Field-Of-Study: Poetry

Adrian Matejka was born in Nuremberg, Germany, and grew up in California and Indiana. He is a graduate of the M.F.A. program at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and his books include The Devil’s Garden (Alice James Books, 2003), winner of the 2002 New York/New England Award, and Mixology (Penguin, 2009), a winner of the 2008

Brenda Shaughnessy is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012.)  Her other books are Human Dark with Sugar, which was a finalist for the 2008 NBCC Award and winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Interior with Sudden Joy, finalist for

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician of internal medicine and the author of three poetry collections and three volumes of poetry-in-translation. His first book of poetry, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize in 2007. Alight and Textu, his second and third poetry collections respectively, followed in 2013

Cleopatra Mathis, born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, is of Greek and Cherokee descent. She is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Book of Dog (2013), White Sea (2005; rpt., 2011), and What to Tip the Boatman? (2001), all published by Sarabande Books, and Aerial View of Louisiana (1979), The Bottom Land

Born in Topeka, Kansas in 1979, Ben Lerner was educated at Brown University. He is the author of three books of poetry: The Lichtenberg Figures (2004), Angle of Yaw (2006), and Mean Free Path (2010), all published by Copper Canyon Press. He has been a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry, a Fulbright

Troy Jollimore’s first book of poetry, Tom Thomson in Purgatory, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2006. His second collection, At Lake Scugog, appeared in the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets in 2011. As a philosopher he has focused largely on ethical aspects of love and personal relationships, and has authored

Major Jackson is the author of three collections of poetry: Holding Company (2010, Norton); Hoops (2006, Norton); and Leaving Saturn (2002, University of Georgia Press), which was awarded the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He has published poems and essays in AGNI, American

Ross Gay was born in Youngstown, Ohio, and grew up just outside of Philadelphia. He is the author of two books of poems, Against Which (CavanKerry Press 2006) and Bringing the Shovel Down (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011).  His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Massachusetts Review, and The Sun, among other

Kate Daniels is Professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at Vanderbilt University.  The author of four volumes of poetry (The White Wave and The Niobe Poems, from the Pitt Poetry Series, and Four Testimonies and A Walk in Victoria’s Secret, from LSU Press), she grew up outside of Richmond, Virginia, and was educated

L. S. Asekoff has published four books of poetry: Dreams of a Work (1994) and North Star (1997) with Orchises Press, and The Gate of Horn (2010) and  the verse-novella Freedom Hill (2011) with TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press. His poems have appeared in such magazines as The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and Ninth Letter.  He

C. Dale Young grew up in South Florida and remembers loving literature and science even as early as grade school. Despite the fact very few people in his life understood his love for both disciplines, he continued to love and study both of them all the way into adulthood.  Young received his undergraduate degree in

Elizabeth Willis’s most recent book, Address (Wesleyan UP, 2011), won the PEN New England Winship Award for Poetry. Her other books include Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan UP, 2006), Turneresque (Burning Deck, 2003), and The Human Abstract (Penguin, 1995), which won the National Poetry Series. Willis’s work builds on a tradition of lyric innovation and open form.

I was twenty-five in 1968 when I finished graduate school at the University of Iowa (the Writers Workshop) and began teaching nearby at a small junior college in Moline, Illinois. During that first year of teaching (I was barely older than my students), two of the young men dropped out of school and almost immediately

Joseph Millar’s  three collections are Overtime (2001), Fortune (2007), and Blue Rust (2012) from Carnegie-Mellon. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University, and spent thirty 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

Kathleen Graber is an Assistant Professor of English in The Creative Writing Program at Virginia Commonwealth University, and she divides her time between Richmond and her hometown of Wildwood, New Jersey, where she and her husband operate a music store on the Boardwalk.  She is the author of two collections of poetry, Correspondence (Saturnalia Books,

Timothy Donnelly received his B.A. from The Johns Hopkins University and his M.F.A. from Columbia University.  His first books of poems, Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, was published by Grove Press in 2003.  His second, The Cloud Corporation, was published by Wave Books in 2010 and in the United Kingdom by Picador

Ghanaian-born Jamaican poet Kwame Dawes is the award-winning author of sixteen books of poetry (most recently, Wheels, 2011) and numerous books of fiction, nonfiction, criticism, and drama and has edited nine anthologies. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner, and a Chancellor’s Professor of English at the University of Nebraska, and Associate Poetry

Katharine Coles’ fifth and sixth collections of poems are forthcoming from Red Hen Press; she is also the author of two novels.  Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, Poetry, North American Review, Southwest Review, DIAGRAM, and Ascent.   In 2009–2010, she served as the inaugural