A prolific and widely respected poet, Lucille Clifton’s work emphasizes endurance and strength through adversity, focusing particularly on African-American experience and family life. Awarding the prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize to Clifton in 2007, the judges remarked that “One always feels the looming humaneness around Lucille Clifton’s poems—it is a moral quality that some poets have and some don’t.” In addition to the Ruth Lilly prize, Clifton was the first author to have two books of poetry chosen as finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 (1987) and Next: New Poems (1987). Her collection Two-Headed Woman (1980) was also a Pulitzer nominee and won the Juniper Prize from the University of Massachusetts. She served as the state of Maryland’s poet laureate from 1974 until 1985, and won the prestigious National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000. In addition to her numerous poetry collections, she wrote many children’s books.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Claribel Alegría was born to Nicaraguan and Salvadoran parents in Estelí, Nicaragua, on May 12, 1924. She grew up in the Santa Ana area of western El Salvador, and in 1943 she moved to the United States. In 1948 she received a BA in philosophy and letters from George Washington University. Throughout her life, Alegría has emphasized her commitment to nonviolent resistance, even during her close association with the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), the people’s movement that took control of the Nicaraguan government in 1979 and overthrew dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle.

Alegría has published numerous books of poetry, including Casting Off (Curbstone Press, 2003); Sorrow (Curbstone Press, 1999), which focuses on the death of her companion and translator, Darwin Flakoll; Umbrales (Thresholds; Curbstone Press, 1996); Fugues (Northwestern University Press, 1993); and La mujer del río/Woman of the River (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), a bilingual edition. She is also a writer of novels and children’s stories.

Source: Poets.org

Poet, dancer, and community activist Janice Mirikitani was born in 1941 in Stockton, California, and earned a BA from UCLA. With her parents, she was interned in an Arkansas camp during World War II and through her poetry and activism is committed to addressing the horrors of war, combating institutional racism, and advocating for women and poor people. Her collections of poetry include Awake in the River (1978), Shedding Silence (1987), We, the Dangerous: New and Selected Poems (1995), and Love Works (2001); Out of the Dust: New and Selected Poems (2014), and Awake in the River and Shedding Silence (2021) which connects Japanese American discrimination with broader struggles on from the domestic to international levels. Mirikitani has edited several anthologies, including Third World Women (1972), Time to Greez! Incantations from the Third World (1975), and Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology (1980). In 2000, she was named the second poet laureate of San Francisco.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973) was perhaps the greatest Spanish poet of the 20th century. The poet known as Pablo Neruda was named Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto at his birth in 1904. He signed his work "Pablo Neruda" (although he did not legally adopt that name until 1946) because his father, a railroad worker, disapproved of the son's poetic interests. Neruda grew up in southern Chile and in 1921 moved to Santiago and enrolled in college with the intention of preparing himself for a career as an instructor of French. He left soon after, however, in order to devote more time to poetry, which had already become his central interest. His first book, Crepusculario (Twilight Book), was published in 1923, and the following year he published Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), a book of intensely romantic and erotic poems. This became his most popular work, more than a million and a half copies of which were published in Spanish alone before his death. Neruda also insisted that he was specifically a Latin American poet. Canto general, which he considered his principal work, celebrates his Latin American heritage. That volume includes "Alturas de Macchu Picchu" ("The Heights of Macchu Picchu"), possibly Neruda's greatest poem.

Source: Gale in Context/Biography

Poet Robert Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey into a poor family in the Paradise Valley neighborhood of Detroit. After graduating from high school in 1932, he attended Detroit City College (now Wayne State University) on scholarship and later earned a graduate degree in English literature from the University of Michigan. As a teaching fellow, he was the first Black faculty member in Michigan’s English department. Hayden eventually became the first African American to be appointed as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His collections of poetry include Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), Figure of Time (1955), A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), which won the grand prize at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, Selected Poems (1966), Words in the Mourning Time (1970), The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972), Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems (1975), and American Journal (1978).

Source: www.PoetryFoundation.org

Daughter of Mixed bloods, a USC Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow and a Department of Cultural Affairs City of Los Angeles (COLA) Master Artist Fellow, Shonda Buchanan is the author of five books, including the award-winning memoir Black Indian.

An award-winning poet, fiction, nonfiction writer and educator, Shonda is the recipient of the Brody Arts Fellowship from the California Community Foundation, a Big Read grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, several Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grants, the Denise L. Scott and Frank Sullivan Awards, and an Eloise Klein-Healy Scholarship. Shonda is also a Sundance Institute Writing Arts fellow, a PEN Center Emerging Voices fellow, and a Jentel Artist Residency fellow.

Source: ShondaBuchanan.com

Peter J. Harris, 2018 Los Angeles COLA Fellow in literary arts, Fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities at USC, and award-winning poet, is the author of Bless the Ashes, poetry (Tia Chucha Press), winner of the 2015 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and The Black Man of Happiness: In Pursuit of My Unalienable Right, a book of personal essays, winner of a 2015 American Book Award. In 2021, FlowerSong Press will publish Harris’ Safe Arms: 20 Love & Erotic Poems (w/an Ooh Baby Baby moan), with Spanish translations by Francisco Letelier.

Source: Poetry.Arizona.edu

Ron Koertge grew up in an agricultural area in an old mining town in Illinois, just across the Mississippi from St. Louis, Missouri. He received a BA from the University of Illinois and an MA from the University of Arizona.

A prolific writer, Ron began publishing poetry in the sixties and seventies in such seminal magazines as Kayak, Poetry Now, and The Wormwood Review. He has published more than twenty books of poetry so far, and his poems continue to appear in independent poetry journals. His recent books include Yellow Moving Van (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), Olympusville (Red Hen Press, 2018), and Vampire Planet (Red Hen Press, 2016).

Ron is currently the Poet Laureate of South Pasadena, California.

Source: RonKoertge.com

Healy has published numerous collections of poetry, including A Wild Surmise: New and Collected Poems and Recordings (2013); Ordinary Wisdom (2005); The Islands Project: Poems for Sappho (2007); Passing (2002), a finalist for both the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry and Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Lesbian Poetry Prize; and Artemis in Echo Park (1991), which was also nominated for the Lambda Book Award.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Nate Marshall is from the South Side of Chicago. His first book, Wild Hundreds (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. He is a co-editor of The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop (2015). Marshall released a rap album, Grown, in 2015 with his group Daily Lyrical Product. He is a visiting assistant professor at Wabash College. He earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, where he served as a Zell postgraduate fellow. He is a founding member of the poetry collective Dark Noise. A Cave Canem fellow, his work has appeared in Poetry, Indiana Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere. He was the star of the award-winning full-length documentary Louder Than a Bomb and has been featured on the HBO original series Brave New Voices. Marshall received the 2014 Hurston/Wright Founding Members Award for College Writers and the 2013 Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Award. In 2015, he was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org