AI (1947–2010) was an American poet. She published eight collections of poetry, including Killing Floor (1979), winner of the Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Sin (1986), winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; and Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999), which won the National Book Award for Poetry. Her other honors include awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Bunting Fellowship Program at Radcliffe College.
ALICE ADAMS (1926–1999) was a writer and professor. She is widely recognized for her short stories, receiving the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement in 1982. Also a novelist, Adams wrote the bestseller Superior Women in 1984. Her other honors include several Best American Short Stories awards along with Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Apart from her career as a writer, she also taught at Stanford and the University of California, Davis and Berkeley.
MARGARET ATWOOD is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her novels include Cat’s Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the MaddAddam trilogy. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid’s Tale, went back into the bestseller charts with the election of Donald Trump, when the Handmaids became a symbol of resistance against the disempowerment of women, and with the 2017 release of the award- winning Channel 4 TV series. The Testaments, her long-anticipated sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, won the 2019 Booker Prize. Dearly, Atwood’s first poetry collection in over a decade, was published in November 2020. Atwood has won numerous awards, including the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, and the PEN USA Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2019, she was made a member of the Order of the Companions of Honour for services to literature. She has also worked as a cartoonist, illustrator, librettist, playwright, and puppeteer. She lives in Toronto, Canada.
DAVID BAKER’s latest book is Swift: New and Selected Poems, published in 2019 by W. W. Norton. He teaches at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, and serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review.
RUTH BEHAR is the Victor Haim Perera Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She was born in Cuba and is the author of the nonfiction books Translated Woman, The Vulnerable Observer, An Island Called Home, and Traveling Heavy; the poetry collection Everything I Kept; and the novels Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba. Behar, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant recipient, was named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation.
BERTOLT BRECHT (1898–1956) was a German poet, playwright, and the- atrical reformer. His theatrical work includes the operas Die Dreigroschenoper (1928; The Threepenny Opera) and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930; Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Apart from his career in dra- matics, Brecht also wrote a variety of poetry, including songs and poems for his plays, which is collected in Poems 1913–1956 (1976) and Poetry and Prose: Bertolt Brecht (2003).
STEPHEN BROCKMANN is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of A Critical History of German Film (2nd ed., 2020) and German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (2004), among others. Since 2014, he has served as president of the International Brecht Society.
KALISHA BUCKHANON is the author of the novels Upstate, Conception, Solemn, and Speaking of Summer. She was a true crime TV commentator on BET, ID Channel and TV One. She and her work featured also in such media as Essence, O Magazine, People, TIME, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmo, Marie Claire, Elle, The Guardian, and more. Upstate is an American Library Association ALEX Award winner, Audie Award in Literary Fiction winner, Terry McMillan Young Author Award winner, Hurston-Wright Foundation Debut Fiction Finalist, and National Book Foundation “Literature for Justice” title.
NGUYEN NGUYET CAM has taught Vietnamese literature at the University of California, Berkeley for almost two decades. She has com- pleted numerous literary translations, including Vietnamese versions of E. B.
White’s Charlotte’s Web and The Trumpet of the Swan (Kim Dong Publishing House) and an English version of Vu Trong Phung’s Dumb Luck (University of Michigan Press).
VICTORIA CHANG’s latest book of poems is OBIT, published by Copper Canyon Press (2020). Other books include Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s books are Love, Love and Is Mommy? She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s MFA Program.
HAYAN CHARARA is the author of four poetry collections, including Something Sinister (Carnegie Mellon), winner of an Arab American Book Award, and the forthcoming These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit (Milkweed Editions). He also edited Inclined to Speak, an anthology of contem- porary Arab American poetry, and he is series editor and co-founder, with Fady Joudah, of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.
MARILYN CHIN’s books include A Portrait of the Self as Nation, Hard Love Province, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, Dwarf Bamboo, The Phoenix Gone, The Terrace Empty, and Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen. Chin has won numerous awards, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan.
WANDA COLEMAN (1946–2013) was an American poet and writer. She published numerous collections of poetry, including Bathwater Wine (1998), winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001), finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Her other works include the poetry and short story collection Heavy Daughter Blues (1987) and the novel Mambo Hips and Make Believe (1999). She received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Fellowship for Poetry. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems, edited by Terrance Hayes, was published by Black Sparrow Press in 2020.
MARTHA COLLINS’s most recent collection of poetry is Because What Else Could I Do (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), which won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. She has published nine earlier books of poetry, four volumes of co-translated Vietnamese poetry, and a number of edited anthologies. Her website is marthacollinspoet.com.
THOMAS J. COTTLE is Professor Emeritus of Counseling Psychology and Human Development at Boston University. His books include Hardest Times: The Trauma of Long Term Unemployment; A Sense of Self: The Work of Affirmation; At Peril: Stories of Injustice; When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother; and Drawing Life: Narratives and the Sense of Self.
MARTÍN ESPADA’s many books of poems include Floaters (2021), Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), and Alabanza (2003). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He teaches English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
EDWARD FIELD, currently ninety-six and living in New York, started writ- ing poetry during World War II when he flew twenty-seven bombing missions. A poem about his plane crashing has recently been made into a short film called Minor Accident of War. His dozen books include poetry, fiction, and a memoir.
L. C. FIORE’s novel The Last Great American Magic (Can of Corn Media) won Novel of the Year from Underground Book Reviews. His debut novel, Green Gospel (Livingston Press), was named first runner-up in the Eric Hoffer Book Awards (General Fiction). His new novel, Coyote Loop, is forthcoming from Adelaide Books in early 2021. His fiction has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, New South, and storySouth, among many other places. An award-winning short story writer and editor, his work has also appeared on the Good Men Project and in various baseball publications, including The Love of the Game: Essays by Lifelong Fans (McFarland & Co.). He is the host of A440 Podcast. He also is the communications director for the North Carolina Writers’ Network and lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with his wife and family.
DAVID FRYE teaches anthropology and Latin American culture and society at the University of Michigan. As a professional translator, he has published thirty books in translation, ranging from Heart of Tango (2010) by the Spanish novelist Elia Barceló and the sixteenth-century picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes (2015) to the poetry of Nancy Morejón.
MARY GAITSKILL is the author of the novels Two Girls, Fat and Thin, Veronica, and The Mare. She has also written three story collections which are Bad Behavior, Because They Wanted To, and Don’t Cry; a collection of her essays, Somebody With A Little Hammer, was published in April 2017. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2004 and an American Academy of Arts and Letters grant in 2018. Her most recent publication is the novella, This Is Pleasure. She is currently Norman Podlich Fellow at Claremont McKenna College.
DIANE GLANCY is Professor Emerita at Macalester College. In 2020, Turtle Point published Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job. Her books A Line of Driftwood: A story of Ada Blackjack and Still Moving: How the Land, the Road and the Sacred Inform a Life are forthcoming in 2021. See www.dianeglancy.com.
LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN, born 1943, grew up in Culver City, CA where he spent extensive periods of time inside “A Room in California,” a closet filled with hundreds of back-issue LIFE magazines for sale. Memories of wartime scenes and persons haunted him throughout his education at UCLA and Brown University, and during the 32 years he served as editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.
LORNA GOODISON was born in Kingston, Jamaica. Her numerous poetry collections include Collected Poems (2017), Supplying Salt and Light (2013), Goldengrove: New and Selected Poems (2006), and Controlling the Silver (2005). She was appointed poet laureate of Jamaica in 2017. In 2018, she received a Windham–Campbell Literature Prize, and in 2019, she was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry.
MARK HALLIDAY directs the creative writing program at Ohio University, where he has taught since 1996. His seventh poetry collection Losers Dream On appeared in 2018 from the University of Chicago Press. “To You in 2052” appeared in his 2008 book Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press).
FRANCINE J. HARRIS is a poet from Detroit, Michigan. She is the author of Here Is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020); play dead (Alice James Books, 2016), which was the winner of a 2017 Lambda Literary Award and the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and was a finalist for the 2017 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; and allegiance (Wayne State University Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Open Book Award. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem and the National Endowment for the Arts.
ROBERT HAYDEN (1913–1980) was an American poet who served as the first Black A merican United States Poet Laureate from 1976 to 1978. His work was first widely recognized in 1966 with his Selected Poems, and he later went on to receive numerous awards and honors, including the grand prize for poetry at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Senegal in 1966 for his book A Ballad of Remembrance (1962) and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1975.
KATHLEEN HEIL writes and translates poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Threepenny Rev iew, Fence, and many other journals. A recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others, she lives in Berlin. More at www.kathleenheil.net.
RICK HILLES is the author of Brother Salvage and A Map of the Lost World, both with the Pitt Poetry Series. A recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, he is an Associate Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
EDWARD HIRSCH was living in Detroit and teaching at Wayne State University when he wrote “Devil’s Night,” which appeared in his book Earthly Measures. In all, he has published ten collections of poetry, most recently, Gabriel: A Poem and Stranger by Night, and six books of prose, most newly, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart.
ALEC HOLCOMBE is an associate professor of Southeast Asian history at Ohio University.
MAJA JABLOŃSKA attended Jagiellonian Universit,ywhere she earned a degree in comparative literature; she lives in Krakow, Poland.
DR. CHARLES JOHNSON, University of Washington professor emeritus and the author of twenty-five books, is a novelist, philosopher, essayist, literary scholar, short story writer, cartoonist and illustrator, and a screenwriter. His recent publications are The Way of the Writer; his fourth short story collection, Night Hawks; and GRAND: A Grandparent’s Wisdom for a Happy Life.
LAWRENCE JOSEPH is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). He has also written two books of prose: Lawyerland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), a nonfiction novel, and The Game Changed: Essays and Other Prose (University of Michigan Press, 2011). He is Tinnelly Professor of Law at St. John’s University School of Law and lives in New York City.
PAULINE KALDAS is the author of Looking Both Ways, The Time Between Places, Letters from Cairo, and Egyptian Compass. She was awarded a fellow- ship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and has been a resident at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She teaches litera- ture and creative writing at Hollins University in Virginia.
JEN KARETNICK’s most recent full-length poetry collection is The Burning Where Breath Used to Be (David Robert Books, 2020). She is also the author/ co-author of nineteen other books spanning multiple genres, including a forth- coming book of poems from Salmon Poetry (2023). Her poems, essays, inter- views, and articles appear widely in publications, including theatlantic.com, Barrow Street, Guernica, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Shondaland, and else- where. For more, please see jkaretnick.com.
CAROLINE KIM was born in Busan, South Korea, but moved to America at a young age. Her collection of short stories, The Prince of Mournful Thoughts and Other Stories, won the 2020 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Find her at www.carolinekim.net and @carolinewriting.
CARILDA OLIVER LABRA (1922–2018) was a Cuban poet. Her collec- tions of poetry include Preludio lirico (1943; Lyric Prelude) and Discurso de Eva (1996; Eve’s Discourse). She received numerous honors and awards for her work, including the National Poetry Prize in 1950 for her work Al sur de mi garganta (1949; At the South of My Throat), the national Cuban First Prize also in 1950, the National Literature Award in 1997, and the José de Vasconcelos International Prize in 2002.
PHILIP LEVINE (1928–2015) was an American poet born in Detroit. His numerous books of poetry include his 7 Years from Somewhere (1979), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award; his Ashes: Poems New and Old (1979), which received the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and the first American Book Award for Poetry in 1980; and also his The Simple Truth (1994), which won the Pulitzer Prize. He served as US Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2012.
DONG LI is an international and multilingual writer and translator, fully con- versant in English, French, German, and Mandarin Chinese. For his transla- tions, he has received fellowships from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund, the American Literary Translators Association, Ledig House, the Vermont Studio Center/Henry Luce Foundation, and others.
THURGOOD MARSHALL (1908–1993) was an American lawyer and a leader of the civil rights movement. He successfully argued the case of Brown v. Board of Education before the Supreme Court prior to serving as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court from 1967 to 1991, making him the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court. He also held NAACP’s chief legal counsel position in 1936, founded the Legal Defense Fund in 1940, and served as its first director-counsel.
ALICE MATTISON’s seventh novel is Conscience. She is also the author of The Kite and the String: How to Write with Spontaneity and Control—and Live to Tell the Tale. “Brooklyn Sestina” was included in her story collection In Case We’re Separated.
CAMPBELL MCGRATH is the author of eleven books of poetry, includ- ing Nouns & Verbs, Spring Comes to Chicago, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. He is a recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship, among other distinctions. He lives with his family in Miami Beach and teaches at Florida International University.
TIYA MILES is the author of three prizewinning histories on slavery in the United States, a novel set on a haunted Cherokee plantation, a travel narrative about southern ghost tours, and various articles as well as op-eds in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, CNN, and other venues. Her work has been supported by the MacArthur Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She taught on the faculty at the University of Michigan for sixteen years and is currently a Radcliffe Alumnae Professor in the History Department at Harvard University.
PAUL MONETTE (1945–1995) was an American author, poet, and gay rights activist. While he is widely recognized for his autobiographies Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (1988) and the National Book Award–winning Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story (1992), he also published two novels and three collections of poetry: West of Yesterday, East of Summer: New and Selected Poems (1973–1993) (1994), Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog (1988), and The Carpenter at the Asylum (1975).
TONI MORRISON (1931–2019) was an American novelist, essayist, and professor. She was the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and holds several other prestigious honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1977, the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved (1987), selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Jefferson Lecture in 1996, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.
PABLO NERUDA (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet and politician. In 1971, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His other awards include the International Peace Prize, which he received in 1950, and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953. His various published works include his collections Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair) and his Residencia en la tierra (Residence on Earth).
NAOMI SHIHAB NYE is a poet and novelist. She has published numerous books of poems, including her most recent release, Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (2020), as well as short stories and children’s fiction. She is the recipient of many awards and honors, including the Ivan Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement from the National Book Critics Circle and four Pushcart Prizes. In 2019, she was selected by the Poetry Foundation to be their Young People’s Poet Laureate.
JOYCE CAROL OATES is an American writer. She has published over fifty novels as well as works of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her many awards include the National Book Award for her novel them in 1969, two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize. Apart from her career as a writer, she has also taught at Princeton University and is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
MARY OLIVER (1935–2019) was an American poet. Her first collection of poems was published in 1963, and she later published more than fifteen collec- tions of poetry. Among her many honors are the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for her volume American Primitive (1983), the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award for her House of Light (1990), and the National Book Award for her New and Selected Poems (1992).
LINDA PASTAN has published fifteen books of poetry, two of which were finalists for the National Book Award. She is a past poet laureate of Maryland, and in 2003, she won the Ruth Lilly Award for lifetime achievement. Her most recent books are Insomnia and A Dog Runs Through It.
LUCIA PERILLO (1958–2016) was an American writer and professor. She published numerous collections of poetry, including Dangerous Life (1989) and The Body Mutinies (1996), which were winners of the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont University, respectively. Her other honors include the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant in 2000 and the recognition of her Inseminating the Elephant (2009) as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
EILEEN POLLACK is the author, most recently, of the novel The Professor of Immortality. Her collection of essays, Maybe It’s Me: On Never Being the Right Kind of Woman, is forthcoming from Delphinium Books. A former director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, she now lives and writes in Boston.
PATRICIO PRON is an Argentine writer and critic living in Madrid whose work has been translated into a dozen languages. In 2010, Granta named him one of the best young writers in Spanish. His most recent book, Mañana ten- dremos otros nombres, won the 2019 Alfaguara Novel Prize.
JAMES RAGAN is the author of ten books, and his poems have been pub- lished in Poetry, The Nation, North American Review, and the Los Angeles Times. His honors include two honorary PhDs, three Fulbright Professorships, an Emerson Poetry Prize, nine Pushcart nominations, a National Endowment of the Arts grant, a Poetry Society of America Citation, and the Swan Foundation Humanitarian Award. He is the subject of the documentary Flowers and Roots, which received the Platinum Remi Award at the WorldFest-Houston International Film Festival.
JACQUES J. RANCOURT is the author of Brocken Spectre (forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021); Novena (winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd prize, Pleiades Press, 2017), and a chapbook, In the Time of PrEP (Beloit Poetry Journal, 2018). He lives in San Francisco and works as a middle school principal.
CHRISTINE RHEIN is the author of Wild Flight (Texas Tech University Press). Her recent poems appear in The Southern Review, Rattle, Southern Poetry Review, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. A former winner of the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, Christine lives in Brighton, Michigan.
ADRIENNE RICH (1929–2012) was an American poet and essayist. Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World (1951), was chosen for publication in the Yale Series of Younger Poets before she graduated college. She published twenty-five books of poetry and received many awards and honors, including the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award in 1960 and the National Book Award for Poetry for her collection Diving into the Wreck alongside Allen Ginsberg in 1974.
EXCILIA SALDAÑA (1946–1999) was an Afro-Cuban poet. Her first book of poetry, Enlloró, was unpublished during her lifetime but was honored by the Casa de las Américas Prize shortly after her death. Her other honors include the National Ismaelillo Prize in 1979; the Rosa Blanca Prize in 1987, 1988, 1989, and 1995 from the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba; and the Nicolás Guillén Award for Distinction in Poetry in 1998.
REGINALD SHEPHERD (1963–2008) was an American poet whose work has been widely anthologized. His poetry is published in several editions of The Best American Poetry, and he has received honors from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council, and the Guggenheim Foundation. His collection Some Are Drowning (1994) was chosen for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ Donald Hall Prize for Poetry, and his 2007 Fata Morgana received the Silver Medal of the 2007 Florida Book Awards.
TOBIN SIEBERS (1953–2015) was an author, professor, and V. L. Parrington Collegiate Professor at the University of Michigan. He was also the co-chair of the University of Michigan’s Initiative on Disability Studies. He published many essays and articles in his lifetime as well as several books including his most recent works Disability Theory (2008) and Disability Aesthetics (2010). Among his many awards and honors are the James T. Neubacher Award and his position as a fellow of the Michigan Society of Fellows.
CHARLES SIMIC is a Serbian American poet. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn’t End and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963–1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He has been awarded the PEN Translation Prize, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship, a Wallace Stevens Award, a Frost Medal, a Vilcek Prize in Literature, and a Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award. He was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 2007.
DANEZ SMITH is a Black, Queer, Poz writer and performer from St. Paul, Minnesota. Danez is the author of Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020); Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Midwest Booksellers Choice Award and a finalist for the National Book Award; and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, the Montalvo Arts Center, Cave Canem, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
CATHY SONG is the author of five books of poetry, including Picture Bride, which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Love in the World, a collection of short sto- ries, was published in spring 2020 by Bamboo Ridge Press.
ILAN STAVANS is Lewis-Sebring Professor of Humanities and Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College, publisher of Restless Books, and host of NPR’s podcast In Contrast. The recipient of many inter- national awards and honors, his work, translated into twenty languages, has been adapted to film, TV, radio, and theater. His latest books are The Seventh Heaven: Travels through Jewish Latin America, the anthology How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish, and a retelling of the Popol Vuh, the K’iche’ book of origins.
JON SWAN, born in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1929, is the author of three collec- tions of poems. His poems have appeared in several American and British pub- lications. He has translated plays and novels from the Dutch and German, and in 1981, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which supported research for a recently completed narrative poem, Freydis Erik’s-daughter & the Vinland Venture. Jon and his wife, Marianne, live in Yarmouth, Maine. They have three daughters.
TED SWEDENBURG is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Arkansas, author of Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (University of Minnesota Press, 1995) and co- editor of Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 2005) and of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke University Press, 1996).
WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA (1923–2012) was a Polish poet, essayist, and translator. She published more than fifteen books of poetry, including People on a Bridge (1990), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems (1995), Miracle Fair (2001), and Monologue of a Dog (2005). She was a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1996. Her other awards include the Goethe Prize in 1991, the Herder Prize in 1995, and the Polish PEN Club prize in 1996.
HARRY THOMAS has published several books in the last few years, includ- ing Haiku, The Truth of Two: Selected Translations, and Poems About Trees, an anthology. He is at work on a book of essays on paintings of readers.
MARÍA DE LOS ANGELES TORRES is a Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago. She received her PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is author of two books, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the US and the Promise of a Better Future (Beacon Press, 2004) and In the Land of Mirrors: The Politics of Cuban Exiles in the United States (University of Michigan Press, 1999). She is co-author of Citizens in the Present: Youth Civic Engagement in the Americas (University of Illinois Press, 2013).
LEWIS TURCO is the author of over fifty books, chapbooks, and mono- graphs including The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (1968, fifth edition, 2020) and The Familiar Stranger (2014). Turco was the founding director of the Poetry Center at Fenn College (now Cleveland State University). He also founded the Program in Writing Arts at SUNY Oswego, where he taught for 30 years before retiring in 1996.
A prolific writer of Hanoi, NGUYEN VIET HA has published four novels and six collections of short stories and essays. He has also penned numerous literary pieces for newspapers and magazines. His recent novel, A Novel of Urban People, won the Hanoi Writers’ Association award in December 2019.
Born in Shanghai, SHAO WANG’s stories have been published by Michigan Quarterly Review, Fiction International, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Zyzzyva. His Chinese stories have been published in Chinese journals, and his novel appeared in France and Thailand. He currently serves as co-director, China- U.S.-Netherlands Zero Emission Vehicle Policy Lab and as the director of the China Center for Energy and Transportation at the University of California, Davis.
KATHLEEN WINTER is the author of Transformer (Word Works, 2020) as well as I will not kick my friends (Elixir Press, 2018), winner of the Elixir Poetry Prize, and Nostalgia for the Criminal Past (Elixir Press, 2012), which won the Texas Institute of Letters Bob Bush Memorial Award. Her poems have been published by The New Republic, New Statesman, AGNI, The Cincinnati Review, and Poetry London.
CHARLES WRIGHT won the National Book Award in 1983 for Country Music: Selected Early Poems and the Pulitzer Prize in 1998 for Black Zodiac. His translation of Eugenio Montale’s The Storm & Other Poems won the PEN Translation Prize in 1979. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for his lifetime achievement and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for his collection Chickamauga (1995). He served as United States Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2015.
LEONARD WOLF (1923–2019) was a Romanian-American poet, author, translator, and a professor of English. While teaching at San Francisco State University, he founded the alternative university and arts center Happening House in 1967. Though he is best known for his annotated editions of classic horror novels, he published two books of poetry, including The Stone Cicada (2001), and received numerous awards, such as the James Phelan Poetry Prize and an O. Henry fiction award.
LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA is an American poet and novelist from Hawaiʻi. Many of her literary works are written in Hawaiian Pidgin. Her first book, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, was published in 1993, and her most recent book, Behold the Many, was released in 2006. Yamanaka has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Carnegie Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize for Poetry, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and an Asian American Literary Award.
YEVGÉNY YEVTUSHÉNKO (1933–2017) was a Soviet and Russian poet, novelist, essayist, dramatist, screenwriter, publisher, actor, editor and director of several films. In 1961 he composed his best-known poem “Babi Yar.” His numerous books include The Best of the Best: A New Book of Poetry in English and Russian (1999) and Walk on the Ledge: A New Book of Poetry in English and Russian (2005). His honors include gracing the cover of TIME, the 1991 American Liberties Medallion, the Laureate of the International Botev Prize, the Russian national “The Poet” award, a medal as “Defender of Free Russia,” and the Ovid Prize in recognition of his body of work. In July 2000 the Russian Academy of Sciences named a star in his honor.
ZHU ZHU is a Chinese poet, essayist, and art critic and has received the Henry Luce Foundation Chinese Poetry Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center and the Chinese Contemporary Art Award for Critics. His first book in English, The Wild Great Wall, was published by Phoneme Media in 2018.
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