Poetry

Aaron Fagan was born in Rochester, New York, in 1973. He was educated at Hampshire College and Syracuse University, and he is the author of two poetry collections Garage (Salt Publishing, 2007) and Echo Train forthcoming from Salt in spring 2010. Recent work has appeared, or is due to appear, in The American Poetry Review, Tuesday: An Art Project, Stand and The Yale Review.

Barbara Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and studied biology at DePauw University in Indiana. At age 23 she moved to southern Arizona and spent most of the next two decades writing from the cultural and political territory of the U.S-Mexican border. She has also lived in Europe and Africa and followed writing assignments across five continents. With her husband Steven Hopp, a professor of environmental studies, she has raised two adventurous daughters and now resides on a farm in southern Appalachia. She is the author of seven works of fiction, including the novels The Lacuna, The Poisonwood Bible, Animal Dreams, and The Bean Trees, as well as books of poetry, essays, and creative nonfiction. Her most recent work of nonfiction is the enormously influential bestseller Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life.

Billy Collins is the author of eight books of poetry including Ballistics, The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems, Nine Horses, Picnic, Lightning, and Sailing Alone Around the Room. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College (CUNY), he served as United States Poet Laureate 2001-2003 and New York State Poet Laureate 2004-2006.

Deborah Bogen has four prize-winning collections of poetry. The latest, In Case of Sudden Free Fall, came out from Jacar Press in 2017. These days she’s primarily a political activist in Pittsburgh PA where she writes songs, plays ukulele and sings in The Highland Park Mini-band.

Emily Ferrara is the author of The Alchemy of Grief (Alchimia del dolore), winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize, which was published in bilingual edition by Bordighera Press in 2007. She is featured, along with the book's translator Sabine Pascarelli, in the winter 2008 season of National Public Radio's The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress. She is an assistant professor of family medicine and community health at University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she teaches medical creative writing and doctor- patient communication skills. She has also has published and presented nationally and internationally on the power of writing to foster personal and professional development, and on creative writing as a form of reflective practice.

James Kimbrell is the author of The Gatehouse Heaven (Sarabande, 1998) and My Psychic (Sarabande, 2006). He has been the recipient of the Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a "Discovery"/The Nation Award, Poetry magazine's Bess Hokin Award, a Whiting Writers' Award, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His poems have appeared in the Bread Loaf Anthology of New American Poets, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century. He teaches at Florida State University.

Katherine Soniat’s seventh collection, Bright Stranger, is forthcoming from Louisiana State University Press in spring 2016. The Goodbye Animals, recently received the Turtle Island Quarterly Chapbook Award and will be published by Foothills Press this December. The Poetry Council of North Carolina selected The Swing Girl (LSU Press) as Best Collection of 2011 and A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Work appears in World Poetry Portfolio #60, Saint Katherine Review, Hotel Amerika, storySouth, Prairie Schooner (Waterfusion),and Connotations Press. Previously on the faculty on at Hollins University and Virginia Tech, she teaches in the Great Smokies Writers Program at UNC-Asheville.

Kathleen Hellen’s collections include Meet Me at the Bottom, The Only Country Was the Color of My Skin, and Umberto’s Night, and two chapbooks, The Girl Who Loved Mothra and Pentimento. Featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, her work has appeared widely in such journals as Arts & Letters, Colorado Review, Massachusetts Review, New Letters, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, West Branch, and Witness, among others. She is the recipient of the poetry prize from Washington Writers’ Publishing House, the Thomas Merton prize for Poetry of the Sacred, and prizes from the H.O.W. Journal and Washington Square Review.

Keith Ekiss is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University and the past recipient of scholarships and residencies from the Bread Loaf and Squaw Valley Writers Conferences, Santa Fe Art Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, and the Petrified Forest National Park. His first book, Pima Road Notebook, is forthcoming from New Issues Poetry & Prose in 2010.

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.

Richard Bronson is on the faculty at the Stony Brook University Medical Center, a school in the vanguard of the back-to- literature movement in medical education. He is on the Board of Trustees of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association and the Board of the Long Island Poetry Collective, facilitating its weekly workshop. In 2006, he founded Padishah Press, a small press devoted to the publication of poetry informed by the experiences of illness and healing. Bronson has won the 2003 poetry prize of the American College of Physicians and the 2005 poetry prize of the Institute for Medicine in Contemporary Society.

Sarah Wangler's work has been published or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2010, Cream City Review, FIELD, Moon City Review, Superstition Review Issue 4, The Tusculum Review, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, Bawl Ass, was recently named as a semi-finalist in the 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award. She has been an editorial assistant at the Cimarron Review and Passages North and holds graduate degrees from Oklahoma State University and Northern Michigan University.

Stefanie Silva is originally from the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her B.A. in English at Santa Clara University, where she served as Poetry Editor for the Santa Clara Review. After graduating, she moved to London before moving back to California to work at Stanford University. She is currently in her second year as an MFA candidate in poetry at University of North Carolina Greensboro, and is a Poetry Editor for the Greensboro Review. She currently has a book review on storySouth.com This is her first publication in poetry.

Timothy Liu is the author of eight books of poems, most recently Polytheogamy and Bending the Mind Around the Dream's Blown Fuse. His poems have been translated into ten languages, and his papers and journals are archived in the Berg collection at the New York Public Library. He lives in Manhattan.