Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015).

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Natasha Trethewey was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, the daughter of poet, professor, and Canadian emigrant Eric Trethewey and social worker Gwendolyn Ann Turnbough. The daughter of a mixed-race marriage, Trethewey experienced her parents’ divorce when she was six. She subsequently spent time in Atlanta, Georgia, with her mother and in New Orleans, Louisiana, with her father. Encouraged to read as a child, Trethewey studied English at the University of Georgia, earned an MA in English and creative writing from Hollins University, and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. A former US poet laureate, Trethewey is the author of five collections of poetry: Monument (2018), Thrall(2012), Native Guard(2006), Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002), and Domestic Work (2000). She is also the author of a book of creative non-fiction: Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (2010).

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of eight books of poetry, including Incendiary Art(2017), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a finalist for both the Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler (2008), a chronicle of the human and environmental cost of Hurricane Katrina which was nominated for a National Book Award; and Teahouse of the Almighty, a 2005 National Poetry Series selection published by Coffee House Press. In 2021 she was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Poet Ilya Kaminsky was born in the former Soviet Union city of Odessa. He lost most of his hearing at the age of four after a doctor misdiagnosed mumps as a cold, and his family was granted political asylum by the United States in 1993, settling in Rochester, New York. After his father’s death in 1994, Kaminsky began to write poems in English. He explained in an interview with the Adirondack Review, “I chose English because no one in my family or friends knew it—no one I spoke to could read what I wrote. I myself did not know the language. It was a parallel reality, an insanely beautiful freedom. It still is.”

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Referred to as “one of America’s most original, influential, and productive of lyric poets,” Carl Phillips is the author of a dozen books of poetry and two works of criticism. Phillips’s most recent books of poetry are Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020), Wild Is the Wind (2018), Reconnaissance (2015), Silverchest (2013, nominated for the Griffin Prize), Double Shadow (2011, winner Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry and finalist for the National Book Award), and Speak Low (2009, finalist for the National Book Award).

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Poet Kiki Petrosino was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of an African American mother and an Italian American father. She earned a BA from the University of Virginia, an MA in humanities from the University of Chicago, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Fort Red Border (2009), Hymn for the Black Terrific (2013), Witch Wife (2017), and White Blood: a Lyric of Virginia (2020).

Source: ThePoetryFoundation.org

Jaki Shelton Green is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate. When he appointed her in 2018, Governor Cooper stated that “Jaki Shelton Green brings a deep appreciation of our state’s diverse communities to her role as an ambassador of North Carolina literature. Jaki’s appointment is a wonderful new chapter in North Carolina’s rich literary history.”

Source: JakiSheltonGreen.com

Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.”

Source: TyehimbaJess.net

Chloe Martinez is a poet and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves (The Word Works) and the chapbook Corner Shrine (Backbone Press). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in AGNI, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She works at Claremont McKenna College.

Source: chloeAVmartinez.com

Cece Peri’s poems have appeared, or will appear, in publications including Malpais Review, Luvina: The Los Angeles Issue, Speechless the Magazine, Askew, NoirCon, Capital & Main, Literary Alchemy, Moonchild Magazine, Beyond the Lyric Moment(Tebot Bach), Master Class: The Poetry Mystique (Duende Books), Cultural Weekly, 1001 Nights (Redondo Poets), Spillway, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Pacific Coast Poetry Series), San Diego Poetry Annual, MORIA, We Are Here: Village Poets Anthology, and Pratik: A Magazine of Contemporary Writing (Kathmandu, Nepal).

Cece has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and was selected to read in the ALOUD Series at the Los Angeles Central Library. She received the first Anne Silver Poetry Award and awards from NoirCon, the Arroyo Arts Collective’s “Poetry in the Windows,” and honorable mention in the Steve Kowit Poetry Prize.

Born and raised in New York City, Cece now calls Los Angeles home.

Source: CecePeri.com