Jessica Morgan with Helen Lee and Joachim Pissarro

One of the most celebrated poets of the American post-war generation, Jorie Graham is the author of 14 collections of poetry, including The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1992 (Ecco Press 1995), PLACE (Ecco Press 2012), Fast (Ecco Press 2017), and, most recently, Runaway (Ecco Press 2020). Her work has been widely translated as well as the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, The Forward Poetry Prize (UK), and The International Nonino Prize. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Massachusetts. Her most recent book is [To] The Last [Be] Human ( Copper Canyon Press, 2022).

Poet, essayist, and playwright, Claudia Rankine is the author of six collections of poetry and plays, including Just Us: An American Conversation, Citizen: An American Lyric, Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, HELP, The White Card, Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, as well as numerous video collaborations. She is the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, she co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute. She is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. Rankine teaches at Yale.

Poet and writer Jericho Brown is the author of The Tradition for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please, won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry, among others. He is the director of the Creative Writing Program and a professor at Emory University.

Poet D.A. Powell’s books include Tea, Lunch, Cocktails (Wesleyan University Press) and Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys (Graywolf Press 2012). He is the recipient of awards from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, the National Book Critics Circle, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A former Briggs-Copeland Lecturer at Harvard University, Powell teaches full-time in the MFA Program at the University of San Francisco.

An artist, activist, and educator Suzi Q. Smith’s debut poetry collection A Gospel of Bones was published by Alternating Current Press in February of this year and is the winner of the 2020 Electric Book Award. Her second full-length collection Poems for the End of the World is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in June 2021.

A writer and translator with degrees in geology and literature, Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in northern California. His books, often concerned with ecology, include Be With (New Directions 2018) winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, the novel The Trace (New Directions 2014), and Twice Alive, (New Directions, 2021). Gander’s translations and co-translations include Alice Iris Red Horse by Gozo Yoshimasu (New Directions 2016), Spectacle & Pigsty by Kiwao Nomura (Omnidawn 2011), and Then Come Back: the Lost Neruda Poems (Copper Canyon Press 2016) He has received grants from the Library of Congress, the Guggenheim, Howard, Whiting and United States Artists Foundations.