Previous Readers
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. He is the author of Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press) and Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press) and co-editor and co-translated many other books. His poems have been translated into over twenty languages, and his books are published in many countries, including Turkey, Netherlands, Germany, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. In 2019, Kaminsky was selected by BBC as “one of the 12 artists that changed the world.” Deaf Republic was named Best Book of the Year by NPR, Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, Times Literary Supplement, Publishers Weekly, Financial Times, The Guardian, Irish Times, Library Journal, The Telegraph, New Statesman, Slate, Vanity Fair, Lithub, Huffington Post, The New York Public Library, The American Library Association. He is the winner of the LA Times Book Prize, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Poetry, National Jewish Book Award and Finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Book Award, PEN/Jean Stein Award, Kingsley Tufts Award, Forward Prize (UK), and the T.S. Eliot Prize (UK).
Ilya Kaminsky has worked as a law clerk for San Francisco Legal Aid and the National Immigration Law Center. More recently, he worked pro-bono as the Court Appointed Special Advocate for Orphaned Children in Southern California. He has held the Bourne Chair in Poetry at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Now he is a professor at Princeton University.
Ilya KaminskyKatie Farris is the author of Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, Alice James Books, 2023 and A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, winner of the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award.She is also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls, (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the chapbooks Thirteen Intimacies (Fivehundred Places, 2017), and Mother Superior in Hell (Dancing Girl, 2019). She is winner of poetry awards from Beloit Poetry Journal, Fairy Tale Review, Massachusetts Review, and the Orison Anthology Prize in Fiction. Her work has appeared American Poetry Review, Granta, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and Poetry, and has been commissioned by MoMA. She is the co-translator of several books of poetry from the French, Chinese, and Russian, including Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently Associate Professor at Princeton University.
Katie FarrisAndrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, etc. A new book of poems, Nightshade, will be out this year with Four Way Books. Other collections include Unfathoming (Four Way Books, 2017), Furs Not Mine (Four Way Books, 2015), Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011), Long Division (Salmon Poetry, 2009), and The Cartographer’s Vacation (Owl Creek Press, 1999). She has received a PEN Discovery Award, Glimmer Train’s Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at The MacDowell Colony. She directs the Writers House at Merrimack College and the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA, and is teaching a poetry workshop this June at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Andrea CohenChard deNiord is the author of six books of poetry: In My Unknowing (2020), Interstate (2019), The Double Truth(2011), and Night Mowing (2005), all from the University of Pittsburgh Press; Speaking In Turn with Tony Sanders, (2011), Gnomon Press, Sharp Golden Thorn (2002), Marsh Hawk Press, and Asleep In The Fire (1990), University of Alabama Press. He is also the author of two books of interviews with eminent American poets: I Would Lie To You If I Could (2018), University of Pittsburgh Press and Sad Friends, Drowned Lovers, Stapled Songs, Conversations and Reflections on 20th Century Poetry (2011), Marick Press. DeNiord was the eighth poet laureate of Vermont from 2016 to 2019. He serves as board member of the Sundog Poetry Center in Vermont, is the essay editor at Plume Poetry Journal, and lives in Westminster West, Vermont with his wife, Liz.
Distinguished poet, essayist, teacher and editor. “Shadow-feast” (her most recent of five books of poetry) “is a tour de force, sheared of excess, breathtaking in its leaps, and thrilling in its sonic resonances.” – Los Angeles Review of Books.
Joan HoulihanKevin Prufer (The Art of Fiction, 2021) was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and attended Wesleyan University, the Hollins Writing Program, and Washington University. He is the author of seven poetry collections, including the Four Way Books titles How He Loved Them (2018), winner of the Julie Suk Award, finalist for the Rilke Prize, and long-listed for the Pulitzer Prize; Churches (2014), named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by The New York Times Book Review; In a Beautiful Country (2011), a Rilke Prize and Poets’ Prize finalist; and National Anthem (2008), named one of the five best poetry books of the year by Publishers Weekly and a finalist for the Poets’ Prize. Prufer is the recipient of many awards, including four Pushcart prizes, several awards from the Poetry Society of America, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Lannan Foundation, and several Best American Poetry selections. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA Program.
Angela Narciso Torres (what happens is neither, 2021) is the author of Blood Orange, winner of the Willow Books Literature Award for Poetry, and the chapbook, To the Bone (Sundress Publications). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in POETRY, Missouri Review, Quarterly West, Cortland Review, and Poetry Northwest. A graduate of Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and Harvard Graduate School of Education, Angela has received fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Illinois Arts Council, and Ragdale Foundation. She received First Prize in the Yeats Poetry Prize .New City magazine named her one of Chicago’s Lit 50. Born in Brooklyn and raised in Manila, she currently resides in San Diego. She serves as a senior and reviews editor for RHINO Poetry.
Reginald Gibbons (Renditions, 2021) is the author of eleven poetry collections. His Creatures of a Day was a Finalist for the National Book Award. His book Saints was published in the National Poetry Series. Volumes of his selected poems in translation have been published in Spain, Italy, and France. (His novel Sweetbitter won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and he has also published a book of very short fiction, An Orchard in the Street. Gibbons is the author of a book on poetic technique, How Poems Think. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Center for Hellenic Studies, as well as the Folger Library’s O. B. Hardison, Jr. prize and other honors and awards. His work has been included in the Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies. He teaches at Northwestern University, where he is a Frances Hooper Professor of Arts and Humanities.
Jennifer Militello is the author of The Pact, forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2021 and Knock Wood, winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four additional collections of poetry: A Camouflage of Specimens and Garments (Tupelo Press, 2016), finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize, Body Thesaurus (Tupelo Press, 2013), named one of the top books of 2013 by Best American Poetry and runner-up for the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail.
Her work has been published widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, POETRY, Tin House, and anthologized in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Poem-a-Day: 365 Poems for Every Occasion, and The Manifesto Project. She has been awarded the Barbara Bradley Award, the Yeats Poetry Prize, the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Betty Gabehart Prize, and the 49th Parallel Award, as well as grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Writers at Work, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.
Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College. She lives in Goffstown, New Hampshire.
Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. Last summer, Bloodaxe Books published the UK edition. He is also the author of four chapbooks, most recently GESUNDHEIT! (with Sam Herschel Wein, Glass Poetry Press). His work appears in many publications, including Poetry, Ploughshares, Poem-a-Day, and The Best American Poetry (2015 & 2019). He has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds an MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence and co-runs the journal, Underblong. He lives in Waltham, MA with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.
Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry, including The Absurd Man (2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in American Poetry Review, Callaloo, The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and his work is included in multiple volumes of Best American Poetry. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English and University Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.
Didi Jackson’s poems have appeared in The New Yorker, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is the author of Moon Jar (Red Hen Press, 2020) which was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award, the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize by Persea Books, and the Autumn House Press first book award. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly (2013). Currently, she teaches Poetry and the Visual Arts, Creative Writing, and African American Poetry at the University of Vermont and serves as the associate poetry editor for Green Mountains Review.
George Kalogeris’ most recent book, Guide to Greece ,(LSU 2019) was described as “At once boisterous, ironic and tender” by Michael Putnam, emeritus professor of classics, Brown university. “The poems fall on the ear and rest in the heart…with consummate ease.”
Ellen Doré Watson previous director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and named one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century” by the Library Journal has written five books of poetry and many translations from Portuguese. Robert Pinsky described her work as “interrogative, tender, wildly inventive.” Gerald Stern echoed, writing “The poems are wild, delirious…yet the (smart) organizing principle is this mind, ever alert, choosing and sorting.” Her most recent book is pray me stay eager (Alice James Books, 2018)
Ellen Doré WatsonMaggie Dietz, author of That Kind of Happy (University of Chicago Press, 2016,) and Perennial Fall (University of Chicago, 2006), which won the 2007 Jane Kenyon Award for Outstanding Book of Poetry and a Wisconsin Library Association Literary Award for Outstanding Achievement. She was director of the Favorite Poem Project. With Robert Pinsky, she co-edited three anthologies related to the project. Her awards include the Grolier Poetry Prize, the George Bennett Fellowship, fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center, and the NH State Council on the Arts. Dietz’s poems have appeared in literary journals such as Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Agni, Harvard Review and Salmagundi. Dietz taught in the Creative Writing Program at Boston University and was assistant poetry editor of online magazine, Slate. She is Associate Professor of English at UMass, Lowell.
Maggie DietzPrizewinning poet, translator and editor. Of his book, The Right Place to Jump, Marjorie Perloff writes, “these [are] wonderfully funny, sad, heartbreaking, jaunty, and always delightfully accurate poems.”
Peter Corvino