Brian Sonia-Wallace was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in Culver City, California, and Santiago, Chile. He holds an MA in Sustainable Development from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. The author of the memoir The Poetry of Strangers (Harper Collins, 2020), his other publications include the chapbook, I sold these poems, now I want them back (Yak Press, 2016), a chapter on poetry-as-placemaking for Art & The City (Routledge, 2018), and writing in The Guardian, LitHub, and Rolling Stone. Sonia-Wallace curates an LGBTQ+ poetry column for The Pride LA and teaches creative writing through UCLA Writers’ Extension and Get Lit—Words Ignite. He has held residences from Amtrak, Dollar Shave Club, and the Mall of America, and runs the custom poetry business RENT Poet. Sonia-Wallace is the 4th Poet Laureate of the City of West Hollywood. In 2021, he received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Source: Poets.org

Poet and children's author Janice N. Harrington grew up in Alabama and Nebraska, and both those settings figure largely in her writing. Her first book of poetry, Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (2007), won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She is also the author of The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (2011) and Primitive: The Art and Life of Horace H. Pippin (2016). Her children’s books, The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County (2007) and Going North (2004), have won several awards and citations, including a listing among Time Magazine’s top 10 children’s books and the Ezra Jack Keats Award from the New York Public Library.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

J. Michael Martinez was born in Greeley, Colorado. He earned his BA from the University of Northern Colorado and his MFA from George Mason University. His first collection of poetry, Heredities (2010), received a Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Martinez is the co-founder and co-editor of Breach Press, and poetry editor of NOEMI Press, and has read, lectured, or taught at universities and organizations nationwide including the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Conference.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Considered one of the most important voices to come out of East Los Angeles, Marisela Norte is the author of Peeping Tom Tom Girl, a collection of poetry. Norte's work was recently featured in the MTA's Out Your Window project and named one of the best transit poems in the world by The Atlantic Monthly.

Source: Poets.org

Born in Santa Ana, El Salvador, poet William Archila immigrated to the United States in 1980 to escape his native country’s civil war. He earned an MFA at the University of Oregon. His poems engage themes of social justice, brutality, and identity. Archila is the author of the poetry collections The Art of Exile (2009), which won the Emerging Writer Fellowship Award from the Writer’s Center as well as the International Latino Book Award, and The Gravedigger’s Archaeology (2015), which won the Letras Latinas/Red Hen Poetry Prize.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Felicia Zamora is the author of the books Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press 2017), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press 2018), and Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions 2018). Of Form & Gather was listed as one of the “9 Outstanding Latino Books Recently Published by Independent and University Presses” by NBC News.

Source: Poet's Corner with Felicia Zamora

Poet and editor Andrea Carter Brown is the author of three previous poetry collections: The Disheveled Bed (CavanKerry Press, 2006) and two chapbooks, Brook & Rainbow (winner of the 2001 Sow’s Ear Poetry Review chapbook contest) and Domestic Karma, (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her current manuscript, American Fraktur, was chosen by Jane Hirshfield for the 2018 Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award from Marsh Hawk Press, and her new poetry collection, September 12, has just been published by The Word Works for the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Her poetry has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, Southwest Review, Five Points, River Styx, Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Miramar, among many others. Featured on Poetry Daily, her work has also won awards from The River Oak Review, Thin Air, and the Poetry Society of America.

Source: Andrea Carter Brown Website

Popular since the late 1950s in her native Poland, Szymborska was little known elsewhere until the Nobel Prize announcement. Her quiet, personal poems—when compared to the political rebellion of many other poets from Eastern Europe—seemed out of step with the times. Never a prolific writer—she has published some 200 poems in a career spanning 40 years—Szymborska has not created the body of work normally associated with a Nobel Prize-winner. But, as Bogdana Carpenter remarked in World Literature Today, each of her poems "is a masterpiece."

Source: Gale in Context: Contemporary Women Poets

Native American Joy Harjo (born 1951) is a multi-faceted writer, artist, and musician. Trained first as a painter, Harjo shifted her attention to poetry during her undergraduate studies at the University of New Mexico. Of Muscogee Creek heritage, Harjo often draws on Native American spirituality and culture in her work, spotlighting feminist concerns and musical themes as well. Harjo has taught at the University of Colorado, the University of Arizona, and the University of New Mexico and has written several television scripts and screenplays. She has been honored with numerous awards and fellowships for her writing and music. She published a memoir, Crazy Brave, in 2013. In 2019, Harjo was named United States Poet Laureate, making her the first Native American to earn the title.

Source: Gale in Context: Biography

Vandana Khanna was born in New Delhi, India, and has lived most of her life in the United States. Her collection of poetry, Train to Agra, won the 2000 Crab Orchard Review First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Crazyhorse, Hayden's Ferry Review, and the Crab Orchard Review, among others.

Khanna earned her BA from the University of Virginia and her MFA from Indiana University in Bloomington, where she was a recipient of the Yellen Fellowship in poetry. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Source: Poetry Foundation