Featured Poets & Scholars
The following Featured Poets and Scholars will be performing and/or presenting at the 2024 Furious Flower Conference: Celebrating the Worlds of Black Poetry.
Anastacia-Renée
Anastacia-Renée is a queer writer, educator, artist, playwright, podcaster, and speaker whose most recent works include: (v.), Forget It, Here in the (Middle) of Nowhere, and Sidenotes from the Archivist, which was selected as one of the “NYPL Best Books of 2023,” and The American Library Association’s (RUSA) “Notable Books of 2024.” Anastacia-Renée received the James W. Ray Distinguished Artist Award for Washington Artist (2018), served as Seattle Civic Poet (2017-2019), and was Jack Straw Curator and Poet-in-Residence at Hugo House (2015-2017). Other honors include the Black Arts Legacies Award, the Prairie Schooner Glenna Luschei Poetry Award, an NAACP Award Nomination, and being selected by NBC News as part of the list of “Queer Artists of Color Dominate 2021’s Must See LGBTQ Art Shows,” for her Frye Art Museum installation, “(Don’t Be Absurd) Alice in Parts.” She has received fellowships and residencies from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, VONA, Ragdale, Mineral School, and The New Orleans Writers Residency. They were the 2021 Distinguished Visiting Writer in Residence at Seattle University and has been a visiting guest writer at many universities across the country. Her work has been widely anthologized in collections such as The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics and Superhero Poetry, Home is Where You Queer Your Heart, and elsewhere, as well as featured in print and online in Prairie Schooner, Evergreen, BOMB, Foglifter, Inkwell, Catapult, The Fight and The Fiddle, Torch, Cascadia Magazine, Bellingham Review Ms. Magazine and many others.
Efe Paul Azino
Efe Paul Azino is one of Nigeria’s best-known performance artists and poets. In 2015, he co-founded West Africa’s first international poetry festival, the Lagos International Poetry Festival, which he currently directs. He is also the founder and director of the New York Black and African Literature Festival and author of For Broken Men Who Cross Often, published under Farafina Books. He has appeared at the Berlin Poetry Festival, Poetry Africa, Edinburgh International Book Festival, Stanza Poetry Festival, BBC Contains Strong Language, Taipei Poetry Festival and the Ake Book and Arts Festival amongst others. His poems have been translated into Afrikaans, French, German and Mandarin.
Lillian Yvonne Bertram
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram’s most recent book of poetry, Negative Money, was a finalist for the New England Book Award. Their previous book, Travesty Generator, won the 2018 Noemi Press Poetry Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Anna Rabinowitz prize for interdisciplinary work, was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Their other books include Personal Science; a slice from the cake made of air; and But a Storm is Blowing from Paradise, which was chosen by Claudia Rankine as the winner of the 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award. Their new chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. Their honors include a 2017 Harvard University Woodberry Poetry Room Creative Grant, a 2014 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, finalist nomination for the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship, and fellowships to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Cave Canem, among others. They currently direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland.
Tara Betts
Tara Betts is a poet, editor, and educator, who has authored three full-length poetry collections: Refuse to Disappear, Break the Habit, and her debut collection Arc & Hue. Her other publications reflect her interests in Black literature and social justice, such as her book Carving Out Rights from Inside the Prison Industrial Complex. Her work has appeared in numerous journals including Obsidian III, Callaloo, African Voices, and Reverie, among others; she has also been widely anthologized. Betts has taught at several Northwestern, DePaul, University of Illinois-Chicago, and Rutgers University, as well as at Stateville Prison via Prison + Neighborhood Arts Project. She served as the Inaugural Poet for The People Practitioner Fellow at University of Chicago, and worked with several non-profit organizations in Chicago, including Gallery 37 and Young Chicago Authors. Betts is also Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and founder of the nonprofit organization The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side. She has been awarded an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship, as well as Writer’s Residencies at Ragdale Foundation, Centrum, Caldera, Soul Mountain, and Vermont Studio Center.
Remica Bingham-Risher
Remica Bingham-Risher is a Cave Canem fellow and Affrilachian Poet whose work has appeared many places, both in print and online. Bingham-Risher has authored several award-winning books including Conversion, winner of the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award; What We Ask of Flesh, which was shortlisted for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and Starlight & Error, winner of the Diode Editions Book Award and finalist for the Library of Virginia Book Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Writer’s Chronicle, New Letters, Callaloo, and Essence, among other journals. Bingham-Risher’s first prose publication is a memoir titled Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions That Grew Me Up. She is the Director of Quality Enhancement Plan Initiatives at Old Dominion University.
Malika Booker
Malika Booker is a poet, multi-disciplinary artist, and the founder of the writing collective Malika’s Poetry Kitchen, which has produced award winning poets since 2001. Her poetry collection Pepper Seed was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas 2014 poetry prize, and the Seamus Heaney Centre 2014 prize for first full collection. Booker has written for the stage, page, and radio, appearing in journals and anthologies including Bittersweet: Contemporary Black Women’s Poetry (1998), Out of Bounds, Black & Asian Poets (2012), and New Daughters of Africa (2019). She was the first British poet to be a fellow at Cave Canem and the inaugural Poet in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and has represented British writing internationally, both independently and with the British Council. Booker was both a Douglas Caster Cultural Fellow in Creative Writing and LHRI Fellow at Leeds University. In 2019 she won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors for her outstanding contributions to poetry. The following year, she won a Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, an award that she won again in 2023. Booker received a Research and Development commission for her next play and works as a Creative Writing lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is a poet and educator who authored The Tradition, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Paterson Poetry Prize and a finalist position for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first book, Please, won the American Book Award in 2008. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and was named one of the best books of the year by the Library Journal. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME Magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he won the Whiting Writer’s Award in 2009. He is currently the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.
Merle Collins
Merle Collins is a poet, short story writer, and academic whose art and research largely revolve around her experience as an active participant of the Grenadian Revolution. During the period of the Revolution, she served as a coordinator for research on Latin America and the Caribbean for the Government of Grenada. After leaving her home country of Grenada in 1983, Collins published her first collection of poetry, Because the Dawn Breaks in 1985, at which time she was a member of African Dawn, a performance group combining poetry, mime, and African music. In 1987, she published her first novel Angel, which was followed by a collection of short stories, Rain Darling in 1990, and a second collection of poetry, Rotten Pomerack in 1992. Her second novel, The Colour of Forgetting, was published in 1995 and will be republished as a Caribbean Modern Classic in 2023. She has also published a biography, The Governor’s Story: The Authorised Biography of Dame Hilda Bynoe, and her critical work has been published in books such as From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women’s Writing in the Postmodern World, Slavery and Abolition, and Caribbean Literature in Transition. Collins is currently Professor Emerita, University of Maryland, College Park.
Curtis Crisler
Curtis Crisler is a poet, educator, and the author of numerous poetry collections, including THe GReY aLBuM [PoeMS], winner of the Steel Toe Books Open Reading Period Prize; “This” Ameri-can-ah; Pulling Scabs, which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize; Black Achilles; Wonderkind, which was also nominated for a Pushcart Prize; and Spill, which won a Keyhole Chapbook Award. His most recent book Doing Drive-Bys on How to Love in the Midwest, won the C&R Press Award for poetry. He has published many other poetry books, young adult books, poetry chapbooks, been anthologized in many publications, and published in various magazines and journals. He has received fellowships and residencies from the City of Asylum/Pittsburgh, Cave Canem, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), Soul Mountain, Hamline University, Words on the Go, and Writer-in-Residence sponsored by Poets & Writers, INC. In addition to many grants and awards, including the RHINO Poetry Founder’s Prize and the Indiana Arts Commission Grants, Crisler was also nominated for the Eliot Rosewater Book Award (Rosie Award), and a Jessie Redmon Fauset Book Award; this year, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Indiana. He is currently a Professor of English at Purdue University Fort Wayne.
Rita Dove
Rita Dove is a distinguished writer, playwright, and editor who has authored a novel, a book of short stories, essays, and numerous volumes of poetry, among them Collected Poems 1974-2004, which was a National Book Award finalist and an NAACP Image Award winner. In 1987, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her third collection of poetry, Thomas and Beulah, and from 1993 to 1995, she served as U.S. Poet Laureate at the Library of Congress. Dove has written poetry for the New York Times Magazine from 2018 to 2019 and The Washington Post from 2000 to 2002. She has a many interdisciplinary credits as well, including a drama The Darker Face of the Earth; a song cycle Seven for Luck; and a song sequence A Standing Witness. Dove’s numerous honors include Lifetime Achievement Medals from the Library of Virginia and the Fulbright Association, the 2014 Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the 2019 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, and the 2021 Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1996, she received the National Humanities Medal from President Bill Clinton and in 2011, the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama—the only poet ever to receive both medals. To date, 29 honorary doctorates have been conferred upon Dove, most recently by Yale University, Emory University, Smith College, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa. She has served as president of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), as a chancellor of Phi Beta Kappa, and as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. A member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Dove teaches at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Camille Dungy
Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, which was named book of the month by Hudsons Booksellers, received the 2024 Award of Excellence in Garden and Nature Writing from The Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries, and was on the short list for the PEN/Jean Stein Award. Dungy has also written four collections of poetry, including Trophic Cascade, winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, and co-edited the From the Fishouse poetry anthology, as well as served as assistant editor for Gathering Ground: Celebrating Cave Canem’s First Decade. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and over 40 other anthologies, plus dozens of venues including The New Yorker, Poetry, Literary Hub, The Paris Review, and Poets.org. She is also the host of Immaterial, a podcast from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Magnificent Noise. A University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University, Dungy’s honors include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, an Honorary Doctorate from SUNY ESF, and fellowships from the NEA in both prose and poetry.
Ross Gay
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Gay has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is an activist, critic, poet, scholar, and educator. A self-described “Queer Black Troublemaker and Black Feminist Love Evangelist,” Gumbs is the author of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Dub: Finding Ceremony, M Archive: After the End of the World, and Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity; she is also co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines. She is the co-founder of Black Feminist Film School and Lucille Clifton Poetry Prize Honoree whose work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies, including classroom standards including The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Literature and Women’s Voices, Feminist Visions. In 2020, Gumbs was awarded the National Humanities Center Fellowship for her book in progress, The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde: A Cosmic Biography.
francine j. harris
francine j harris’s most recent book of poetry is Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said “no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet’s voice.” Her second book, play dead (Alice James, 2017) won a LAMBDA Literary Award, a Publishing Triangle Award, and was nominated for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry. Her debut collection, Allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012) was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. Her poetry has appeared in many journals, including McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, Poetry, Meridian, Indiana Review, Callaloo, and Boston Review. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and Cave Canem.
Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes is the author of seven poetry collections: So to Speak; American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and Whiting Foundation, and is a professor of English at New York University.
Damaris B. Hill
DaMaris B. Hill is a writer, scholar, and educator who authored A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing, which was an Amazon #1 Best Seller in African American Poetry, a Publisher’s Weekly Top 10 History Title for the season and nominated for an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work for Poetry. She has also published Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood, The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland, and \Vi-zə–bəl\ \Teks-chərs\ (Visible Textures), among other books. Her digital work includes “Shut Up In My Bones,” a twenty-first-century poem. Her work has appeared in African American Review, Sou’Wester, Sleet Magazine, American Studies Journal, Meridians, Shadowbox, Tidal Basin Review, Reverie, Tongues of the Ocean, Women in Judaism and numerous anthologies. During the 2023 to 2024 academic year, Hill served as a fellow and scholar-in-residence for Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.
Erica Hunt
Erica Hunt is a poet, essayist, and author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Time Flies Right Before the Eyes, A Day and Its Approximates, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and her newest work Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems. Her poems and non-fiction have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, FENCE, Hambone, among other publications. Essays on poetics, feminism and politics have been collected in Moving Borders, Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women and The Politics of Poetic Form, The World, and other anthologies. With poet and scholar Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is co-editor of the anthology Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing. She has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Fund for Poetry, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Djerassi Foundation, and is a past fellow of Duke University/the University of Capetown Program in Public Policy and a past Fellow at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing in Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, Hunt is Bonderman Visiting Professor at Brown University.
Angela Jackson
Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright who has published numerous chapbooks, volumes of poetry, and several stage plays. Born in Greenville, Mississippi, and raised on Chicago’s Southside, she was educated at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Jackson’s collections of poetry include Voo Doo/Love Magic; Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners; And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Open Book Award and a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Milt Kessler Poetry Prize. She received a Pushcart Prize and an American Book Award for her chapbook Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E. Jackson’s latest collection of poems, More Than Meat and Raiment, came out earlier this year. She has received the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America, TriQuarterly’s Daniel Curley Award, Illinois Center for the Book Heritage Award, Chicago Literary Hall of Fame Fuller Award, Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent from Chicago State University, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. She was a twenty-year member of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop, succeeding the late Hoyt W. Fuller as its Chair, and in 2022 she received the Black Excellence Lifetime Achievement Award from the Black Ensemble Theater and a Poetry Foundation 2022 Ruth Lilly Lifetime Achievement award for poetry. In recognition of her selection as Illinois’ Poet Laurate, the Illinois State Senate passed SR142, celebrating November 25, 2021, as Angela Jackson Day.
Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author’s Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.
Amanda Johnston
Amanda Johnston is a writer, visual artist, and the 2024 Texas Poet Laureate. She earned a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. She is the author of two chapbooks, GUAP and Lock & Key, and the full-length collection Another Way to Say Enter. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, among them, Callaloo, Poetry Magazine, The Moth, the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, and the anthologies, Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, and Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism. She has received fellowships, grants, and awards from Cave Canem, Hedgebrook, Tasajillo, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, The Watermill Center, American Short Fiction, and the Austin International Poetry Festival. She is a former Board President of Cave Canem Foundation, a member of the Affrilachian Poets, cofounder of Black Poets Speak Out, and founder/executive director of Torch Literary Arts.
Linda Kaoma
Linda Kaoma is a poet, writer, and projects/events manager in the arts. She is a Salzburg Global Seminars Fellow and a CNN-featured project manager with over eight years of experience in project and event management in the arts sector. She recently co-curated an event called “In Light of What We Write” for the Edinburgh International Book Festival in collaboration with the British Council. In 2013, she performed in Amsterdam at the Afro Vibes Festival alongside Dutch poet Babs Gons, in a poetic production entitled Becoming Another, Becoming You. She was a panelist at the Open Book Festival in 2014 and 2017 and at the Franschhoek Literary Festival in 2015 and 2016. Kaoma has also shared her work locally and in Austria, Ghana, and Kenya. She has managed and curated several local and international events, projects and festivals, and her work has been published on Unbranded Truth Online Magazine which she founded and edited, on Badilisha Poetry X-change, on the Life Righting Collective website, and in New Contrast. Kaoma is also a contributing author to the Life Righting Collective’s This Is How It Is anthology. She also reviews books on her Youtube channel LindaReads.
John Keene
John Keene is the author, co-author, and translator of a handful of books, including the poetry collection Seismosis (with art by Christopher Stackhouse), the novel Annotations, and the novella and story collection Counternarratives, both published by New Directions. Counternarratives received an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Republic of Consciousness Prize (UK), and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction. His most recent publication, Punks: New & Selected Poems received the 2022 National Book Award for Poetry, the Thom Gunn Award from the Publishing Triangle and a 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. Keene is a member of the Dark Room Collective, and his honors include a Whiting Award and fellowships from Cave Canem, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the New York Times Foundation, Yaddo, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Pan-African Literary Forum. He has taught at Northwestern University and served as the managing editor of Callaloo. Keene currently works as an associate professor of English, African American Studies, and African Studies at Rutgers University—Newark.
Keith Leonard
Keith Leonard is a scholar, writer, and the author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights. His academic and artistic work revolve around his study of political consciousness in African American poetry and poetics and in hip-hop culture and has been published in journals such as Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, MELUS, and on the Poetry Foundation’s website; his work can be found in print in anthologies like the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry, and African American Literature in Transition: The 1960s. His Contemporary Literature article “Postmodern Soul: The Innovative Nostalgia of Thomas Sayers Ellis” won the L. S. Dembo Prize for Best Article of the Year. Other honors and awards include an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a CAS Dean’s Award (American University) for Outstanding Contributions to an Inclusive Community, a Distinguished Faculty Award from the Office of Multicultural Affairs, and two Mellon Fellowships for his research and publications. Leonard is a member of the George Moses Horton Society for the Study of African American Poetry and has served numerous administrative positions with the Frederick Douglass Distinguished Scholars Program. He is an associate professor at American University and is currently working on a book project entitled Black Avant-Gardism.
Canisia Lubrin
Canisia Lubrin is a writer, critic, editor, professor, and poet. She is the author of three books, including Code Noir, her first novel; The Dyzgraphxst, which was shortlisted for four book prizes and won four more, including the overall OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Derek Walcott Prize, and the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize; and Voodoo Hypothesis, which was named a CBC Best Poetry Book and shortlisted for the Raymon Souster Award. Her short story “Into Timmins” is anthologized in The Unpublished City: Vol. I, edited by Dionne Brand and finalist for the 2018 Toronto Book Awards. Lubrin has held fellowships at the Banff Centre, Civitella Ranieri, and multiple universities. She was appointed the Inaugural Shaftesbury Writer in Residence of Victoria College at the University of Toronto from 2018 to 2021. In 2019, she was Writer-in-Residence at Queens University and has taught in the English department at Humber College. In 2021, publisher McClelland & Stewart announced Lubrin as their new poetry editor. She is an assistant professor and coordinator in the creative writing MFA program at the University of Guelph in Guelph, Ontario, Canada.
Shara McCallum
Shara McCallum is a poet, nonfiction writer, and educator. Her works include No Ruined Stone, a finalist for the 2022 UNT Rilke Prize; Madwoman, winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Poetry; The Face of Water: New and Selected Poems; This Strange Land; Song of Thieves; and The Water Between Us, winner of the 1998 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize. McCallum has received fellowships from Cave Canem, the NEA, the Tennessee Arts Commission, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and Guggenheim; she has also received a college prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her honors include the Silver Musgrave Medal, the Oran Robert Perry Burke Award for Nonfiction, and the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, among others. McCallum’s work has been featured in the Best American Poetry series, and in her radio program “Poetry Moment” which she created and hosted as the 2021-22 Penn State Laureate.
Kei Miller
Kei Miller is one of the Caribbean’s premiere contemporary writers. Educated in Jamaica, England, and Scotland, Miller is the award-winning author of twelve books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction, as well as the editor of Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology. His work is internationally recognized—his fiction and nonfiction has won the Prix les Afriques and Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. His poetry has been awarded the Forward prize, and his most recent collection, In Nearby Bushes, was shortlisted for the 2020 Derek Walcott Prize, longlisted for the 2020 Polari Prize, and was a 2019 Telegraph Herald Book of the Year. Miller is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for his contribution to literature. Miller’s collections and novels have garnered many other honors, including an OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in Non-Fiction, the 2018 Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Award for Excellence in Arts & Letters, and the Silver Musgrave Medal from the Institute of Jamaica for his contribution to literature, and an International Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Iowa. has been a visiting writer at York University in Canada, at the Department of Library Services in the British Virgin Islands and a Vera Rubin Fellow at Yaddo. He has taught at the University of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter, and elsewhere. Dr. Miller recently moved to the United States and currently serves as professor of Creative Writing at the University of Miami.
Gregory Pardlo
Gregory Pardlo is the author of the poetry collections Spectral Evidence and Digest, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include Totem, winner of the American Poetry Review/ Honickman Prize, and Air Traffic, a memoir in essays. His honors include fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Pardlo is a faculty member of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers-University-Camden and Co-Director of the Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice at Rutgers University-Camden. He is currently a visiting professor of creative writing at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Jahan Ramazani
Jahan Ramazani is a poetry scholar and literary historian of broad international scope. He is a co-editor of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, and the associate editor of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ramazani is the author of numerous critical books on poetry, including Poetry in a Global Age; Poetry and Its Others: News, Prayer, Song, and the Dialogue of Genres; A Transnational Poetics, winner of the Harry Levin Prize for best book in comparative literary history published in the years 2008 to 2010; The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English; Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016 and the American Philosophical Society in 2022, Ramazani is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEH Fellowship, a Rhodes Scholarship, the William Riley Parker Prize of the MLA, and the Thomas Jefferson Award, the University of Virginia’s highest honor. He is currently Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
Glenis Redmond
Glenis Redmond is a poet, performer, educator, and the First Poet Laureate of Greenville, South Carolina. She has authored six books of poetry: Backbone, Under the Sun, What My Hand Say, Listening Skin, Three Harriets & Other, and Praise Songs for Dave and Potter, and her poetry has been showcased on NPR and PBS and has been most recently published in Orion Magazine, storySouth and The New York Times, as well as numerous literary journals. Redmond has received the highest arts award in South Carolina, the Governor’s Award and been inducted into the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She is also a “Charlie Award” recipient awarded by the Carolina Mountains Literary Festival and was recently a recipient of the Peacemaker Award by the Upstate Meditation Center in 2022. Redmond founded the first Greenville Poetry Slam in 1995, was one of the original founders of WordSlam, the youth slam movement in Asheville, NC that began in 2007, and founded Peace Voices. She participated in the task force that created the first Writer-in-Residence at the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, NC. She was awarded the WNC Best Poet through the Mountain Xpress so many times, she was placed in the Hall of Fame. She is a North Carolina Literary Fellowship recipient and a Cave Canem alumni. Now she works as a Kennedy Center Teaching Artist and is listed in their National Touring Directory.
Roger Reeves
Roger Reeves is a the author of Best Barbarian, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His debut collection is King Me, a Library Journal Best Poetry Book of the Year, and winner of the Larry Levis Reading Prize, the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, and a John C. Zacharis First Book Award. His first book on nonfiction is Dark Days: Fugitive Essays, published by Graywolf in August 2023. His poems have appeared in magazines and journals such as The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Tin House, among others. He was awarded a 2013 NEA Fellowship, Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation in 2008, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard University, and a Whiting Award.
Matthew Shenoda
Matthew Shenoda is the author of Somewhere Else (Coffee House Press, 2005), which was named one of 2005’s debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and was the winner of a 2006 American Book Award; Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone (BOA Editions, 2009); and Tahrir Suite: Poems (Northwestern University Press), winner of the 2015 Arab American Book Award. He is the editor, with Kwame Dawes, of Bearden’s Odyssey: Poets Respond to the Art of Romare Bearden, and a founding editor of the African Poetry Book Fund. Shenoda is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Literary Arts at Brown University.
Evie Shockley
Poet and literary scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we (winner of the NAACP Image Award; National Book Award Finalist), semiautomatic (winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Pulitzer Prize finalist), and the new black (winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award). She publishes widely and has been translated into French, Polish, Slovenian, and Spanish. Honors recognizing the body of her work include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, and the Stephen Henderson Award, and her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Cave Canem and collaborating with like-minded artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy, winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Their other collections of poetry include Homie and Don’t Call Us Dead, and they are also the author of two chapbooks, hands on ya knees and black movie, winner of the Button Poetry Prize. Their other honors and awards include the Forward Prize for Best Collection, the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and they have been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry, the National Book Critic Circle Award, and the National Book Award. Smith’s poetry and prose have been featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, The New Yorker, GQ, Best American Poetry and on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. They edit for The Offing and are a founding member of two collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club. Smith is a former co-host of the Webby nominated podcast VS (Versus), and they have received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, Princeton, United States Artists, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Smith has been featured as part of Forbes’ annual 30 Under 30 list and has won a Pushcart Prize.
A.B. Spellman
A. B. Spellman is a poet, music critic, and arts administrator who published his first book of poems, The Beautiful Days, in 1964 while working as a jazz music reviewer. His first full-length book, Four Lives in the Bee-Bop Business, is an in-depth look at the lives of the jazz musicians Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols, and Jackie McLean. The year after its publication, Spellman joined a group of Black poets touring the nation’s HBCUs. His book Things I Must Have Known received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award and was nominated for the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. Spellman has written for Rhythm Magazine until 1969, and then taught at Morehouse College, Emory University, Rutgers, and Harvard, and started the Atlanta Center for Black Art. In 1975, he became the director of the Arts in Education Study Project for the NEA, where he held a series of positions, culminating in his 1998 appointment to the Deputy Chairman for the Office of Guidelines, Panel and Council Operations for the NEA. After retiring in 2005, his service was honored by the creation of the A.B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy. In addition to continuing to write, Spellman serves on several arts panels for the Rockefeller Foundation and ASCAP and is on the Advisory Board of the Smithsonian Institution’s African-American Museum.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is the author of three books: Big Girl, a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Balcones Fiction Prize and the Next Generation Indie Book Award for First Novel; The Poetics of Difference: Queer Feminist Forms in the African Diaspora, winner of the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the MLA; and the short story collection, Blue Talk and Love, winner of the Judith Markowitz Award from Lambda Literary. In her writing, she explores the links between language, imagination, and bodily life in Black queer and feminist experience. Her stories and essays have appeared in Best New Writing, The Kenyon Review, Callaloo, Feminist Studies, American Fiction, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard Review, TriQuarterly, GLQ: Lesbian and Gay Studies Quarterly, American Literary History, The Scholar and Feminist, American Quarterly, Public Books, Ebony.com, TheRoot.com, BET.com, and others. A BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and a New York Times Paperback Row selection, Big Girl was named a best books feature by TIME, Essence, People, Vulture, Ms, Goodreads, Booklist, She Reads, The Root, Library Reads, Glamour UK, Vogue France, and others. Her work has earned support and honors from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, Millay Arts, the Institute for Citizens and Scholars, the Mellon Foundation, the Center for Fiction, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born and raised in Harlem, NY, she is Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University and lives in Washington DC.
Frank X Walker
Frank X. Walker is a multidisciplinary artist and educator, as well as the first African American writer to be named Kentucky Poet Laureate. He is the author of the children’s book A is for Affrilachia, and thirteen collections of poetry, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers, which was awarded a NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the Black Caucus American Library Association Honor Award for Poetry. He also curated “We Wear the Mask: Black Superheroes Through the Ages,” an exhibit of his personal collection of action figures, comics, and related memorabilia at the Lyric Theatre and Cultural Arts Center in 2015; he reprised the exhibit in 2018 at Purdue University and Western Carolina University. Voted one of the most creative professors in the south, Walker coined the term “Affrilachia” and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets, subsequently publishing the eponymous collection. His honors include a 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, the 2008 and 2009 Denny C. Plattner Award for Outstanding Poetry in Appalachian Heritage, the 2013 West Virginia Humanities Council’s Appalachian Heritage Award, as well as fellowships and residences with Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Kentucky Arts Council. In 2020 Walker received the Donald Justice Award for Poetry from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. The recipient of honorary doctorates from University of Kentucky, Transylvania University, Spalding University and Centre College, Walker is the founding editor of pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture and serves as Professor of English and African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is a poet, fiction and nonfiction writer, professor, and an anti-war and human rights activist who began writing in her home country of Liberia. She has authored six critically acclaimed poetry collections: Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, which was selected by judges as the 2023 winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Award; When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, The River is Rising, Becoming Ebony, which won a 2002 Crab Orchard Award; and Before the Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa. She is also the author of a children’s book, In Monrovia, the River Visits the Sea. Her newest publication, Breaking the Silence: Anthology of Liberian Poetry, is the most comprehensive volume of Liberian literature of any genre since before that nation’s independence. She was also selected as the 2022 winner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize, the 2022 Edward Stanley Poetry Prize, and received many other grants and awards including a 2020 Humanities Institute Fellowship and a 2011 Institute of Arts Fellowship from Penn State, a 2016 WISE Women Award for Literary Arts from Wise Women of Blair County, a 2011 President Barack Obama Award from Blair County NAACP, the 2010 Liberian Award, a Penn State University AESEDA Collaborative Grant, and a World Bank Fellowship, among others. She has had dozens of poems, memoir articles, and short stories anthologized and published in literary magazines internationally, including Harvard Review, Transition, Crab Orchard Review, Harvard Divinity Review, and Prairie Schooner. She has taught at Pennsylvania State University and Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
avery r. young
avery r. young is an interdisciplinary artist and an award-winning teaching artist who has been an Arts + Public Life Artist-In-Residence at the University of Chicago. The full-length recording tubman. is the soundtrack to his collection of poetry, neckbone: visual verses. Young’s poems and essays have been published in Cecil McDonald’s In the Company of Black, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Teaching Black, The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, AIMPrint, and other anthologies. His work in performance, visual text, and sound design have been featured in several exhibitions and theatre festivals–notably The Hip Hop Theatre Festival, The Museum of Contemporary Art, and American Jazz Museum. Young is the featured vocalist on flutist Nicole Mitchell’s Mandorla Awakening and is one of four directors of The Floating Museum, co-mentoring Rebirth Youth Poetry Ensemble and performing with his band, de deacon board. He is a 3Arts awardee, a poetry editor for Bridge, and a former Cave Canem fellow. Young received a 2022 Leader for a New Chicago Award and a 2022 Meier Achievement Award. In 2023, he was appointed the inaugural poet laureate of Chicago.