Acosta is a writer who has published fiction, journalism, and poetry. He is the author of the novels The Tattoo Hunter and The Violence of Velvet and has edited anthologies of contemporary Mexican poetry published by City Lights Books. He received his BA from New College of California and his PhD from the University of California, Davis. Acosta is the Dean of the Writing Department at California College of the Arts.

 

Alcosser shares thirty acres in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana with a dwindling population of bear, moose, elk, and mountain lion and has served as Montana’s first Poet Laureate. Her poetry collection Except by Nature received numerous national awards including the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. Alcosser received three fellowships from the NEA, and her poems have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and been writer-in-residence at Glacier National Park and the Central Park Zoo. Alcosser is also a founder of the MFA program at San Diego State University, where she is a professor of poetry, fiction, and feminist poetics.

Brinsfield grew up in New Jersey and earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. Her writing has appeared in Word Riot, Tupelo Quarterly, CutBank, and Matter Press.

Cheng is a Chinese-born poet, essayist, novelist, calligrapher, and art historian who has lived in Paris since 1949. He is the author of essays, novels, collections of poetry, and books on art written in the French language, and is the translator of some of the great French poets into Chinese. Among his books are Empty and Full: The Language of Chinese Painting, The Way of Beauty, and the novels The River Below, and Green Mountain, White Cloud. In 2002, he became the first person of Asian origin elected to the French Academy.

DeNiord grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia, and was educated at Lynchburg College, Yale Divinity School, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His poetry collections include Interstate, The Double Truth, Night Mowing, and Sharp Golden Thorn, among others. DeNiord has also authored two books of interviews with renowned American poets, Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs: Reflections and Conversations with Twentieth Century American Poets, and I Would Lie to You If I Could. He is professor of English at Providence College and lives in Putney, Vermont, with his wife, Liz. He is currently serving as the Poet Laureate of Vermont. www.charddeniord.com

Everwine was born in Michigan and raised in western Pennsylvania. He authored seven books of poetry and numerous translations. His most recent collection of poems is Listening Long and Late (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013). He also translated poetry from the Hebrew and Aztec languages. Everwine taught at California State University, Fresno, and Reed College. He was a senior Fulbright lecturer in American poetry at the University of Haifa, Israel. He was the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in literature, and fellowships from the NEA and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. He lived in Fresno, California, until his death in late 2018.

 

Frame was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1924, and is the country’s best-known author. Over three decades, she wrote twelve novels, a three-volume autobiography, as well as many short stories and poems. A 1990 film by Jane Campion, An Angel at My Table, was based on Frame’s autobiography and led to a wider readership. She received numerous literary honors, and was named a New Zealand Icon by the Prime Minister. She died in Dunedin in 2004.

Hanzlicek was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, in 1942. He received a BA from the University of Minnesota in 1964 and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.  He is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently, The Lives of Birds. He has translated Native American songs, A Bird’s Companion, and poems from the Czech, Mirroring: Selected Poems of Vladimir Holan, which won the Robert Payne Award from the Columbia University Translation Center in 1985. In the summer of 2001, he retired from California State University, Fresno, where he taught for thirty-five years and was, for most of those years, the Director of the Creative Writing Program.

 

Hickey, born in Fort Worth, Texas, is a celebrated art critic who has written for publications like Rolling Stone, Art News, Artforum, The London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and Art in America, where he also served as Executive Editor. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001 and a Peabody Award in 2006 for his PBS American Masters documentary on Andy Warhol. His essays are collected in the books, Invisible Dragons: Four Essays on Beauty and Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy.

Kaschnitz was born in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1901, and was renowned in her home country as a distinguished poet and writer of fiction and essays, authoring more than thirty books. Having remained in Germany through the Nazi regime and the Second World War, she became an important voice in literature concerned with confronting the immediate past. In her life she received the Georg Büchner Prize and Roswitha Prize, and, after her death in 1974, a literary prize was established to commemorate her.

Klimenko began writing poetry in 1973, soon after she began modeling for artist Manuel Neri. She received dual master’s degrees in creative writing and psychology from San Francisco State University where she taught from 1983 to 1986. Klimenko’s poems have appeared in numerous publications from 1978 to the present. She has been the primary model for Manuel Neri since 1972, as well as a psychotherapist in private practice in Benicia, California.

Lewis, born in Chicago in 1899, was known for her poetry, historical novels, short stories, and opera libretti. Her books of poetry include, The Earth-Bound 1924-1944 and Poems Old and New, 1918-1978. Among her historical novels are The Wife of Martin Guerre and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron. Lewis was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1950. She taught at Stanford University and at the University of California, Berkeley. Lewis died in 1998 in Los Altos, California.

A Chinese poet of the Middle Tang Dynasty, Li He was born in the year 791. His method of composition was riding on horseback with a bag full of paper pieces which he would pull out when the idea for a phrase hit him and write it down. When he returned home in the evening he would assemble them into a poem. He often explored the supernatural in his poems, and was also nicknamed the Ghost. He died at the age of twenty-seven in AD 817.

Mayes is a poet, memoirist, and essayist originally from Georgia. In 1975 she earned her MA from San Francisco State University, where she eventually became professor of Creative Writing, director of the Poetry Center, and chair of the Department of Creative Writing. While there, she wrote the text The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems. She is the author of numerous books and is best known for her memoir, Under the Tuscan Sun.
 

Metcalfe was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1953. His plays include Vikings, Strange Stew, Half a Lifetime, White Linen, Sorrows and Sons, Spittin’ Image, Baseball Play, Pilgrims, The Incredibly Famous Willy Rivers. His work has been produced in New York City and at many regional theaters throughout the country. His screenplays and teleplays include Half a Lifetime, Cousins, Jacknife, Summer, and Roommates. Metcalfe is a member of the Playwright’s Unit at the Manhattan Theater Club and is an Associate Artist of the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. He has published two novels, The Tragic Age in 2014, and The Practical Navigator in 2016. www.stephenmetcalfe.net

Mueller was born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1924. The daughter of teachers, her family was forced to flee the Nazi regime when Mueller was fifteen, settling in the Chicago area. She attended the University of Evansville, where her father was a professor, and did her graduate study at Indiana University. Drawn to modernism, she wrote thirteen books of poetry, winning numerous awards including the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, as well as being named the Poet Laureate of Illinois. She also translated poetry from German, most recently Circe’s Mountain by Marie Luise Kaschnitz.
 

Rothenberg is an internationally known poet, translator, anthologist, and performance artist who has written over eighty books of poetry and collected ten assemblages of traditional and contemporary work, such as Technicians of the Sacred and Poems for the Millennium. A book of essays, Poetics & Polemics, 1985-2005, appeared in 2008, and his recent books of poetry include Triptych, Gematria Complete, Concealments & Caprichos, and Retrievals: Uncollected & New Poems, 1955-2010. His awards include an American Book Award and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is the editor of the Poems and Poetics blog. poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com

Serpas, a native of southern Louisiana, is a poet, environmentalist, and hospital chaplain. Three volumes of her poetry have been published, Cote Blanche, The Dirty Side of the Storm, and The Diener. Her poems have been included in Southwest Review, The New Yorker, and The Nation, and her essays on Cajun culture and the environment have appeared in The New York Times and Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion. She co-produced Veins in the Gulf, a documentary on Louisiana’s land loss. She teaches creative writing at the University of Houston. www.marthaserpas.com

Snodgrass was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, in 1926. He was educated at Geneva College and the University of Delaware. He received fellowships from the Guggenheim and the Ingram Merrill Foundations, the Academy of American Poets, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book of poems, Heart’s Needle, won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize, and subsequent books of poetry, essays, songs, and translations have achieved worldwide recognition. He died in 2009 in Madison County, New York.

Stone is a writer and visual artist. She was born and raised in Vermont and moved to New York City in 2007 where she received her MFA from NYU. Stone is the author of the poetry collections Someone Else’s Wedding Vows, and Poetry Comics From the Book of Hours and most recently, The Mobius Strip Club of Grief. She and her husband the poet Ben Pease co-run the Ruth Stone Foundation and letterpress studio. www.ruthstonefoundation.org

Stone was born in Roanoke, Virginia, in 1915. She wrote thirteen books of poetry, most recently What Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize. Among her many recognitions are the Wallace Stevens Award, the National Book Award, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. She taught at SUNY Binghamton for twenty-three years. In 2007 Stone was named Poet Laureate of Vermont. She died in 2011. www.ruthstonefoundation.org

Thomas was born in Swansea, Wales, in 1914. He worked in his early years as a journalist and scriptwriter. His first book of poetry, 18 Poems, was published when he was twenty. His most famous works include the poems “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion”; the ‘play for voices’ Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” and “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.” He died in New York in 1953, at the age of thirty-nine.

Westphalen was born in Lima, Peru, in 1911. His career as a poet and writer spans many decades, during which he was also a diplomat and a teacher. Westphalen is strongly identified with the Peruvian surrealist poetry movement of which he and Cesár Moro were leaders in the 1930s. His collected works, Bajo Zarpas de la Quimera: Poemas 1930-1988, was published in Madrid in 1992. He died in Lima in 2001.

Willard, born in 1936, grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She published two novels, Things Invisible to See and Sister Water, and twelve books of poetry, including her selected poems, Swimming Lessons. She also published short story collections, books of essays–primarily about writing–and many children’s books. Her book, A Visit to William Blake’s Inn: Poems for Innocent and Experienced Travelers, was awarded the Newbery Medal in 1981. Other awards include the O. Henry Award, Crawford Award, Golden Kite Award for Fiction, and the Michigan Author Award. In 2013, Willard retired from teaching at Vassar College after forty-seven years. She died at home in Poughkeepsie, New York, in February of 2017.