Zeina Hashem Beck is a Lebanese poet. Her third poetry collection, O, won the 2023 Arab American Book Award for Poetry and was named a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and The New York Public Library. Her previous full-length collections are Louder than Hearts, winner of the 2016 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, and To Live in Autumn, winner of the 2013 Backwaters Prize. She’s also the author of two chapbooks: 3arabi Song, winner of the 2016 Rattle Chapbook prize, and There Was and How Much There Was, a 2016 Laureate’s Choice selected by Carol Ann Duffy. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Poetry, Ploughshares, World Literature Today, The Nation, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Zeina’s invented The Duet, a bilingual poetic form where English and Arabic exist separately and in relationship to each other. She’s the co-creator and co-host, with poet Farah Chamma, of Maqsouda, a podcast in Arabic about Arabic poetry. After a lifetime in Lebanon and a decade in Dubai, Zeina has recently moved with her family to California.
Marianne Chan grew up in Stuttgart, Germany, and Lansing, Michigan. She is the author of All Heathens (Sarabande Books, 2020), which was the winner of the 2021 GLCA New Writers Award. Her second collection, Leaving Biddle City, will be published in 2024. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Best American Poetry, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches poetry and nonfiction at Old Dominion University.
Rita Banerjee is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
A 2020 Guggenheim Fellow, Brian Teare is the author of eight chapbooks and six critically acclaimed books, including Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award, and Doomstead Days, winner of the Four Quartets Prize and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle, Kingsley Tufts, and Lambda Literary Awards. His most recent publication is the 2022 Nightboat reissue of The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven; his seventh book, Poem Bitten by a Man, is forthcoming in the fall of 2023. His honors include Lambda Literary and Publishing Triangle Awards, and fellowships from the NEA, the Pew Foundation, the American Antiquarian Society, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the MacDowell Colony. After over a decade of teaching and writing in the San Francisco Bay Area, and eight years in Philadelphia, he’s now an Associate Professor of Poetry at the University of Virginia. An editorial board member of Poetry Daily, he lives in Charlottesville, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.
Daisy Fried is the author of four books of poetry: The Year the City Emptied, Women’s Poetry: Poems and Advice, My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, and She Didn’t Mean to Do It. She has been awarded Guggenheim, Hodder and Pew Fellowships. An occasional poetry critic for the New York Times, Poetry Foundation and elsewhere; poetry editor for the journal Scoundrel Time; and a member of the faculty of the BFA Program in Creative Writing at University of the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route, all from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Previously, he’s taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Dartmouth College.
Sally Keith’s forthcoming book of poems, Two of Everything, will be published by Milkweed Editions in 2024. Her previous collections of poetry include River House (2015); Fact of the Matter (2012); Dwelling Song (2004); and Design, winner of the 2000 Colorado Prize in Poetry. A Guggenheim Fellow, her poetry has appeared in New York Times, New England Review, Conjunctions, and A Public Space. She is a professor of English and Creative Writing at George Mason University’s MFA Program, where she also co-edits Poetry Daily.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing (a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize), and Rocket Fantastic, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. Calvocoressi is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship from Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Woman Writer’s Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, TX; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Calvocoressi’s poems have been published in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, POETRY, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Calvocoressi is an Editor at Large at Los Angeles Review of Books, and Poetry Editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a non-fiction book entitled, The Year I Didn’t Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi teaches at UNC Chapel Hill and lives in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Calvocoressi is the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022 – 2023.
Daniel Tobin is the author of eight books of poems, Where the World is Made (Middlebury College Press, 1999), Double Life (Louisiana State University Press, 2004), The Narrows (Four Way Books, 2005), Second Things (Four Way Books, 2008), Belated Heavens (Four Way Books, 2010), The Net (Four Way Books, 2014), From Nothing (Four Way Books, 2016), and Blood Labors (Four Way Books, 2018), which the New York Times named one of the Best Poetry Books of the year. His suite of versions of poems from the German of Paul Celan, The Stone in the Air, also appeared in 2018. He is the author of the critical studies Awake in America (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), Passage to the Center: Imagination and the Sacred in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney (University of Kentucky Press, 1999), and On Serious Earth (Little Island Press, 2018), as well as the editor of The Book of Irish American Poetry from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), Selected Early Poems of Lola Ridge (Quale, 2007), Poet’s Work, Poet’s Play: Essays on the Practice and the Arts (University of Michigan Press, 2008, with Pimone Triplett), and To the Many: Collected Early Works of Lola Ridge (Little Island, 2018), which received a Special Commendation from the Poetry Society (U.K.) Among his awards are the “The Discovery/The Nation Award,” The Robert Penn Warren Award, the Robert Frost Fellowship, the Katherine Bakeless Nason Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, the Julia Ward Howe Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.
Connie Voisine is the author of the book of poems, The Bower, begun on a Fulbright Fellowship to Northern Ireland. A previous book, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her first book, Cathedral of the North, won the Associated Writing Program’s Award in Poetry. She has poems published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere. Educated at Yale University, University of California at Irvine, and University of Utah, Voisine directs the creative writing program at New Mexico State University. She was a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
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