Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet, essayist, and national spokesperson for the Campaign for Youth Justice. He writes and lectures about the impact of mass incarceration on American society. He is the au…
William James Collins is an American poet who served as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003. He was a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York,…
Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford Unive…
Victoria Chang's latest book of poems is With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus & Giroux and Corsair in the UK), which received the Forward Prize in Poetry for the Best Collection. Her most recent …
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and Apocalyptic Swing. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Award for Emerging Women Writers, the Bernard F. Conners Prize fr…
Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry from New York University. Limón has receive…
Ariana Reines is the author of The Cow (Alberta Prize, FenceBooks: 2006), Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar: 2007; Fence: 2011), and MERCURY (Fence: forthcoming fall 2011), plus the LP/audiobook SAVE THE WORLD…
Jericho Brown worked as the speechwriter for the Mayor of New Orleans before receiving his PhD in Creative Writing and Literature from the University of Houston. He also holds an MFA from the Universi…
Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir How We Fight for Our Lives, winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, the 2020 Stonewall Book Award/Israel Fishman Non-fiction Award, and a 2020 Lambda Li…
Natalie Díaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her …
Olga Sofia Ravn is a Danish poet and novelist. Initially she published poetry which was acclaimed by the critics, as was her first novel Celestine. She is also a translator and has worked as a literar…
Hala Alyan was born in Carbondale, Illinois, and grew up in Kuwait, Oklahoma, Texas, Maine, and Lebanon. She earned a BA from the American University of Beirut and an MA from Columbia University. Whil…
Oscar Hokeah lives in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and works for Cherokee Nation Indian Child Welfare. He is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma, and he also has Mexican heri…
Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (2014, YesYes Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Their 2nd collection …
sam sax is a queer, jewish, writer and educator. They're the author of PIG (2023, Scribner) and Yr Dead (2024, McSweeney’s), as well as Madness, winner of The National Poetry Series and ‘Bury It’ winn…
Kenan Orhan is a Turkish American writer and a recipient of the O. Henry Prize. His stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner, The Common, and elsewhere, and ha…
Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collection, I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Equilibriu…
Emily Skaja was born and raised in rural Illinois. She holds an MFA from Purdue University and a PhD from the University of Cincinnati. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Blackbird, Crazyhorse…
Mosab Abu Toha is the winner of a Palestine Book Award, an American Book Award, Walcott Poetry Prize, and also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.