University. A former Fulbright Scholar in Egypt, she is now a program director with Academic Affairs at FIU. She lives in Surfside, FL, with her family.
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Holly Mitchell is a queer poet from Kentucky, now living in New York. A winner of an Amy Award from Poets & Writers and a Gertrude Claytor Prize from the Academy of American Poets, Holly received an MFA in Creative Writing from New York University and has poems in Baltimore Review, Juked, and Narrative, among other journals. |
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Jenny Molberg is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (winner of the 2014 Berkshire Prize, Tupelo Press, 2017) and Refusal (LSU Press, 2020). She is the recipient of a 2019-2020 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers Conference, Vermont Studio Center, and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, West Branch, Poetry Northwest, The Missouri Review, and other publications. She is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she directs Pleiades Press and co-edits Pleiades magazine. Find her online at jennymolberg.com. |
Catherine Moore is the author of three chapbooks and the poetry book ULLA! ULLA! Her work appears in Tahoma Literary Review, Southampton Review, Mid-American Review, Broad River Review and in various anthologies. She’s been awarded Walker Percy and Hambidge fellowships; her honors also include the Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize 2014, a Nashville MetroArts grant, as well as Pushcart Prize, the Best of the Net, and VERA Award nominations. Her fiction has shortlisted in several competitions and was selected for inclusion in the juried Best Small Fictions. Catherine holds a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and she teaches at a community college. Her upcoming collection of lyrical pieces in the voices of bog bodies is due out fall 2019 from Unsolicited Press. Twitter: @CatPoetic
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David Moscovich is the Romanian-American author of You Are Make Very Important Bathtime (JEF Books: Chicago,2013) and LIFE+70[Redacted], a print version of the single most expensive literary e-book ever to be hacked (Lit Fest Press). His latest novel, Blink if You Love Me, is now available from Adelaide Books and is about a marriage plagued by the tragedy of mispronunciation. He is the recipient of grants from PEN America and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, fellowships from New York University (NYU) and International House NYC, sponsorship from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). He is editor and publisher of Louffa Press, a micro-press dedicated to printing innovative fiction in collectible, handprinted chapbooks as well as artist books.
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Eileen Myles came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet, subsequently a novelist, public talker and art journalist. Their twenty-two books include For Now, an talk/essay about writing, Afterglow (a dog memoir), I Must Be Living Twice/new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls. Eileen is the recipient of many grants and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and in 2020, Myles received the Bill Whitehead lifetime achievement award from the Publishing Triangle. They live in New York and Marfa, TX. |
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Cynthia Neely is the winner of Bright Hill Press’s chapbook contest for Passing Through Blue Earth (2016) and the winner of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment’s chapbook contest for Broken Water (2011). Her poems appear in numerous journals including Pontoon (2016 Paula Jones Gardiner Memorial Award-Floating Bridge Press), Bellevue Literary Review (runner up for the Jan and Marica Vilcek prize, judged by Marie Ponsot), Crab Creek Review, Raven Chronicles, Terrain.org and in several anthologies. Her full-length book, Flight Path, (2014) was a finalist in the Aldrich Press book contest. Her chapbook Hopewell Bay (2017), a single long hybrid poem, is available from Seven Kitchens Press. Her essay and creative non-fiction work appear in The Writers’ Chronicle, Cutthroat Journal (runner up for the Barry Lopez Prize) and Terrain.org. Neely earned her MFA in creative writing from Pacific University.
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Photo Credit: Dean Davis http://picturesofpoets.com
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Rhonda J. Nelson’s books include Musical Chair (Anhinga Press. 2004) and The Undertow (Rattapallax Press, 2001). She is a Florida Fellow in Poetry 2000-2001, winner of Writer's Exchange 2000, sponsored by Poets & Writers, Inc., and the recipient of two Hillsborough County Emerging Artist grants and one Hillsborough County Individual Artist Grant. She is the artistic director of the improvisational poetry music collective, Irritable Tribe of Poets, who performed poems from her Frida Kahlo manuscript during the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Salvador Dali Museum. Her work has been published in many journals, including Ekphrasis, Angel Face, Slipstream, The Panhandler, Survivor Magazine, Asheville Review, Apalachee Review, The Pedestal Magazine, The Dexter Review, New CollAge, and Sandhill Review. She is Creative Loafing Magazine’s Best Spoken Word Artist 2019.
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Barbra Nightingale has eight books of poetry with small presses, the latest of which is Alphalexia (Finishing Line, 2017). Over 200 of her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies. She is an Associate Editor with the South Florida Poetry Journal. She lives in Hollywood with her menagerie of two and four-legged creatures. |
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Michael Mackin O'Mara is managing editor and co-publisher of SoFloPoJo (the South Florida Poetry Journal), and has been published in Evening Street Review, Visitant, fields magazine, The Body, The Complete HIV/AIDS Resource, and Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now Project among others. www.michaelmackinomara.com |
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Gregory Orr is the author of more than 10 collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir. His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into at least 10 languages. Orr has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. He has also been a Fulbright Scholar and a Rockefeller Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture and Violence, and he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. City of Salt (1995) was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award for Poetry. Orr received his B.A. from Antioch College and his MFA from Columbia University. He founded the MFA program at the University of Virginia in 1975, and was the poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review from 1978 to 2003.
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mollypeacockauthor/
Twitter: @mollypeacock3 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mollypeacockpoet/ Website: http://mollypeacock.org/ Blue Flower Arts: a Literary Speakers Agency |
Molly Peacock is a widely anthologized poet as well as a biographer and an arts activist. Her latest poetry collections are The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton and Company). She is co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York City’s subways and series founder of The Best Canadian Poetry. Her latest ventures are The Secret Poetry Room and The Timeless Project. One of the subjects of the documentary My So-Called Selfish Life, about women who choose not to have children, she is also the author of the biography The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72 and the forthcoming Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Manages a Threesome. A former New Yorker, she lives in Toronto, a dual citizen with both Canadian and American roots. She teaches at the 92St Y.
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Photo Credit: Ira Wood
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Marge Piercy is the author of 20 poetry collections, including MADE IN DETROIT and her most recent, ON THE WAY OUT, TURN OFF THE LIGHT (Knopf). She has 17 novels, lastly SEX WARS, and a collection of short stories, THE COST OF LUNCH,ETC.; also a memoir SLEEPING WITH CATS and four nonfiction books. She has given readings, workshops or speeches at over 500 venues here and abroad. Every June [but this one] she holds a juried intensive poetry workshop in Wellfleet. She has been politically active beginning with Civil Rights in college, in feminism always, on ecological issues including nuclear power, anti-war agitation and gun violence. margepiercy.com She is a notorious cat lover and an avid gardener. She lives in the woods with Ira Wood and three cats. |
Catherine Esposito Prescott is the author of the chapbooks Maria Sings and The Living Ruin. Recent poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Flyway, MiPOesias, Pleiades, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, and TAB: The Journal of Poetry & Poetics, as well as the anthologies 99 Poets for the 99 Percent and The Orison Anthology. Prescott earned an MFA in Creative Writing from NYU. She is a co-founder of SWWIM, which curates a reading series in Miami Beach and publishes the online literary journal SWWIM Every Day. Instagram & Twitter: @catprescott, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ceprescott
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Alexandra Lytton Regalado is author of Matria, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). She is a CantoMundo fellow, winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction among others. Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more than ten Central American-themed books. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com |
Moving to New York in the late 1970s from California where she was born, Sapphire became involved in the Slam Poetry movement, writing, performing, and eventually publishing her work. She is the author of two collections of poetry, Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999) and American Dreams (1994), and The New York Times bestselling novels The Kid (2011) and Push (1996), which was made into the Academy Award winning movie Precious. She has performed her work in venues in North America, Europe, Africa and South America. Sapphire has said of her work: “A major focus of my art has been my determination to reconnect to the mainstream of human life a segment of humanity that has been cast off and made invisible. I have brought into the public gaze women who have been marginalized by sexual abuse, poverty, and their blackness. Through art I have sought to center them in the world.”
Maureen Seaton has authored twenty-one poetry collections, both solo and collaborative, most recently, Sweet World (CavanKerry Press, 2019), which went on to win the Florida Book Award for poetry. Her awards include the Iowa Prize and Lambda Literary Award for Furious Cooking, the Audre Lorde Award for Venus Examines Her Breast, an NEA, and the Pushcart. A memoir, Sex Talks to Girls (University of Wisconsin, 2008, 2018), also garnered a “Lammy.” With Denise Duhamel, she co-authored Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, and New Collaborations (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Seaton and Duhamel have been collaborating for over thirty years. Twitter: @mseaton9.
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Maggie Smith is the author of three award-winning books of poems, most recently Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), and a collection of essays and quotes, Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2020). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Best American Poetry, the New York Times, Poetry, The Believer, Tin House, the Washington Post, the Paris Review, and on the CBS drama Madam Secretary. She has received a Pushcart Prize, as well as fellowships and prizes from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, and the Ohio Arts Council. A freelance writer and editor, Smith is on the poetry faculty of Spalding University’s MFA program and serves as an Editor at Large for the Kenyon Review. You can find her on Twitter as @maggiesmithpoet.
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Christopher Soto (b. 1991) is a poet based in Los Angeles, California. He works at UCLA with the Ethnic Studies Centers and sits on the Board of Directors for Lambda Literary. For more information visit christophersoto-poet.com |
Photo Credit: Kai Richards
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Virgil Suárez was born in Havana, Cuba in 1962. At the age of twelve he arrived in the United States. He received an MFA from Louisiana State University in 1987. He is the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently 90 MILES: SELECTED AND NEW, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. His work has appeared in a multitude of magazines and journals internationally. He has been taking photographs on the road for the last three decades. When he is not writing, he is out riding his motorcycle up and down the Blue Highways of the Southeast, photographing disappearing urban and rural landscapes. His 10th volume of poetry, THE PAINTED BUNTING’S LAST MOLT, will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in the Spring of 2020. |
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Colleen Sutton writes creative non-fiction, short fiction and poetry, and is currently working on her first novel. A diplomat for the Government of Canada by day, Colleen’s also a certified yoga instructor, lifeguard and professional dog trainer. Speaking four languages fluently, with studies in another three, Colleen loves words, pronunciation and studiously memorizing different verb tenses. A prolific traveler, she’ll be knocking country number 75 off her list later this year. Colleen is married and they have two fluffy blonde dogs that yes, you will want to pet. Instagram: @writing_with_my_dogs |
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Paul Tran is the recipient of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. Their work appears in The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, Good Morning America, NYLON, and elsewhere, including the Lionsgate movie Love Beats Rhymes with Azealia Banks, Common, and Jill Scott. They earned their MFA from Washington University in St. Louis, where they were the Chancellor's Graduate Fellow and Senior Poetry Fellow in the Writing Program, and currently serve as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Paul is Poetry Editor of The Offing Magazine, which won a Whiting Literary Magazine Award from the Whiting Foundation. |
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Julie Marie Wade teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami. She has published 12 collections of poetry and prose, most recently the book-length lyric essay, Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing (The Ohio State University Press, 2020) and the hybrid-forms chapbook, P*R*I*D*E (VCFA/Hunger Mountain, 2020). A winner of the Marie Alexander Poetry Series and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir, Julie makes her home in Dania Beach with her spouse Angie Griffin and their two cats.
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Emma Trelles is the daughter of Cuban immigrants and the author of Tropicalia (University of Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize, a finalist for Foreword/Indies poetry book of the year, and a recommended read by The Rumpus. She is currently writing a second book of poems, Courage and the Clock. Her work has been anthologized in Verse Daily, Best American Poetry, Best of the Net, Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, and others, and she has presented her work at venues across the country, including The Bryant Park Reading Room in New York. The Poet and the Poem Series at the Library of Congress, Busboys & Poets in Washington D.C., the inaugural O’Miami Poetry Festival, the Miami Book Fair, the Ojai Art Center, the University of California-Santa Barbara, and the Palabra Pura series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. A CantoMundo Fellow and a recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, she lived and worked for many years as an arts journalist in South Florida and now lives with her husband in California, where she teaches at Santa Barbara City College and curates the Mission Poetry Series.
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http://www.zoetrope.me/
https://www.instagram.com/zoetrope_zoe/ https://www.facebook.com/zoetropezoe/ (which I almost never use these days) https://twitter.com/zoetropezoe (ditto) |
Zoe Welch is a photo-based artist and writer. Her poetry and photographic work have appeared in the French Canadian publications Ciel Variable and La Revue des Animaux; her film Landing: le film pour Loïc was part of the National Film Board of Canada’s program on love that was presented at La Cinémathèque québécoise where the film is now also part of the digital collection; and she contributed a written piece to the anthology and New York Times bestseller, Women in Clothes. Her public art has been presented in Seattle as part of King County’s City Panorama program; in Miami as part of #project305 in conjunction with the New World Symphony; and as part of the New York City Tree Alphabet project. In her current work, Zoe is examining what it means to live in US, where she moved in 2016. She’s the museum educator at The Wolfsonian – FIU where she leads K-12 and youth & programming.
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Cynthia White’s poems have appeared in Massachusetts Review, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, Grist and CALYX among others. She was a finalist for both New Letters’ Patricia Cleary Prize and Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. She lives in Santa Cruz, California.
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Hari Ziyad is a cultural critic, a screenwriter, the editor-in-chief of RaceBaitr, and the author of Black Boy Out of Time. They are a 2021 Lambda Literary Fellow, and their writing has been featured in BuzzFeed, Out, the Guardian, Paste magazine, and the academic journal Critical Ethnic Studies, among other publications. Previously they were the managing editor of the Black Youth Project and a script consultant on the television series David Makes Man. Hari spends their all-too-rare free time trying to get their friends to give the latest generation of R & B starlets a chance and attempting to entertain their always very unbothered pit bull mix, Khione. For more information about the author, visit www.hariziyad.com.
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