Keetje Kuipers was born in Pullman, Washington. She earned her BA at Swarthmore College and her MFA at the University of Oregon. Her collections of poetry include Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which won an A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, The Keys to the Jail (2014), and All its Charms (2019). In her poems, Kuipers ranges over and across landscapes with “an unmistakable sense of adventure,” in poet Eavan Boland’s phrase. In an interview, Kuipers herself noted that “geography has become of primary importance to me, and the battle for belonging—and the butting together of disparate and conflicting geographies that express different parts of myself—are clearly hashed out in my poetry.”

Source: Poetry Foundation

Poet, critic, and scholar David Kirby grew up on a farm in southern Louisiana. He received a BA from Louisiana State University and, at the age of 24, a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University. Influenced by artists as diverse as John Keats and Little Richard, Kirby writes distinctive long-lined narrative poems that braid together high and popular culture, personal memory, philosophy, and humor.

Source: Poetry Foundation

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006), and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry London, among many others.

Source: Poetry Foundation

David St. John is a skillful poet. Hush, a collection of poems written by his mid-twenties, clearly establishes his talent as well as reflecting preoccupations common to younger poets. As with many young poets, there are poems modeled after the work of other writers as well as impressionistic poems inspired by paintings. Many of the poems in this collection, however, also connect quite powerfully with the author's personal history. The literary allusions and painterly approach generally work for, rather than against, the outcome. Many poems deal with the struggle to get beyond the preoccupation with self that is part of being an artist to establish the intimacy necessary to being a worthwhile human being. This theme is reflected in a quote from Paul Éluard that precedes the body of the work: "Are we two or am I all alone."

Source: Gale Literature: Contemporary Poets

African-American poet Lucille Clifton is remembered as one of the most important literary voices of the 20th and early 21st centuries, whose economical verses centered on the African-American family and the experiences of black women in particular. Informed by her own African-American heritage and by her life as a mother to six children, Clifton's work treats wide-ranging subjects such as slavery and its legacy, family and community, oppression, the pain of illness, and the joys and indignities of the female body. The author of a dozen volumes of poetry, beginning with Good Times in 1969, and more than 20 books for children, Clifton was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize three times and was the first author to have two books chosen as finalists for the award during the same year, Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems, nominated in 1988. In 2000 she won the prestigious National Book Award for her collection Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000, and in 2007 she was the winner of the Poetry Foundation's prestigious Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the first African-American woman to be so honored. The Poetry Foundation honored Clifton for her lifetime of contributions to American literature with its Robert Frost Medal, which was awarded posthumously in 2010.

Source: Gale Literature: Contemporary Black Biography

Terrance Hayes is an American poet whose work is noted for its brilliant language, underlying humor, and startling insights. His poetry has been honored with many awards, including the Pushcart Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Poetry Series; in 2014, Hayes received a MacArthur Fellowship. His work, said Stephen Burt in the New York Times, explores multiple identities and multiple forms of masculinity—how to be, or become, various kinds of men--but it is also an art of evasion...Hayes works to escape not the African American identity but the demand that he (or anyone) express that identity in the same way all the time." Writing in Ploughshares, Robert N. Casper observed that Hayes "is as various as he is virtuosic, and he has constructed an oeuvre out of what he calls his 'schizophrenic aesthetic.'...His poems invoke...cultural figures high and low, through address, persona poems, and—in the case of predecessors from Federico Garcia Lorca to Wanda Coleman—imitations."

Source: Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors

A resident of San Antonio, Texas, since she was a high school student, Nye has drawn increasing public and critical recognition for her poetry as well as for editing collections of Mexican and Middle Eastern verse. In her poems, Nye often adopts an incantatory and didactive voice to capture and comment on the metaphysical and ethical essence of such diverse subject matter as Texas landscapes, elderly people, and popular culture. The result is poetry that is playfully and imaginatively instructive, borrows from Eastern and Middle Eastern and Native American religions, and resembles the meditative poetry of William Stafford, Wallace Stevens, and Gary Snyder.

Source: Gale In Context: Biography: Contemporary Women Poets

Dorothy Barresi is a critically acclaimed poet and educator. She is a professor of creative writing and chair of the creative writing department at the University of California, Northridge, a two-time Pushcart Prize winner, and the author of five collections of poetry.

Source: Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors

Kwame Dawes is one of the most prolific poets writing in English today. The author of more than 16 collections of poetry, two novels, and several nonfiction books, he also has edited numerous anthologies that collect and promote the work of Afro-Caribbean writers. The 2012 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry, he serves as the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, one of the United States' most prestigious literary magazines.

Source: Contemporary Black Biography

Harryette Mullen is best known as a poet but has also written short stories, essays, and non-fiction prose. Mullen, who has been called the "Queen of Hip Hyperbole" by the Hispanic writer, Sandra Cisneros, has published five volumes of poetry, and her work has been included in several anthologies. Given Mullen's creative use of homophones, metaphors, puns, and aphorisms, even her short poems are densely layered with meaning and imagery. She writes from the vantage point of being African-American, female, and a feminist. Her poetic style is influenced by Black Arts Movement, feminist, and formally innovative writers. She is not a "Language Poet," although like them she writes beyond the boundaries of "mainstream" poetry.

Source: Contemporary Black Biography