Lauren Clark is a poet, classicist, and editor. Their first collection of poems, Music for a Wedding, was selected by Vijay Seshadri for the 2016 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2017. They hold an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, where they were the recipient of a Zell Fellowship, several Hopwood Awards, and a Civitas Fellowship. They work as Program & Development Coordinator at Poets House in New York.
Galen Beebe is a Boston-based writer and maker whose work been published by Full Stop, Hypocrite Reader, Patient Sounds, Hound, Satellite Press, and Bello Collective. She holds an MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Sonia Sanchez is a poet, playwright, mother, professor and activist. She is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Morning Haiku (Beacon Press, 2010); Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1999); Does your house have lions? (Beacon Press, 1995), which was nominated for both the NAACP Image and National Book Critics Circle Award; Homegirls & Handgrenades (White Pine Press, 1984), which won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; I’ve Been a Woman: New and Selected Poems (Third World Press, 1978); A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (Broadside Press, 1973); Love Poems (Third Press, 1973); We a BaddDDD People (Broadside Press, 1970); and Homecoming (Broadside Press, 1969).
Among the many honors she has received are the Robert Creeley Award, the Frost Medal, the Community Service Award from the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, the Lucretia Mott Award, the Outstanding Arts Award from the Pennsylvania Coalition of 100 Black Women, the Peace and Freedom Award from Women International League for Peace and Freedom, the Pennsylvania Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Humanities, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts.
She was the first Presidential Fellow at Temple University, where she began teaching in 1977, and held the Laura Carnell Chair in English there until her retirement in 1999. She lives in Philadelphia.
Diana Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters represent an ongoing record of writing from the struggle for radical and unlimited form of political, intellectual and poetic change. Di Prima’s book points a way forward through a set of interventions, adjustments, recommendations, and calls to action that demand that we see our liberation in writing as well as in the street. After all, Di Prima writes, “…the best thing to do with a mimeograph is to drop it / from a five story window, on the head of a cop.”
A writer, vocalist and sound artist, LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs is the author of TwERK (Belladonna, 2013). She was born and raised in Harlem.
Laurie Anderson is a performance artist, composer, and writer whose work explores a remarkable range of media and subject matter.
Jennifer Scappettone works at the crossroads of writing, translation, and scholarly research, on the page and off. She is the author of the hybrid-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43: Outtakes & Scores from an Archaeology and Pop-Up Opera of the Corporate Dump (just out from Atelos Press), and of the scholarly monograph Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia University Press, 2014). Her translations from the Italian of the polyglot poet and musicologist Amelia Rosselli are collected in Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli, winner of the Academy of American Poets’s biennial Raiziss/De Palchi Book Prize; she is now at work on translating futurist F.T. Marinetti and feminist Carla Lonzi.
She founded, and curates, PennSound Italiana, a new sector of the audiovisual archive based at the University of Pennsylvania devoted to experimental Italian poetry. Installation pieces were exhibited most recently at Una Vetrina Gallery in Rome and WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles, and she has collaborated with musicians, architects, and dancers on performance works engaging with sites ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct on Rome’s Janiculum Hill to New York’s Fresh Kills Landfill. In 2016, she shared a Mellon Fellowship for Arts and Scholarship with Caroline Bergvall and Judd Morrissey to work on a project called The Data That We Breathe at Chicago’s Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry. Scappettone is Associate Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Romance Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.
Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems, Simulacra, received the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (Yale University Press, 2017). Her work has appeared in Best American Poets 2015, American Poets, Four Way Review, The Indiana Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She received the 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She received her B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania, her M.P.A. from the University of Michigan Ford School of Public Policy, and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Ms. Matthews is working on her second poetry collection, under/class, which explores poverty. She currently lives in Detroit, Michigan.
Derrick Austin is the author of Trouble the Water. He is the 2016–2017 Ron Wallace Poetry Fellow at The Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. A Cave Canem fellow, his work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2015, Image: A Journal of Arts and Religion, and New England Review. He’s a finalist for the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, We Charge Genocide Again, has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He is also a revolutionary poet who uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. His latest book of poems titled, Someone’s Dead Already, was nominated for a California Book Award. His next book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, is being published in the City Lights Pocket Poets series.
Rae Armantrout is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego. She has taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts, Bard College, Naropa University, San Diego State University, and San Francisco State University. Armantrout’s latest book is Partly: 2001–2015, an anthology spanning some of her most salient works and containing never-before published poems. Her 2009 collection, Versed, received the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. Armantrout earned her MA at San Francisco State University in 1975. She lives in San Diego, CA.
Sarah Gerard is the author of the forthcoming essay collection Sunshine State, the novel Binary Star, and two chapbooks, most recently BFF. Her short stories, essays, interviews, and criticism have appeared in The New York Times, Granta, New York Magazine’s “The Cut”, The Paris Review Daily, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Bookforum, Joyland, Vice, BOMB Magazine, and other journals, as well as anthologies for Joyland and The Saturday Evening Post. She’s been supported by fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, Tin House, and PlatteForum. She writes a monthly column on food for Hazlitt and teaches writing in New York City.