F. Douglas Brown is the author of Zero to Three (University of Georgia Press, 2014), recipient of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. He teaches English and Poetry at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, California.

Source: Poets.org

Donika Kelly is the author of the chapbook Aviarium (500 Places, 2017) and the full-length collection Bestiary (Graywolf, 2016), winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry and the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Bestiary was also long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she earned her MFA in Writing from the Michener Center for Writers and a Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She is an assistant professor at St. Bonaventure University, where she teaches creative writing.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Writer and editor Victoria Chang earned a BA in Asian studies from the University of Michigan, an MA in Asian studies from Harvard University, an MBA from Stanford University, and an MFA from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Her collections of poetry include Circle (2005), winner of the Crab Orchard Review Award Series in Poetry; Salvinia Molesta (2008); The Boss (2013); and Barbie Chang (2017). Her poems have been published in the Kenyon Review, Poetry, the Threepenny Review, and Best American Poetry 2005. In 2017, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Source: PoetryFoundation.org

Lim's poetry resists being placed within any particular poetic school or tradition though some critics have identified it with the English Romantic tradition. Her poetry, written in apparently traditional form achieves a rare conciseness and precision. It disturbs, and challenges the reader to re-examine received notions about culture, language, and gender. It also offers pleasure and insights.

Source: Gale In Context: Biography

Poet Amy Uyematsu was raised in southern California by parents who had been interned in American camps during World War II. She earned a BA in mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles. Uyematsu’s poems consider the intersection of politics, mathematics, spirituality, and the natural world. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Basic Vocabulary (2016), The Yellow Door (2015), Stone Bow Prayer (2005), Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (1997), and 30 Miles from J-Town (1992), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize.

Source: Poetry Foundation

Poet Laureate Emerita of Altadena, California (Editor-in-Chief) 2018-2020 and a member of the Pasadena Rose Poets, Teresa Mei Chuc is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012), Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014), and Invisible Light (Many Voices Press, 2018). Teresa Mei Chuc (mixed ancestry: Vietnamese, Cantonese & Japanese) was born in Saigon, Vietnam, and immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee of war under political asylum with her mother and brother shortly after the American war in Vietnam while her father, who had served in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, remained in a Vietcong "re-education" prison camp for nine years. Teresa, a fellow, and teacher-consultant of the Los Angeles Writing Project (a chapter of the National Writing Project), teaches literature and writing at a public high school and works towards decolonizing education for her students. Teresa has a bachelor's degree in philosophy, professional teaching credentials in primary and secondary education, and a Master's in Fine Arts in Creative Writing (poetry) from Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont. She served for one year as poetry editor and another year as poetry editor-in-chief for Goddard College's Pitkin Review. Teresa was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2012 for "Truth is Black Rubber," a section of poems in her collection Red Thread, and Teresa was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2016 for her poem "Quan Am on a Dragon." Teresa’s poetry appears in the anthology, Inheriting the War: Poetry and Prose by Descendants of Vietnam Veterans and Refugees ​(W.W. Norton).

Source: Author's Website

In her collection titled Esperanza: Poems for Orpheus, Holly Prado uses the metaphor of Orpheus to illustrate the nature of creative inspiration. Prado also, according to Women's Review of Books contributor Alison Townsend, shows how mythology is a part of our everyday life. She starts by describing the mythic character of Orpheus in her introduction. Orpheus's music enchanted people, animals, and gods alike. Even trees uprooted themselves in ecstasy. As Prado notes in her introduction to Esperanza, "Orpheus becomes the background for all inspiration and represents a personal union with the divine."

Source: Gale In Context: Biography

As a writer, performer, professor, and activist, Francisco X. Alarcón disproves the myth that poets are reclusive and introspective. While the content of his work is often highly personal, Alarcon has not only made a mission of sharing his work with the widest possible audience but has also drawn on his experiences as a member of different communities—his neighborhood, his heritage, his sexual orientation.

Source: Gale In Context: Biography

Over four decades, Jayne Cortez has perfected her personal expression of an exuberant poetry steeped in African-American traditions of jazz, blues, dance, drama, and painting, and connected to the needs of the communities that continue to shape her voice. In Cortez's work, the personal is always intensely political, both in topical poems that address specific issues of war and injustice, and in her recurring vision of a community of strong, resourceful, and free women and men. The poet's role is to record wrongs, to chastise wrongdoers, and to give heart to the individuals whose struggles create the community. Her poetic personae, thus, include the griot, the jeremiah, and the shaman. Critically praised as one of the most forthright voices raised in opposition to racism and sexism, Cortez, herself, says in an interview with D.H. Melhem, "I think that poets have the responsibility to be aware of the meaning of human rights, to be familiar with history, to point out distortions, and to bring their thinking and their writing to higher levels of illumination."

Source: Gale In Context: Biography

Poet Ralph Angel grew up, lives, and works on the U.S. West Coast, yet has traveled throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Angel is on faculty on both coasts, teaching creative writing classes. As a poet, Angel has won numerous awards, including a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright fellowship. The first book of poetry Angel published was Anxious Latitudes in 1986. Angel did not publish another book for almost ten years when he released Neither World. The "world" Angel introduces here is that of Los Angeles through surrealism. Gail Wronsky, writing in the Antioch Review, wrote that Neither World "is an exhilarating, heartbreaking, deliciously subversive place."

Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems, 1986-2006, published in 2006, is a collection of Angel's previous three collections, plus twenty-three new poems. Fred Muratori, writing in Library Journal, called Angel "a poet of the interior," adding that he "conjures a half-lit, Prufrockian world forever caught between states of dreaming and waking" in his poetry.

Source: Gale In Context: Biography