January
Tyree Daye was raised in Youngsville, North Carolina. He is the author of the poetry collections Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and River Hymns (American Poetry Review, 2017), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. A Cave Canem Fellow and a Palm Beach Poetry Festival Langston Hughes Fellow, Daye is the recipient of a Whiting Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Kate Tufts Award. He was the 2019 Diana and Simon Raab Writer-In-Residence at University of California, Santa Barbara, and is a teaching assistant professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
February
Patricia Smith is a poet, teacher, and performance artist. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Incendiary Art (Northwestern University Press, 2017), winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), winner of the 2013 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; and Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award. She is also the co-author of the history book Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998) and the children’s book Janna and the Kings (Lee & Low Books, 2003). Smith is a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam and a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize, and her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Mystery Stories, among other publications. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, she has written and performed two one-woman plays, one of which was produced by Derek Walcott’s Trinidad Theater Workshop. Smith is a Cave Canem faculty member, teaches in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada College, and is a professor of creative writing at the City University of New York/College of Staten Island. She lives in Howell, New Jersey.
March
Diane Seuss is the author of five books of poetry. Her most recent collection is frank: sonnets (Graywolf Press, 2021), winner of the PEN/Voelcker Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her other collections include Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf Press, 2018), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf Press, 2015), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open (University of Massachusetts Press, 2010), which received the Juniper Prize. Her sixth collection, Modern Poetry, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2024. Seuss is the recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2021 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She will be the Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford University in 2023. Seuss was raised by a single mother in rural Michigan, which she continues to call home.
April (National Poetry Month)
Ada Limón was appointed the United States poet laureate in 2022. She is the author of The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022); The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018); Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), a finalist for the National Book Award; Sharks in the Rivers (Milkweed Editions, 2010); This Big Fake World (Pearl Editions, 2006), winner of the 2005 Pearl Poetry Prize; and Lucky Wreck (Autumn House Press, 2006), winner of the 2005 Autumn House Poetry Prize. A 2001–2002 fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and a Guggenheim Fellow, Limón has also received a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts and won the Chicago Literary Award for Poetry. She splits her time between Lexington, Kentucky, and Sonoma, California.
May
Hieu Minh Nguyen is a queer, Vietnamese American poet from Minnesota and the author of Not Here (Coffee House Press, 2018) and This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014). The recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, the Poetry Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is a lecturer at Stanford University and lives in Oakland, California.
June
Brian Teare is the author of Doomstead Days (Nightboat Books, 2019), which was a finalist for the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and longlisted for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award; and The Room Where I Was Born (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), winner of the Brittingham Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. In 2008, Teare founded Albion Books, a micropress specializing in limited-edition poetry chapbooks, broadsides, and print ephemera. He is the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award as well as fellowships from Stanford University, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, the Pew Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. He is currently an associate professor of poetry at the University of Virginia, and lives in Charlottesville.
July
John Lee Clark is a DeafBlind poet, essayist, translator, literary historian, and a leader and linguistics researcher in the Protactile movement. He is the author of How to Communicate: Poems (W. W. Norton, 2022), as well as the essay collections Touching the Future (W. W. Norton, forthcoming) and Where I Stand (Handtype Press, 2014). Among recent honors, he has received a Bush Leadership Fellowship from the Archibald Bush Foundation, the Krause Essay Prize from the University of Iowa, a Disability Futures Fellowship from the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations, the National Magazine Award for Best Essay, and the Frederick Bock Prize from Poetry magazine. Born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, he continues to reside there with his partner, the artist Adrean Clark, their three kids, and two cats.
August
Divya Victor is the author of several books and chapbooks, including Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021), winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award and the 2022 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Kith (Fence Books/Book*hug, 2017); and Scheingleichheit: Drei Essays (Merve Verlag, 2020, translated by Lena Schmidt). Her work has appeared in Bomb, the New Museum’s The Animated Reader, Crux: Journal of Conceptual Writing, The Best American Experimental Writing, Poetry, The Yale Review, American Poetry Review, and boundary 2 and has been translated into Czech, French, German, and Spanish. Victor’s honors also include a Mark Diamond Research Fellowship at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, a Riverrun Fellowship at the Archive for New Poetry at the University of California San Diego, and a writing residency at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition (L.A.C.E.). The former editor of several publications, she is currently an associate professor of English and writing at Michigan State University, where she is the director of the creative writing program.
September
Eunsong Kim is an associate professor in the department of English at Arizona State University. Her practice spans poetry, translation, visual culture, and critical race and ethnic studies. Her work has appeared in Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association, Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, and in the book anthologies American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement (Wesleyan University Press, 2018) and Reading Modernism with Machines (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Kim’s poetry has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, The Iowa Review, and The Minnesota Review, among other publications. She is the author of The Politics of Collecting: Property & Race in Aesthetic Formation (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and gospel of regicide (Noemi Press, 2017), as well as the co-translator of Kim Eon Hee’s Have You Been Feeling Blue These Days? (Noemi Press, 2019). She is a recipient of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, a grant from the Andy Warhol Art Writers Program, and Yale’s Poynter Fellowship. In 2021 Kim co-founded offshoot, an arts space for transnational activist conversations.
October
Vanessa Angélica Villareal was born in the Rio Grande Valley borderlands to formerly undocumented Mexican immigrants. She is the author of the poetry collection Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017). The recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award in Poetry and a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, she is a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles, California.
November
Steve Bellin-Oka’s first book of poems, Instructions for Seeing a Ghost (University of North Texas Press, 2020), won the 2019 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. He is also the author of four chapbooks, including Tell Me Exactly What You Saw and What You Think It Means (SCE Press, 2021), winner of the 2020 Blue Mountain Review LGBTQ Chapbook Contest, and Proviso (Paper Machine Press, 2021), a text/image collaboration with the painter Kristen Tomecek. He has received fellowships from Yaddo, the National Parks Arts Foundation, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Crosstown Arts Center. Bellin-Oka has also been a translation scholar at the Bread Loaf Translators’ Conference. He lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow in poetry and translation.
December
Claudia Rankine is the author of several collections, including Just Us: An American Conversation (Graywolf Press, 2020); Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014), which received the 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Book Prize for Poetry, the 2015 Forward Prize for Poetry, and the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry; and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize. Rankine has edited numerous anthologies, including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind (Fence Books, 2015); American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007); and American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Her plays include Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and Existing Conditions, co-authored with Casey Llewellyn. She has also produced a number of videos in collaboration with John Lucas, including Situation One. In 2013, Rankine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2019, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her other honors include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and a United States Artists Zell Fellowship in literature. In 2017, she founded the Racial Imaginary Institute. Rankine is currently a Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University.
