Henry J. Morro was born in Costa Rica and at the age of two, his family moved to San Francisco. He lived there until he was sixteen when his family reversed the American Dream and moved back to Nicaragua. After the great earthquake in 1972, his family moved to Los Angeles. He graduated from California State University, Los Angles, and began writing poetry. He has taught poetry in public schools and prisons. He has also edited literary journals and anthologies. In addition to his poetry appearing in the West Coast and national publications, in 1994 New Alliance Records released Somoza’s Teeth, a CD recording of his poetry. He lives in Southern California with his wife and two daughters. His new and selected, The Zoot Suit Files, was recently published and is available through Amazon and at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center.

Source: Interlitq.org

Suzanne earned her MA in English in 1978 at California State University-Fresno, where she studied under Philip Levine, Peter Everwine, and Chuck Hanzlicek. At Fresno, Suzanne absorbed the poetic sensibilities of the Fresno school of poetry, which is (according to Suzanne), “characterized by a direct personal voice, a language both lyrical and colloquial, and an image-based fidelity to the tangible world, whether rural or urban.”

Source: An Interview with L.A. Poet Suzanne Lummis

William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin was born in New York City in 1927 and raised in New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of a Presbyterian minister. His numerous collections of poetry, his translations, and his books of prose have won praise over seven decades. Though his early poetry received great attention and admiration, Merwin would continue to alter and innovate his craft with each new book, and at each stage, he served as a powerful influence for poets of his generation and younger poets. For the entirety of his writing career, he explored a sense of wonder and celebrated the power of language, while serving as a staunch anti-war activist and advocate for the environment. He won nearly every award available to an American poet, and he was named U.S. poet laureate twice.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Poet Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, and received her B.A. from Wayne State University and an M.A. in English Literature from New York University. Her books of poetry include The Empress of the Death House (1978), a collection that draws on her early experiences at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit, Natural Birth (1983), Captivity (1989), Tender (1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011). She has also published a collection of prose, The Black Notebooks (1997), which won the Annisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, poet, and playwright Derek Walcott was trained as a painter but turned to writing as a young man. Walcott’s major breakthrough came with the collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962), a book that celebrates the Caribbean and its history as well as investigates the scars of colonialism. Throughout a long and distinguished career, Walcott returned to those same themes of language, power, and place. His later collections include Tiepolo’s Hound (2000), The Prodigal (2004), Selected Poems (2007), White Egrets (2010), and Morning, Paramin (2016). In 1992, Walcott won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and winner of a 2021 Northern California Book Award.

Source: Danusha Laméris

David Baker is a poet, educator, editor, and literary critic. Since 1984 Baker has taught at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, where he is currently a Professor of English and holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Creative Writing. Baker also serves frequently on the faculty of the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College and is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. David Baker is the author or editor of eighteen books, including twelve books of poetry, most recently Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019, W. W. Norton), Scavenger Loop (2015, W. W. Norton) and Never-Ending Birds (2009, W. W. Norton), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize in 2011, and six books of prose, most recently Seek After: On Seven Modern Lyric Poets (2018, SFASU).

Source: David Baker Website

Rebecca Hart Olander holds a bachelor’s degree from Hampshire College, a master of arts in teaching in English from Smith College ’96, and a master of fine arts in writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She teaches writing at Westfield State University and is the editor/director of Perugia Press, an independent feminist press that publishes full-length poetry collections by emerging women poets.

Rebecca is a Women’s National Book Association poetry contest winner and a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her chapbook, Dressing the Wounds, was published in 2019 by dancing girl press, and her debut full-length collection, Uncertain Acrobats, was released by CavanKerry Press in 2021.

Source: Smith College Website

Phillip B. Williams was born in Chicago, Illinois, and earned his MFA from Washington University, where he was a Chancellor’s Graduate Fellow. He is the author of the poetry collection Thief in the Interior (2016), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a Lambda Literary Award, as well as the chapbooks, Burn (2013) and Bruised Gospels (2011).

A Cave Canem graduate, Williams is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He is coeditor of the online journal Vinyl and teaches at Bennington College.

Source: Poetry Foundation

Conney D. Williams is a Los Angeles based poet, actor, and performance artist originally from Shreveport, Louisiana where he worked as a radio personality. He released two critically acclaimed CDs (2015) of his poetry accompanied by music: Unsettled Water and River&Moan. He has two collections of poetry “Leaves of Spilled Spirit from an Untamed Poet (2002)” and his most recent, “Blues Red Soul Falsetto (2012).”