Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is an award-winning poet, editor, and teacher known for her work exploring cultural connection and shared humanity. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, and has spent over four decades leading writing workshops around the world.

She is the author or editor of more than 30 books, including 19 Varieties of Gazelle, Everything Comes Next, and Grace Notes: Poems About Families. Her work spans poetry, fiction, and anthologies for both adults and young readers, earning honors such as the National Book Award finalist, four Pushcart Prizes, and the 2024 Wallace Stevens Award.

 A former poetry editor for The Texas Observer and New York Times Magazine, Nye is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets and teaches creative writing at Texas State University.

January Gill O'Neal

January Gill O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and the author of Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. Glitter Road won the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and is a finalist for multiple awards including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, and American Poetry Review. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (2012–2018) and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. O’Neil chairs the AWP Board of Directors and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English.

Kimberly Blaeser

Kimberly Blaeser, founding director of Indigenous Nations Poets and past Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is the author of works in several genres. Her six poetry collections include Ancient Light (2024), Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance (2020), and Copper Yearning (2019). Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry, wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition on the work of fellow White Earth writer, and served as contributing editor for When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). Her writing is included in over 100 anthologies and translated into multiple languages including French, Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Chinese, and Hungarian. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” 

An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation and grew up on the reservation. Blaeser’s honors include the 2025 Poets & Writers’ Writer for Writers Award, Zona Gale Short Fiction Award from the Council of Wisconsin Writers, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. She is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member at Institute of American Indian Arts. Recent projects include the curation of a “Water Portfolio” for Prairie Schooner and an “Indigenous #LanguageBack through Poetry” project.

Ellen Bass

Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Her other poetry books include Like a Beggar, The Human Line, and Mules of Love. Her poems appear  frequently in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The NEA, and The California Arts Council, The Lambda Literary Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She co-edited the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks!, and her nonfiction books include the groundbreaking The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse and Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, California jails, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University.

Jane Hirshfield

Jane Hirshfield, in poems described by The Washington Post as belonging “among the modern masters” and in The New York Times Magazine as “among the most important poetry in the world today,” addresses the urgent immediacies of our time. Ranging from the political, ecological, and scientific to the metaphysical, personal, and passionate, Hirshfield praises the radiance of particularity and reckons the consequence of the daily. Her poems and essays traverse the crises of the biosphere, questions of social justice, and the myriad interior quandaries of heart, mind, and spirit. Her work lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, desire and loss, impermanence and beauty— all the dimensions of our shared existence within what one poem calls “the pure democracy of being.”

Her ten poetry books include the newly published The Asking: New & Selected Poems (September, 2023); Ledger (March, 2020), The Beauty, long-listed for the 2015 National Book Award; Given Sugar, Given Salt, a finalist for the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award; and After, named a “best book of 2006” by The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and England’s Financial Times. Her two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), have become classics in their field, as have her four books collecting and co-translating the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Komachi & Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Japanese Court; Women in Praise of the Sacred: 43 Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women; Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems; and The Heart of Haiku, on Matsuo Basho, named an Amazon Best Book of 2011.

Hirshfield’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets; Columbia University’s Translation Center Award; The Poetry Center Book Award, The California Book Award, the Northern California Book Reviewers Award, the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry, the Zhongkun International Poetry Award, and the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2012, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, in conjunction with reading to an estimated 50,000 people on the Washington Mall at the first March For Science, she co-founded the Poets For Science traveling installation, housed with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University. In 2019, she was elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, Poetry, Orion, and ten editions of The Best American Poems.

Hirshfield has taught at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, Bennington College, Queen's University Belfast, and elsewhere. Her frequent appearances at universities, writers’ conferences, symposia and festivals in this country and abroad are highly acclaimed. Her poems and essays have been translated into over fifteen languages and her work has been set by numerous composers, including John Adams and Philip Glass. Her TED-ED animated lesson on metaphor has received over 1.5 million views.

Pádraig Ó Tuama

Maggie Smith

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977, Maggie Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of You Could Make This Place Beautiful; My Thoughts Have Wings, a picture book illustrated by SCBWI Portfolio grand prize winner Leanne Hatch; the national bestsellers Goldenrod and Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change; as well as Good Bones, named one of the Best Five Poetry Books of 2017 by the Washington Post and winner of the 2018 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, winner of the 2012 Dorset Prize and the 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Gold Medal in Poetry; and Lamp of the Body, winner of the 2003 Benjamin Saltman Award. 

Maggie Smith’s newest book is Dear Writer: Pep Talks & Practical Advice for the Creative Life, from Atria/Simon & Schuster.

A 2011 recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Smith has also received six Individual Excellence Awards from the Ohio Arts Council, two Academy of American Poets Prizes, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her poems have been widely published and anthologized, appearing in Best American Poetry, the New York Times, and The New Yorker, among many others. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, on the Poetry Foundation website, and elsewhere.

In 2016 Maggie Smith’s poem “Good Bones” went viral internationally, receiving coverage in various national publications. PRI (Public Radio International) called it “the official poem of 2016." In 2017 the poem was featured on an episode of CBS primetime drama Madam Secretary, also called “Good Bones,” and was read by Meryl Streep at Lincoln Center.