Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019). Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition on the work of fellow White Earth writer, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Her writing is included in over 100 anthologies and translated into multiple languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hungarian. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” 

An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. Blaeser’s honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. Recent projects include the curation of a “Water Portfolio” for Prairie Schooner and an “Indigenous #LanguageBack through Poetry” project.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters” and in The New York Times Magazine as “among the most important poetry in the world today,” addresses the urgent immediacies of our time. Ranging from the political, ecological, and scientific to the metaphysical, personal, and passionate, Hirshfield praises the radiance of particularity and reckons the consequence of the daily. Her poems and essays traverse the crises of the biosphere, questions of social justice, and the myriad interior quandaries of heart, mind, and spirit. Her work lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, desire and loss, impermanence and beauty— all the dimensions of our shared existence within what one poem calls “the pure democracy of being.”

Her ten poetry books include the newly published The Asking: New & Selected Poems (September, 2023); Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Her two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), have become classics in their field, as have her four books collecting and co-translating the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems; and The Heart of Haiku, on Matsuo Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011.

Hirshfield’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award, The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, the Zhongkun International Poetry Award, and the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, in conjunction with reading to an estimated 50,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March For Science, she co-founded the Poets For Science traveling installation, housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Orion, and ten editions of The Best American Poems.

Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Bennington College, Queen's University Belfast, and elsewhere. Her frequent appearances at universities, writers’ conferences, symposia and festivals in this country and abroad are highly acclaimed. Her poems and essays have been translated into over fifteen languages and her work has been set by numerous composers, including John Adams and Philip Glass. Her TED-ED animated lesson on metaphor has received over 1.5 million views.

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Kim Addonizio

Kim Addonizio is the author of nine poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/music CDS: Swearing, Smoking, Drinking, & Kissing (with Susan Browne) and My Black Angel, the companion to My Black Angel: Blues Poems and Portraits, a collaboration with woodcut artist Charles D. Jones.   Her poetry has been translated into several languages including Spanish, Arabic, Italian, and Hungarian. Collections have been published in China, Spain, Mexico, Lebanon, and the UK. Addonizio’s awards include two fellowships from the NEA, a Guggenheim, two Pushcart Prizes, and other honors. Her latest collection is Exit Opera (W.W. Norton).

Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear  frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Reginald Dwayne Betts

Reginald Dwayne Betts is the author of the poetry collections Doggerel (W. W. Norton, 2025); Redaction (W. W. Norton, 2023), with visual artist Titus Kaphar; Felon (W. W. Norton, 2019), winner of a 2020 NAACP Image Award and an American Book Award; Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015); and Shahid Reads His Own Palm (Alice James Books, 2010), which won the 2010 Beatrice Hawley Award.

Betts is also the recipient of a 2019 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He was an Emerson Fellow at New America, and is a PhD candidate at Yale Law School. He lives in New Haven.

Alison Luterman

Alison Luterman was raised in Massachusetts, the oldest of four children, and moved to Oakland, California in 1990. Her poems have been published in The Sun, The Brooklyn Review, Slipstream, Tattoo Highway, and on the Library of Congress web site Poetry 180. Several of her poems have been featured as Poetry in Motion posters on buses and subway trains in the San Francisco Bay Area and in Portland, Oregon. She has also published many personal essays and feature articles and has written several plays.

She writes frequently about her neighborhood, social justice, personal relationships, urban wilderness, and the uses of art, especially poetry and theater.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher known for her work exploring cultural connection and shared humanity. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, and has spent over four decades leading writing workshops around the world.

She is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Everything Comes Next, and Grace Notes: Poems About Families. Her work spans poetry, fiction, and anthologies for both adults and young readers, earning honors such as the National Book Award finalist, four Pushcart Prizes, and the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award.

 A former poetry editor for The Texas Observer and New York Times Magazine, Nye is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and teaches creative writing at Texas State University.

January Gill O'Neal

January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road won the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and is a finalist for multiple awards including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, and American Poetry Review. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (2012–2018) and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. O’Neil chairs the AWP Board of Directors and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.

Vincent Rendoni

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Dead Chicano Mixtape (Red Hen Press, 2027) and A Grito Contest in the Afterlife (Catamaran, 2022), winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Quarterly West, and december. Currently, he is a Seattle Arts and Lectures Writer in Residence at Garfield High School.

Joseph Millar

Joseph Millar's first collection of poems, Overtime, was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. Kingdom was released in early 2017, and Dark Harvest, New & Selected Poems, was released in 2021. His latest collection, Shine, was published in October of 2024.

Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce.

He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in Pacific University's low-residency MFA Program.

Keetje Kuipers

Keetje Kuipers is the author of four collections of poetry, all from BOA Editions: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award; All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, and Poetry, among others. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships, including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, on the land of the Salish and Kalispel peoples and directly at the foot of the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. She lives there with her wife and their two children, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.

ire'ne lara silva

ire’ne lara silva (she/they) is the 2023 Texas State Poet Laureate and the author of the poetry collections the eaters of flowers (Saddle Road Press, 2024), FirstPoems: ani’mal, INDíGENA, and furia (FlowerSong Press, 2021), Cuicacalli//House of Song (Saddle Road Press, 2019), Blood Sugar Canto (Saddle Road Press, 2016), and furia (Mouthfeel Press, 2010). They are also the author of the chapbooks Hibiscus Tacos (Alabrava Press, 2021) and Enduring Azucares (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), and the short story collection flesh to bone (Aunt Lute Books, 2013), winner of the Premio Aztlán.

silva has received support from a 2021 Tasajillo Writers Grant and a 2017 NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant. They won the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Award and the 2021 Texas Institute of Letters Shrake Award for best short nonfiction and were a fiction finalist for A Room of Her Own Foundation’s 2013 Gift of Freedom Award. She is currently a writer-at-large for Texas Highways magazine.