Poetry

Adrian C. Louis grew up in Nevada and is an enrolled member of the Lovelock Paiute Tribe. From 1984-97, Louis taught at Oglala Lakota College on the Pine Ridge Reservation. He recently retired as Professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State.  Pleiades Press published his latest poems, Random Exorcisms, in 2016. 

In the winter of 1984-85, big changes began for Afaa Michael Weaver, whose birth name is Michael S. Weaver. He had been working in factories and writing since 1970. In January, he received an NEA fellowship in poetry. He was also accepted into Brown's writing program that spring. In July his first book, Water Song, was published. He became an academic. At Rutgers he received tenure in 1995, and he has taught at Simmons since 1998, the year he received a Pew fellowship in poetry. His tenth and newest book of poetry is The Plum Flower Dance, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Afaa lives in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Barbara Hamby's fourth book of poems, All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her third book of poems, Babel, was chosen by Stephen Dunn to win the 2003 Associated Writing Programs Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and was also published by Pittsburgh. Hamby received a fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. She has also received three fellowships from the Florida Arts Council. Her work has appeared in many national publications. She is Writer-in-Residence in the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida.

Brenda Hillman is the author of eight collections of poetry, all published by Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which are Cascadia (2001) and Pieces of Air in the Epic (2005), which received the William Carlos Williams Prize for Poetry, and Practical Water (forthcoming 2009). She has also published three chapbooks. With Patricia Dienstfrey, she edited The Grand Permission: New Writings on Poetics and Motherhood (Wesleyan, 2003). Hillman teaches at St. Marys College where she is the Olivia Filippi Professor of Poetry and works with CodePink, a social justice group against war. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

David Baker was born in 1954 in Maine and grew up in Missouri. He received degrees from Central Missouri State University and University of Utah and has taught at Kenyon College, Ohio State University, and the University of Michigan. Currently he holds the Thomas Fordham Chair of Poetry at Denison University, in Granville, Ohio, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. He teaches also in Warren Wilson's MFA program. Baker's twelve books include Never-Ending Birds, (poems, Norton, 2009), Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry (2007, Graywolf), and Midwest Eclogue (poems, 2005, Norton). Baker has received honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and others.

David Hamilton is the author of Deep River: A Memoir of a Missouri Farm, Ossabaw, a volume of poems, and numerous uncollected poems and essays. He is also one of several editors of a well known college reader Fields of Reading: Motives for Writing, soon in its 9th edition. For most of his career at the University of Iowa, he has edited The Iowa Review. He teaches literature and writing and has directed Iowa's MFA program in literary nonfiction.

Dick Allen's new collection is Present Vanishing: Poems (Sarabande Books, October, 2008). Sarabande also published his The Day Before: Poems and Ode to the Cold War: Poems New and Selected. He has received NEA and Ingram Merrill Poetry Writing Fellowships, a Pushcart Prize, and publication in five editions of The Year's Best American Poetry. Allen's earlier recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Boulevard, American Scholar, Ploughshares, Hudson Review, Atlantic Monthly. Yearly, he and his wife drive about 10,000 miles around America, searching for poems and great cheap Chinese food. They live near a small Zen lake in Connecticut.

Eugene Gloria is the author of two books of poems Hoodlum Birds (Penguin, 2006) and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel (Penguin, 2000), which was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and the 2001 Asian American Literary Award. His other awards include a Pushcart Prize and recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Indiana Review, Crab Orchard Review, Louisville Review, The Normal School, and The New Republic. He teaches creative writing and literature at DePauw University and lives in Greencastle, Indiana.

Jenny Yang Cropp's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Eclipse, Poetry Southeast, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere. She received her MFA in creative writing from Minnesota State University-Mankato and will begin the University of South Dakota's PhD program in English this fall.

A native of Maine, Joann Gardner lives in Tallahassee, where she is an Associate Professor of English at The Florida State University. She is the Director of Runaway with Words, a poetry workshop for runaway and homeless youths, and an Associate Director of Anhinga Press, a publisher of fine poetry. Her poems have appeared in such journals as Seneca Review, Small Press Magazine, Crazyhorse, Writers Forum, Louisiana Literature and Tampa Review. In 2005, she won the Weldon Kees Award for her chapbook La Florida, which was subsequently published by Backwaters Press.

Josh Rathkamp’s first collection of poetry, Some Nights No Cars At All, was published by Ausable Press and is now distributed by Copper Canyon. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and public art projects, including most recently American Poetry Review, Arts and Letters, Poet Lore, and Rattle.  He is the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Mesa Community College. 

Julie Hensley grew up on a sheep farm in the Shenandoah Valley, but now makes her home in Kentucky with her husband (the writer R. Dean Johnson) and their two children. She is a core faculty member of the Bluegrass Writers Studio, the brief-residency MFA program at Eastern Kentucky University. Julie won The Southern Women Writers Emerging Voice Award in both fiction (2005) and poetry (2009). Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Anthology and regularly appears in a variety of journals, most recently in PoemMemiorStory, The Pinch, Blackbird, and Louisville Review. Her chapbook of poems, The Language of Horses, is available from Finishing Line Press.

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of two books of poems: Small Knots and the chapbook Geography. Her work has been published in the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, Crab Orchard Review and Image. Her work has been featured on NPR's The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor and in Keillor's second anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times. Born and educated in the Pacific Northwest, Kelli is a graduate of the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writers Program where she received her MFA. Currently, she edits the literary journal Crab Creek Review.

Mark DeCarteret's work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Places of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry (Story Line Press), Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998 (Black Sparrow Press) and Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited. He was recently selected as Portsmouth New Hampshire's seventh Poet Laureate.

Michael S. Harper has published more than ten books of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (2002). He has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Award. He is University Professor and Professor of English at Brown University, where he has taught since 1970.

Patrick Pfister is the author of two books of travel literature: Pilgrimage: Tales from the Open Road and Over Sand & Sea. His work has been selected for several Traveler's Tales anthologies, including Best Travel Writing 2007. His short stories appear in literary magazines such as International Quarterly, Fifth Wednesday Journal and Alimentum. His poetry has been published in Pearl, Juked, Chiron Review, flashquake, Tipton Poetry Journal and elsewhere. For the last twenty years he has lived in Barcelona, Spain.

Philip Jenks was born in North Carolina and grew up in Morgantown, West Virginia. He got his BA from Reed College, MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and doctorate from University of Kentucky in Political Science. He has studied under Susan Bordo, Fish, Pinsky, and Walcott. He sings and plays percussion with The Howling Hex, contributing to their upcoming album XI, being released August 28th on Drag City. He teaches English at University of Illinois at Chicago and Political Science at Lewis University. Flood Editions published his first volume of poems in 2002, On the Cave You Live In and a second volume of poems, My First Painting will be The Accuser was released on Zephyr Press (2005).

Ray Gonzalez is the author of fifteen books of poetry including Soul Over Lightning (University of Arizona Press, 2014) and the forthcoming Beautiful Wall (BOA Editions, 2015). Other books include The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (BOA, 2003 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry), and Turtle Pictures (Arizona, 2001 Minnesota Book Award). His work appeared in Best American Poetry 2014 (Scribners). A native of El Paso, he teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Robert Krut is the author of three books: The Now Dark Sky Setting Us All on Fire (Codhill/SUNY Press, 2019), which received the Codhill Poetry Award, This is the Ocean (Bona Fide Books, 2013), and The Spider Sermons (BlazeVox, 2009).  He teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lives in Los Angeles.

Ronald Wallace's twelve books of poetry, fiction, and criticism include Long for this World: New and Selected Poems and For a Limited Time Only both from the University of Pittsburgh Press. He co-directs the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin and edits the University of Wisconsin Press Poetry Series. He divides his time between Madison and a 40-acre farm in Bear Valley, Wisconsin.

Ruth Ellen Kocher's work has been published in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ploughshares, African American Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Washington Square Journal, Crab Orchard Review, ninth letter, as well as other literary journals, and has been translated into Persian in the Iranian literary magazine She'r. Her first book of poetry, Desdemona's Fire, won the Naomi Long Madget Award for African American Poets and was published by Lotus Press in 1999. Her second book, When the Moon Knows You're Wandering, won the Green Rose Prose and was published by Western Michigan and New Issues Poetry and Prose in 2001, who also published her third book, One Girl Babylon. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Colorado-Boulder.

Sherman Alexie's awards and honors include the 2007 Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award and the 2003 Regents' Distinguished Alumnus Award, Washington State University's highest honor for alumni. His work was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2004, edited by Lorrie Moore, and Pushcart Prize XXIX Best of the Small Presses. Alexie's most recent novels are Flight, released in April 2007 by Grove/ Atlantic, and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, his first young adult novel, published in September 2007 by Little, Brown. Hanging Loose Press will release a new collection of his poems, Face, in March 2009. Sherman Alexie lives in Seattle, WA, with his wife and two sons.

Simone Muench was raised in Louisiana and Arkansas and lives in Chicago, Illinois. She is the author of three books: The Air Lost in Breathing (Marianne Moore Prize for Poetry; Helicon Nine, 2000), Lampblack & Ash (Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry; Sarabande, 2005), and Orange Crush (Sarabande, forthcoming in 2010). Her latest chapbooks are Orange Girl (dancing girl press, 2007) and Sonoluminescence written with Bill Allegrezza (Dusie Press, 2007). She is a recipient of numerous awards and received her Ph.D from the University of Illinois at Chicago and is director of the Writing Program at Lewis University where she teaches creative writing and film studies.