Our Poets
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↑Aaron Caycedo-Kimura
Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a writer, visual artist, and educator who holds an MFA in creative writing from Boston University and teaches at Trinity College and the University of Hartford. His poetry draws on Japanese American heritage, family memory, and intergenerational loss, moving between intimate elegy and ekphrastic exploration. His chapbook Ubasute (Slapering Hol Press, 2021) won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition, tracing his parents' experiences of World War II Japanese internment and the Tokyo firebombings. His debut full-length collection, Common Grace (Beacon Press, 2022), expands that lyric vision across cultures, generations, and artistic forms. His honors include a MacDowell Fellowship, a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry, a Connecticut Office of the Arts Artist Fellowship, and a St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artist Award in Literature.
Aberjhani
Aberjhani (born in Savannah, Georgia) is a poet, historian, novelist, and visual artist whose work spans poetry, fiction, cultural history, and social commentary. His writing draws on African American literary tradition, spiritual inquiry, and the legacies of the Harlem Renaissance. He served in the United States Air Force and later co-edited the Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance (Facts on File, 2003) with Sandra L. West, which received the American Library Association's Choice Academic Title Award. His poetry collections include The River of Winged Dreams (Bright Skylark Literary Productions, 2010) and Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black (2012). He is the recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Journalism Award and the Best Poet and Spoken Word Artist Award from Connect Savannah.
Abolqasem Ferdowsi
Abolqasem Ferdowsi (c. 940–1020) was a Persian poet born near Tus in the Khorasan region of present-day Iran. He is the author of the Shahnameh (Book of Kings), one of the world's longest epic poems, composed over approximately thirty years. The Shahnameh recounts the mythological and historical past of Persia from creation through the Arab conquest of the seventh century, drawing on pre-Islamic Iranian tradition. Ferdowsi is credited with preserving the Persian language at a time when Arabic was the dominant literary medium, and the Shahnameh remains foundational to Persian literature, national identity, and cultural memory across Iran and Central Asia.
Ada Limón
Ada Limón (born in Sonoma, California) served as the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2022 to 2025, becoming the first Latina to hold the position. A Mexican-American poet of extraordinary emotional directness, her work melds close observation of the natural world with unflinching personal reflection — on illness, grief, family, and the complicated beauty of being alive. Her collection The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow, she had a poem engraved aboard NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft launched in 2024.
Adam Deutsch
Adam Deutsch is a poet, publisher, and teacher based in San Diego, California. He teaches in the English Department at Grossmont College and is the founder and publisher of Cooper Dillon Books. His debut full-length collection, Every Transmission (Fernwood Press, 2023), expands on the lyric concerns of his earlier chapbook Carry On, a collection of elegies. His poetry has appeared in Poetry International, Thrush, Juked, and Typo. He is also an advocate for the independent poetry community, both through his press and his literary citizenship.
Adam Golaski
Adam Golaski is an American poet, fiction writer, and editor whose work moves between experimental poetry, horror, and translation. He is the author of Color Plates (Rose Metal Press, 2009), a genre-bending collection of prose poems and fictions inspired by Impressionist painting, and co-edited two anthologies of experimental poetry for Flim Forum Press: Oh One Arrow (2007) and A Sing Economy (2008). His translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, retitled Green, appeared in installments on the critical journal Open Letters. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Conjunctions, McSweeney's, and Sleepingfish. He also edits New Genre, a journal of literary horror and science fiction, and teaches at Central Connecticut State University.
Adrienne Novy
Adrienne Novy is a poet and teaching artist from the suburbs of Chicago. A 2020 graduate of Hamline University's creative writing program, her work explores mental health, Jewish identity, pop culture, and personal recovery with candor and intimacy. She is the author of three poetry collections: Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018; expanded edition 2023), a breakout debut praised by Hanif Abdurraqib; Erev Gildene: The Pop-Rock Survival Guide for the Modern Jewish Millennial (Game Over Books, 2022); and Good Luck in the Real World (Button Poetry, 2026). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Bettering American Poetry.
Ai
Ai (1947–2010) was born Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas, and grew up in Tucson, Arizona. Of mixed Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, African American, and Irish ancestry, she legally changed her name to Ai, the Japanese word for love. She earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine. Known for graphic, unflinching dramatic monologues spoken in the voices of murderers, politicians, and ordinary people, her work confronts the violence embedded in American culture and psyche. Her collection Vice: New and Selected Poems (W.W. Norton, 1999) won the National Book Award for Poetry. Other major works include Killing Floor (1979), which received the Lamont Poetry Award, and Sin (1986), which won an American Book Award. She taught at Oklahoma State University until her death.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Aimee Nezhukumatathil (born in Chicago, Illinois) is a Filipino-Indian American poet and essayist who draws on the natural world and multicultural heritage to explore love, wonder, and belonging. She received her BA and MFA from Ohio State University and is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Mississippi. She is the author of five poetry collections, including Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press, 2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize and the Global Filipino Literary Award; Oceanic (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award; and Night Owl (Ecco, 2026). Her essay collection World of Wonders (Milkweed Editions, 2020) was a New York Times bestseller. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and National Endowment for the Arts Fellow.
Alex Dimitrov
Alex Dimitrov (born in Sofia, Bulgaria) is a poet who grew up in the United States and now lives in New York City. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and has taught creative writing at Princeton, Columbia, Barnard, and other institutions. His poetry explores intimacy, celebrity, loneliness, and contemporary American life through a collage of voices and cultural references. He is the author of Begging for It (Four Way Books, 2013), Together and by Ourselves (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), and Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon, 2021). He received the Stanley Kunitz Prize from American Poetry Review and a Pushcart Prize. He formerly served as Senior Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets and cofounded the Wilde Boys queer poetry salon.
Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Alexandra Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran-American poet, editor, and translator born in El Salvador who left during the country's civil war and later returned to live in San Salvador. She holds MFAs in poetry from Florida International University and in fiction from Pacific University. Her poetry explores motherhood, displacement, national identity, and the fraught landscape of El Salvador. Her debut collection Matria (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) won the St. Lawrence Book Award, and Relinquenda (Beacon Press, 2022) won the National Poetry Series. She is a CantoMundo and Letras Latinas fellow and the co-founder of Editorial Kalina, a bilingual publishing press in El Salvador.
Alexandra Vasiliu
Alexandra Vasiliu is an award-winning Romanian-American inspirational poet and author holding a PhD in Medieval Literature. Her bestselling collections — including Healing Words, Be My Moon, Healing Is a Gift, and Dare to Let Go — explore emotional healing, resilience, love, and self-discovery, and have reached readers worldwide through their accessible warmth. Writing in English as well as Romanian, she has published more than a dozen books, including several children's titles. Her poetry has touched tens of thousands of readers navigating heartbreak and personal transformation, and she maintains an active international following across social media.
Alexandria Hall
Alexandria Hall is a poet and musician from Vermont and the author of Field Music (Ecco, 2020), her debut collection selected by Rosanna Warren as a winner of the 2019 National Poetry Series. The collection explores language, place, and selfhood through intimate depictions of rural Vermont life, holding together safety and danger, isolation and intimacy. Hall earned her MFA from New York University and is a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of tele- magazine. Her poems have appeared in Narrative, the Bennington Review, BOAAT, and Foundry.
Alicia Cook Poetry
Alicia Cook is a poet, essayist, and addiction-awareness advocate based in Newark, New Jersey. Her poetry, structured around music metaphors and personal testimony, addresses grief, addiction, mental health, and resilience with directness and accessibility. Her debut collection, Stuff I've Been Feeling Lately (Andrews McMeel, 2016), a Goodreads Choice Award finalist, was structured as a mixtape with blackout-poetry remixes. Subsequent collections include I Hope My Voice Doesn't Skip (2018), Sorry I Haven't Texted You Back (2020), and The Music Was Just Getting Good (2024). She has been recognized with the 2026 Central Avenue Poetry Prize and the Becker Award from the New Jersey Council of Teachers of English. Her advocacy for families affected by addiction has earned a worldwide readership.
Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) was born in Newark, New Jersey, and became one of the defining voices of the Beat Generation. His landmark poem Howl, first performed in San Francisco in 1955 and published by City Lights Books in 1956, challenged obscenity laws and transformed American poetry with its long, incantatory lines and unflinching social critique. His collection Kaddish and Other Poems (City Lights, 1961), a lament for his mother, is considered among his finest achievements. Deeply influenced by Walt Whitman and William Blake, Ginsberg was also a prominent activist, opposing the Vietnam War and advocating for civil liberties. He received the National Book Award for The Fall of America in 1974.
Allie Michelle
Allie Michelle is a bestselling spoken word poet, author, and certified meditation and yoga teacher. Her collections — including Explorations of a Cosmic Soul (Andrews McMeel, 2019), The Rose That Blooms in the Night, and The Words Left Unspoken (Simon & Schuster, 2025) — blend lyric poetry with themes of healing, love, grief, and spiritual insight. She has performed poetry across the globe and co-founded We Are Warriors, a mental wellness initiative. Her social media following of hundreds of thousands reflects the breadth of her readership. She has also released a debut fantasy novel, Legends of Lemuria.
Alora Young
Alora Young is an American poet, actor, and activist born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee. As the 2021 Youth Poet Laureate of the Southern United States, she earned national recognition for spoken word poetry confronting race, identity, and social justice. Her debut collection, Walking Gentry Home: A Memoir of My Foremothers in Verse (Hogarth/Penguin Random House, 2022), traces nine generations of Black women in her maternal line from enslaved ancestors to her own coming-of-age. It received a starred review in Kirkus and was named a best debut by Ms. Magazine. Young graduated from Swarthmore College with a degree in Spoken Word Pedagogy and is the founder of AboveGround, a creative writing and equity program for elementary school students of color.
Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman (born in Los Angeles, California) is an American poet and activist who became the youngest inaugural poet in United States history. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in sociology. In 2017 she was named the inaugural National Youth Poet Laureate. On January 20, 2021, she delivered The Hill We Climb at President Biden's inauguration, captivating a global audience. Her collections include The Hill We Climb (Viking, 2021) and Call Us What We Carry (Viking, 2021), which debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. She was also the first poet to perform at the Super Bowl.
Amanda Lovelace
Amanda Lovelace is the pen name of an American poet who became known through social media poetry before publishing with Andrews McMeel. She is the author of the Women Are Some Kind of Magic series, beginning with the princess saves herself in this one (Andrews McMeel, 2017), which won the Goodreads Choice Award for Poetry. Subsequent collections include the witch doesn't burn in this book (2018), the mermaid's voice returns in this one (2019), and (you)(r) (e/n)d(s) with happiness. Her work recounts survival from abuse and trauma through feminist fairy-tale imagery in accessible free verse. She has been a two-time Goodreads Choice Award winner for poetry.
Amiri Baraka
Amiri Baraka (1934–2014) was born LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, and became one of the most forceful and controversial poets in American literary history. His early work, collected in Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (Totem Press, 1961), showed the influence of the Beat Generation and Black Mountain poets. His 1964 play Dutchman won an Obie Award and signaled a sharp political turn toward Black Nationalism. He later co-founded the Black Arts Movement and produced influential poetry collections including Black Magic (1969). He served as Poet Laureate of New Jersey from 2002 to 2004 and received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008.
Andrea Gibson
Andrea Gibson (born in Calais, Maine) is a poet and performer who became the first person to win the Denver Grand Slam Poetry Championship and has since become one of the most beloved voices in spoken word poetry. Their work addresses LGBTQ identity, disability, love, grief, and social justice with extraordinary emotional force. They are the author of multiple collections including The Madness Vase (Penmanship Books, 2011), Take Me with You (Write Bloody, 2014), and Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry, 2018). They received the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. In 2019, Gibson announced a diagnosis of ovarian cancer, and their subsequent work continues to engage illness, death, and resilience with characteristic directness.
Andrew Krivak
Andrew Krivak (born in Olyphant, Pennsylvania) is an American writer known primarily for his fiction and memoir, including his debut novel The Sojourn (Bellevue Literary Press, 2011), which won the Chautauqua Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He is a former Jesuit scholastic who studied at Fordham University and Boston College. His writing draws on Slovak-American heritage, Catholic spiritual life, and the landscapes of rural Appalachia and the Berkshires. His novel The Bear (Bellevue Literary Press, 2020) received the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. While primarily a novelist, he writes poetry and teaches literature and creative writing at Colby College.
Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) was born Anna Gorenko near Odessa in the Russian Empire and became one of the preeminent poets of the twentieth century. A leading figure of the Acmeist movement, her early collections Evening (1912) and Rosary (1914) established her voice — precise, restrained, and deeply lyrical. Her long poem Requiem, written between 1935 and 1940 and circulated in secret for decades, documents the Stalinist terror through the suffering of those waiting outside prison walls. Censored by Soviet authorities for much of her career, she was banned from publishing between 1946 and 1958. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature multiple times.
Anne Carson
Anne Carson (born in Toronto, Ontario) is one of the most celebrated and formally innovative poets writing in English, equally at home in poetry, essay, translation, and hybrid forms that resist easy categorization. She taught classics at McGill University and the University of Michigan, among other institutions. Her work Autobiography of Red (Knopf, 1998), a verse novel reimagining the myth of Geryon, brought her wide literary attention. Nox (New Directions, 2010), an accordion-fold elegy for her brother, was a major formal innovation. Her honors include the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She has also translated Sappho, Euripides, and Sophocles, and received the Lannan Literary Award.
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and is among the most prominent practitioners of confessional poetry. Beginning to write seriously following a psychiatric breakdown, she studied under Robert Lowell and became part of an influential circle that included Sylvia Plath. Her collection Live or Die (Houghton Mifflin, 1966) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other major works include To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and Transformations (1971), a reimagining of Grimm fairy tales. Her poetry confronts mental illness, the female body, and religious doubt with unsparing directness. She received a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Arthur Sze
Arthur Sze (born in New York City) is a poet and translator whose work explores the intersection of Eastern and Western cultural and philosophical traditions, landscape, and the nature of perception. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was the founding director of the MFA program. His collection Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) won the National Book Award for Poetry. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, an American Book Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Lannan Literary Award. His translations of Chinese poetry include The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon, 2001).
Atticus
Atticus is a Canadian poet and visual artist who publishes anonymously, maintaining a mask-wearing persona since the publication of his debut collection. His poetry draws on themes of love, freedom, nature, and the search for meaning, presented in spare, accessible free verse often accompanied by his own illustrations. His debut collection Love Her Wild (Atria Books, 2017) became an international bestseller. Subsequent collections include The Dark Between Stars (2018), The Lost Night (2021), and All Love Everything (2022). His work has been widely shared on social media and has reached millions of readers worldwide. He has spoken about growing up in Canada and living in Los Angeles.
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was born in New York City to Caribbean immigrant parents and is celebrated as one of the essential poets of the twentieth century. Her work crosses the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with intellectual force and lyrical precision. She is the author of Coal (Norton, 1976), which brought her wide recognition, and The Black Unicorn (Norton, 1978), widely considered her masterwork. Her prose-poem collection The Cancer Journals (1980) documents her experience with breast cancer. She served as New York State Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1993 and taught at Hunter College for many years. Her essay The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House remains widely read.
Avan Jogia
Avan Jogia is a Canadian actor, director, and writer of Indian and British descent, known for his television roles, who published Mixed Feelings (2019), a debut collection of poems and prose exploring identity, mental health, emotional vulnerability, and self-discovery. The book is illustrated with his own artwork. Jogia has spoken publicly about writing as a tool for processing difficult emotions. While primarily known as an actor, Mixed Feelings earned a devoted following among readers drawn to the intersection of celebrity, vulnerability, and introspective writing.
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↑Barbara Hamby
Barbara Hamby (born in New Orleans, Louisiana) is a poet known for her exuberant, formally inventive work that ranges across popular culture, travel, art, and language itself, often employing elaborate extended vocabulary and comic energy. She is a professor of English at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Her collections include Babel (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), All-Night Lingo Tango (Pittsburgh, 2009), and Bird Odyssey (Pittsburgh, 2018). She has received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, an NEA Fellowship, and the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. With David Kirby, her husband, she has edited the anthology Seriously Funny: Poems About Love, Death, Religion, Art, Politics, Sex, and Everything Else (2010).
Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver (born in Annapolis, Maryland) is an American novelist, essayist, and poet best known for her novels, including The Poisonwood Bible (1998) and Unsheltered (2018). Her novel Demon Copperhead (2022) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Women's Prize for Fiction. She studied biology at DePauw University and received a master's degree from the University of Arizona. Her poetry collection Another America / Otra América (Seal Press, 1992) presents bilingual poems on political and social themes. She received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama in 2011. She has lived and farmed in Virginia, and founded the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction.
Ben Doller
Ben Doller (born 1973, Warsaw, New York) is an American poet known for formally inventive work that interrogates language, voice, and cultural knowledge. He is the author of Fauxhawk (Wesleyan University Press, 2015), Dead Ahead (Fence Books, 2010), FAQ (Ahsahta Press, 2009), and Radio, Radio (Louisiana State University Press, 2001), selected by Susan Howe for the 2000 Walt Whitman Award. His collections fuse sharp formal innovation with political engagement and linguistic play. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and co-edits the Kuhl House Contemporary Poetry Series at the University of Iowa Press. He is an associate professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Ben Mazer
Ben Mazer (born 1964, New York City) is an American poet and scholarly editor raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, known for his intense lyricism and deep engagement with literary tradition. He studied under Seamus Heaney at Harvard University and earned advanced degrees from the Editorial Institute at Boston University under Christopher Ricks and Archie Burnett. He is the author of more than a dozen collections, including The Glass Piano (MadHat Press, 2015) and The Ruined Millionaire: New Selected Poems 2002–2022 (MadHat Press, 2023). As an editor, he produced The Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) and Selected Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (Harvard University Press, 2010). He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Beth Bachmann
Beth Bachmann is an American poet and 2016 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Born near Philadelphia, she studied at Johns Hopkins University and Concordia University in Montreal. She is the author of three collections in the Pitt Poetry Series: Temper (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), about her sister's unsolved murder, which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Do Not Rise (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), a meditation on war and post-traumatic stress that won the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award; and CEASE (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), exploring peace as a process. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and The New Yorker. She teaches at Vanderbilt University.
Bianca Sparacino
Bianca Sparacino is a Canadian poet, author, and creative director based in Toronto. Her writing explores emotional healing, self-worth, love, and personal growth in accessible prose-poetry. She founded Thought Catalog Books and has worked as a contributing editor and creative director at the platform. She is the author of multiple poetry and prose collections, including A Gentle Reminder (2020), The Yearning (2022), and Everything You'll Ever Need (You Can Find Within Yourself) (2021), all published through Thought Catalog Books. Her work has reached millions of readers through social media and has been widely shared as a source of comfort and encouragement.
Bianca Stone
Bianca Stone (born in Burlington, Vermont) is a poet and visual artist whose work moves between lyric and narrative poetry, often infused with surrealist imagery, grief, and the uncanny. She studied poetry at New York University and the University of Montana and has received a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. She is the author of Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2014), which integrates her drawings with her verse, and The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018). She is also the co-translator, with Anne Carson, of the complete works of Euripides' Antigonick and other projects. She is a descendant of the poet Ruth Stone.
Bill Knott
Bill Knott (1940–2014) was born in Carson City, Michigan, and became one of the most original and deliberately eccentric figures in American poetry. He began by publishing pseudonymously as Saint Geraud, falsely announcing his own death in his debut collection The Naomi Poems: Corpse and Beans (1968). Known for his resistance to literary institutions, he self-published much of his later work online at no charge. His compressed, aphoristic poems are marked by dark wit and formal inventiveness. He taught for many years at Emerson College in Boston. Despite his deliberate marginalization from the mainstream literary world, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and is recognized as a major voice in late-twentieth-century American poetry.
Billy Chapata
Billy Chapata is a Zambian-born writer and poet based in the United States whose work addresses love, emotional healing, identity, and self-acceptance in an accessible, direct style widely shared on social media. He is the author of several collections, including Flowers on the Moon (2017), Chameleon Aura (2019), Souls Before Roles (2020), and Healing Starts with Honesty (2022). His books have reached a global readership through platforms including Instagram, where he has built a substantial following. His poetry has been praised for its emotional clarity and capacity to articulate the nuances of intimate relationships and personal growth.
Billy Collins
Billy Collins (born in New York City) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003 and is one of the best-selling and most widely read American poets of his generation. His poems are celebrated for their conversational accessibility, wit, and the way they draw the ordinary into lyric contemplation. He taught at Lehman College of the City University of New York for many years. His major collections include The Apple That Astonished Paris (University of Arkansas Press, 1988), Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001), and Aimless Love (Random House, 2013). He received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in Poetry, the New York State Poet Laureate designation, and the Lavan Younger Poets Award.
Blas Falconer
Blas Falconer (born in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a poet whose work explores family, identity, sexuality, and the landscapes of the American South. He teaches in the MFA program at San Diego State University. His debut collection A Question of Gravity and Light (University of Arizona Press, 2007) received the Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Subsequent collections include The Foundling Wheel (Four Way Books, 2012) and Gilded Auction Block (Four Way Books, 2019). He received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and has served on the advisory board of the Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival.
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (born in Duluth, Minnesota) is an American singer-songwriter who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016, the first musician to be so honored, recognized for creating new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman, he emerged in the early 1960s folk scene with lyrics of extraordinary social, political, and personal depth. Major albums including The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), Blonde on Blonde (1966), and Blood on the Tracks (1975) established his status as a transformative figure in American letters. His published volumes include Tarantula (1971) and The Lyrics: 1961–2012 (Simon and Schuster, 2016).
Bob Hicok
Bob Hicok (born in Grand Ledge, Michigan) is a poet known for his restless, inventive, and often darkly comic engagement with American life, language, and loss. He has worked as an automotive die designer and currently teaches at Virginia Tech. His collections include Animal Soul (Invisible Cities Press, 2001), winner of the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress, This Clumsy Living (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), and Elegy Owed (Copper Canyon, 2013). He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, four Pushcart Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. His poem responding to the Virginia Tech shooting, where he teaches, is widely anthologized.
Brianna Wiest
Brianna Wiest is an American author and poet based in New Jersey whose work focuses on emotional intelligence, personal transformation, and self-awareness. She began publishing essays at Thought Catalog while still in college and has since published widely read books that blend prose, poetry, and philosophy. Her collections and essay volumes include The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage into Self-Mastery (2020), 101 Essays That Will Change the Way You Think (2016), and I Am the Hero of My Own Life. Her work has reached millions of readers globally and has been particularly influential among young adults navigating mental health and personal growth. She studied English at Elizabethtown College.
Bridgett Devoue
Bridgett Devoue is an American poet and author known for her raw, intimate explorations of love, healing, trauma, and female experience. Her debut collection, soft thorns (Andrews McMeel, 2017), quickly found a large following through its unflinching honesty about sexual assault, heartbreak, and personal growth, structured as a journey from pain through healing. A follow-up, Soft Thorns Vol. II (2021), continued this journey with attention to domestic abuse and recovery. Devoue began sharing poetry on Instagram after personal hardships — including a difficult breakup and the onset of chronic pain — building a devoted community drawn to her accessible voice and emotional directness.
Bruce Beasley
Bruce Beasley grew up in Macon, Georgia, and is the author of eight poetry collections including All Soul Parts Returned (BOA Editions, 2017), Theophobia (BOA Editions, 2012), The Corpse Flower: New and Selected Poems (University of Washington Press, 2007), and Lord Brain (University of Georgia Press, 2005). He received a BA from Oberlin College, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD from the University of Virginia. His work weaves together neuroscience, theology, particle physics, and lyric inquiry in meditations on consciousness, faith, and the natural world. The recipient of three Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Artist Trust of Washington, he is a professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
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↑CAConrad
CAConrad (born in South Gainesville, Georgia) is a poet, performer, and activist who has developed a practice of ritual and somatic poetics in which writing emerges from structured, embodied attention to the world. Their collections include (Soma)tic Poetry Exercises & Resulting Poems (Wave Books) and ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books, 2014). They have received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. A longtime activist for queer rights and against the prison-industrial complex, they teach their (Soma)tic methodology at universities and institutions internationally. They edited the anthology The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia.
Camille T Dungy
Camille T. Dungy (born in Denver, Colorado) is a poet, essayist, and editor whose work explores the African American relationship to the natural world, ecological history, and the braided lives of family and community. She is a professor of English at Colorado State University. Her poetry collections include Suck on the Marrow (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) and Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. She edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2009). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Antiquarian Society, and an American Book Award.
Carl Phillips
Carl Phillips (born in Everett, Washington) is one of the most formally accomplished and intellectually rigorous American poets of his generation, known for his intricate syntax and sustained philosophical inquiry into desire, power, and intimacy. He is a professor of English and African American studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His many collections include Cortège (Graywolf, 1995), Rock Harbor (2002), and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Jackson Poetry Prize.
Carol Ann Duffy
Carol Ann Duffy (born in Glasgow, Scotland) served as Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 2009 to 2019, the first woman and first Scot to hold the position. Educated at the University of Liverpool, her poetry is celebrated for its feminist perspectives, dramatic monologue, and engagement with contemporary language and popular culture. Her landmark collection The World's Wife (Picador, 1999) recasts canonical stories from female perspectives. Earlier collections include Standing Female Nude (1985) and Mean Time (1993), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award and the Forward Prize. She is a professor and creative director of the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 2015.
Caroline Bird
Caroline Bird (born in Leeds, England) is one of the most acclaimed British poets and playwrights of her generation, known for her wit, formal range, and psychological intensity. Her collection The Air Year (Carcanet, 2020) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the Costa Poetry Award, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her debut collection, Looking Through Letterboxes (2002), appeared when she was fifteen. Her other collections include Trouble Came to the Turnip (2006) and In These Days of Prohibition (2017). She has been shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and the Folio Prize, and her stage plays have won multiple Off West End Awards. She teaches at the Arvon Foundation.
Carolyn Forché
Carolyn Forché (born in Detroit, Michigan) is a poet and human rights activist whose work has shaped the understanding of poetry as a literature of witness in the face of political violence. She studied at Justin Morrill College at Michigan State University and received her MFA from Bowling Green State University. Her second collection, The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1981), drawing on her time in El Salvador during its civil war, won the Academy of American Poets Lamont Poetry Selection. Her long-awaited fourth collection, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin, 2020), won the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Arts and Sciences. She edited the landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (Norton, 1993). She is a professor at Georgetown University.
Cassandra Whitaker
Cassandra Whitaker (she/they) is a trans writer from rural Virginia whose work explores queer identity, ecology, and the body. Their poems have appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, The Mississippi Review, and Whale Road Review. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, Whitaker has received fellowships from the Maryland Humanities, the Maryland State Arts Council, and the Witter Bynner Foundation for bringing poetry into schools. Their debut full-length collection, Wolf Devouring a Wolf Devouring a Wolf, is forthcoming from Jackleg Press.
Catherine Arra
Catherine Arra is a Hudson Valley poet and former high school English teacher who left the classroom in 2012 to write full-time. She is the author of Writing in the Ether (Dos Madres Press, 2018), (Women in Parentheses) (Kelsay Books, 2019), Her Landscape, Poems Based on the Life of Mileva Marić Einstein (Finishing Line Press, 2020), Deer Love (Dos Madres Press, 2021), and Solitude, Tarot & the Corona Blues (Kelsay Books, 2022), along with three chapbooks. Her debut collection draws on family memory, immigrant heritage, and Sicilian ancestry. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she teaches part-time in New York's Hudson Valley and leads local writing groups.
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) was born in Paris and is among the most influential poets in Western literature. His sole collection of verse, Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), first published in 1857, was prosecuted for obscenity and six poems were suppressed. The collection introduced a new aesthetics of modernity — dwelling on urban alienation, beauty in degradation, and the spiritual tensions of contemporary life. His concept of correspondances, exploring the symbolic relationship between sensory experience and spiritual states, had profound influence on the Symbolist movement and subsequent poets including T.S. Eliot and Rainer Maria Rilke. His prose poems, collected in Le Spleen de Paris (1869), pioneered the modern prose poem.
Charles Bukowski
Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) was born in Andernach, Germany, and raised in Los Angeles, which became the setting for much of his work. A prolific writer of poetry, fiction, and memoir, Bukowski cultivated a deliberately raw, anti-literary style grounded in working-class experience, drinking, gambling, and romantic failure. He worked for years at the Los Angeles post office before publishing his breakthrough novel Post Office (Black Sparrow Press, 1971). His poetry collections include Burning in Water Drowning in Flame (1974) and Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977). He published extensively with Black Sparrow Press and remains one of the most widely read American poets internationally.
Charles Simic
Charles Simic (1938–2023) was born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and emigrated to the United States in 1954. He is recognized as one of the most distinctive voices in American poetry, known for surrealist imagery rooted in the violence of history and the strangeness of ordinary life. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End (Harcourt Brace, 1989). He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2007 to 2008. His many collections include Hotel Insomnia (1992) and The Voice at 3:00 A.M. (2003). He was a professor of American literature and creative writing at the University of New Hampshire for several decades and received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Charles Wright
Charles Wright (born in Pickwick Dam, Tennessee) is a poet whose work engages landscape — particularly the Southern Appalachian mountains and Laguna Beach, California — with meditative attention to mortality, memory, and spiritual longing. He studied at Davidson College and served in the U.S. Army before earning an MFA from the University of Iowa. He taught for many years at the University of Virginia. His trilogy Country Music, The World of the Ten Thousand Things, and Negative Blue earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Black Zodiac (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997) and the National Book Award for Country Music: Selected Early Poems (1982). He received the Bollingen Prize and served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2014 to 2015.
Chen Chen
Chen Chen (born in Shijiazhuang, China) is a Chinese American poet who immigrated to the United States with his family and grew up in Massachusetts. His debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017) won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, among other honors, and was longlisted for the National Book Award. His work explores queer identity, immigration, family, and the possibilities and limits of belonging with tenderness and wit. He received his MFA from Syracuse University and a PhD from Texas Tech University. He has been a Kundiman Fellow and received a Pushcart Prize.
Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
Cheryl Allison Boyce-Taylor (born 1950, Arima, Trinidad and Tobago) is a Trinidadian-American poet and teaching artist based in Brooklyn. She holds an MFA from Stonecoast at the University of Southern Maine. Her collections include Arrival (TriQuarterly Books, 2017), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize; Mama Phife Represents (Haymarket Books, 2021), a verse memoir honoring her son Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest, which won the 2022 Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry; and The Limitless Heart: New and Selected Poems 1997–2022 (2023). The founder of the Calypso Muse Reading Series, she is the first Caribbean woman to have presented her work in Trinidadian dialect at the National Poetry Slam and a recipient of the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.
Christian Wiman
Christian Wiman (born in Abilene, Texas) is a poet and essayist who served as editor of Poetry magazine from 2003 to 2013. His poetry and prose have engaged Christianity, illness, mortality, and the crisis of faith with lyric rigor and theological depth. His collection Every Riven Thing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and the essay collection My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013) established him as one of the most serious voices writing at the intersection of poetry and spirituality. A graduate of Washington and Lee University, he is the Russ Family Professor of the Practice of Religion and Literature at Yale Divinity School. He has received Guggenheim and NEA fellowships.
Christopher Citro
Christopher Citro is an American poet known for surreal, humane, and often comic work drawing on the absurdist tradition. He holds an MFA from Indiana University. His collections include The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015) and If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award. His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize. His poems appear in American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, and The New Yorker. He hosted The Poets Weave on NPR affiliate WFIU and teaches creative writing at SUNY Oswego in Syracuse, New York.
Claudia Rankine
Claudia Rankine (born in Kingston, Jamaica) is one of the most critically acclaimed American poets of her generation, whose formally hybrid work examines race, embodiment, citizenship, and the daily texture of anti-Black violence in the United States. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is a professor at New York University. Her collection Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014), which combines poetry, essay, and visual art to examine racial microaggressions and systemic racism, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in both Poetry and Criticism categories. She has received fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She founded the Racial Imaginary Institute.
Cleo Wade
Cleo Wade (born 1989, New Orleans, Louisiana) is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, poet, and visual artist whose work centers on hope, love, and social justice. Her collection Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life (Simon & Schuster, 2018) became an international bestseller translated into more than 15 languages. Subsequent books include Where to Begin (2019), Remember Love (2023), and May You Love and Be Loved (2024). She has created large-scale public art installations in New Orleans, New York, Los Angeles, and Toronto, and has spoken at the White House and the United Nations. Fast Company named her one of the 100 most creative people in business.
Clint Smith
Clint Smith (born in New Orleans, Louisiana) is a poet, writer, and staff writer at The Atlantic whose work addresses race, justice, incarceration, and American history. He received a BA from Davidson College and a PhD in education from Harvard University. His debut poetry collection, Counting Descent (Write Bloody Publishing, 2016), won the Literary Award for Best Poetry Book from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. His nonfiction book How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown, 2021) was a number one New York Times bestseller. He has received a National Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the Art for Justice Fund and the Emerson Collective.
CM Burroughs
CM Burroughs (born in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American poet and associate professor of poetry at Columbia College Chicago. She earned degrees from Sweet Briar College and the University of Pittsburgh. Her debut collection, The Vital System (Tupelo Press, 2012), centers on her survival as a premature infant and explores race, gender, and violence through compressed, cinematically charged language. Her second collection, Master Suffering (Tupelo Press, 2021), was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and was a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award. She has received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Djerassi Foundation, Cave Canem, and commissions from the Studio Museum of Harlem and the Andy Warhol Museum.
Coleman Barks
Coleman Barks (born in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is a poet and translator best known for his widely popular English versions of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet Rumi. After earning a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, he taught English at the University of Georgia for many years. His Rumi translations, collected in volumes including The Essential Rumi (HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), have sold millions of copies and introduced Rumi to a vast English-speaking audience. While not Farsi-speaking translations in the scholarly sense, his interpretive versions are celebrated for their lyric accessibility. His own original poetry collections include The Juice (1972) and Gourd Seed (1993).
Cornelius Eady
Cornelius Eady (born in Rochester, New York) is a poet, playwright, and educator whose work draws on jazz, the blues, and African American vernacular tradition to address race, violence, and the interior life. He received his education at Empire State College. His collections include Kartunes (1980), Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), winner of the Lamont Poetry Selection, and Brutal Imagination (Putnam, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Award. With Toi Derricotte, he co-founded Cave Canem, the landmark poetry retreat and workshop for African American poets, in 1996. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Foundation residency.
Courtney Peppernell
Courtney Peppernell is an internationally bestselling Australian poet and novelist from Sydney, New South Wales. Her debut poetry collection, Pillow Thoughts (Andrews McMeel, 2017), became a global phenomenon and has sold over two million copies worldwide. The book — poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and emotional healing — launched a beloved series including volumes II through IV. Subsequent standalone collections include I Hope You Stay (2020) and Watering the Soul. A 2022 poetry ambassador for Red Room Poetry in Australia, Peppernell has built an especially devoted readership among young adults and the LGBTQ+ community.
Cyrus Parker
Cyrus Parker (now known as Parker Lee) is a trans woman poet and storyteller from New Jersey, formerly a professional wrestler on the Michigan independent circuit. Her debut collection, DROPKICKromance (Andrews McMeel, 2017), chronicles two romantic relationships through spare, emotionally direct verse. Subsequent collections include masquerade (2019), exploring gender identity and the search for self-acceptance, and coffee days whiskey nights. Parker is married to fellow poet amanda lovelace. Her work consistently addresses queer identity, mental health, and emotional recovery.
D
↑Dan Poppick
Daniel Poppick is an American poet who received his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and his BA from Kenyon College. He has received fellowships from Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. His debut collection The Police (Omnidawn, 2017) received praise for its electrical syntax and formally inventive navigation of contemporary life, language, and intimacy. His second collection Fear of Description (Penguin Books, 2019) was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2018 National Poetry Series. His work appears in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New Republic, BOMB, and Poetry. He lives in Brooklyn and works as a copywriter. His debut novel The Copywriter (Scribner, 2026) was named among LitHub's most anticipated books.
Dana Gioia
Dana Gioia (born in Los Angeles, California) is a poet, critic, and arts administrator who served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009. A leading figure in the New Formalism movement, he is widely known for his essay Can Poetry Matter? (1991), which sparked national debate about poetry's cultural role. His poetry collections include Daily Horoscope (Graywolf, 1986), The Gods of Winter (1991), and Interrogations at Noon (Graywolf, 2001), which won the American Book Award. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and an MA in comparative literature from Harvard. He served as California Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2018.
Danez Smith
Danez Smith (born in St. Paul, Minnesota) is a Black, queer, poz poet whose work addresses race, illness, grief, and survival with electric formal energy and emotional force. They received their MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and have received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. Their debut [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014) was followed by Don't Call Us Dead (Graywolf, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Award, and Homie (Graywolf, 2020). They are a founding member of the Dark Noise Collective, a group of queer and trans poets of color, and have received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a fellowship from the Whiting Foundation.
Daniel Borzutzky
Daniel Borzutzky (born 1974, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) is a Chicago-based poet and translator of Chilean descent. His collection The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) won the National Book Award for Poetry, drawing connections between Chicago's South Side and the political violence of Pinochet-era Chile. Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) was a Griffin International Poetry Prize finalist, and Written After a Massacre in the Year 2018 (Coffee House Press, 2021) drew wide critical attention. His most recent collection is The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press, 2024). He received the 2017 ALTA National Translation Award for his translation work and is a professor at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Dante Alighieri
Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was born in Florence and is considered the father of the Italian language and one of the greatest poets in world literature. His monumental work The Divine Comedy, composed between approximately 1308 and 1320, comprises three canticles — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — narrating an allegorical journey through the afterlife. Written in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, the Comedy shaped the Italian language and set the standard for literary vernacular across Europe. His earlier works include La Vita Nuova, a sequence of verse and prose devoted to his idealized love, Beatrice. He died in Ravenna following his exile from Florence in 1302.
Darby Hudson
Darby Hudson is an Australian poet and artist from Melbourne whose work blends tragicomic aphorism, surrealist observation, and existential wit. Previously included in Best Australian Poems (2012 and 2013) and shortlisted for the Newcastle Poetry Prize, he published his debut collection, Falling Upwards, through Five Island Press (University of Melbourne, 2019). Hudson built a large following on Instagram and TikTok through typewriter poetry combining dark humor with everyday observation. His self-published books — including You're Going to Be Okay (Because You're Fucked No Matter What) and Darby, Love — have sold widely. He served as poet-in-residence on the set of Adam Elliot's animated film Memoir of a Snail.
Darrel Alejandro Holnes
Darrel Alejandro Holnes (born in Panama City, Panama) is a poet, playwright, and professor whose bilingual work draws on Afro-Panamanian heritage, performance, and religious tradition to explore displacement, desire, and identity. He studied at the University of Houston and holds degrees from Fordham and the University of Michigan. His debut collection Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press, 2022) won the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. He is an assistant professor at the City University of New York. He has been a fellow of CantoMundo and received grants from the Bronx Council on the Arts.
David Baker Poetry
David Baker (born in Bangor, Maine) is a poet and critic whose work is deeply engaged with the American Midwest, ecological thought, and the formal traditions of lyric poetry. He has taught at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, for many years and serves as poetry editor of The Kenyon Review. His collections include Midwest Eclogue (Norton, 2005), Never-Ending Birds (Norton, 2009), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, and Whale Fall (Norton, 2022). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has edited several anthologies and written the critical study Heresy and the Ideal: On Contemporary Poetry.
David Berman
David Berman (1967–2019) was born in Williamsburg, Virginia, and became known both as the frontman of the influential indie rock band Silver Jews and as a poet of considerable achievement. He attended the University of Virginia, where he met Will Oldham and Mike Meuser. His debut poetry collection, Actual Air (Open City, 1999), was praised by critics and poets alike for its deadpan wit, surreal imagery, and melancholic intelligence. Silver Jews released six studio albums between 1994 and 2008, with Berman's lyrics widely recognized as the work of a major poet. He died by suicide in August 2019, shortly after the release of music under his new band name Purple Mountains.
David Romero
David A. Romero (born 1984, Fontana, California) is a Mexican-American spoken word poet, activist, and publisher from Diamond Bar, California. A USC graduate in Cinema-Television and Philosophy, he is the author of My Name Is Romero (FlowerSong Press, 2020), exploring Chicano identity and the politics of naming, and Diamond Bars 2 (Moon Tide Press, 2024). He co-founded El Martillo Press, an independent publisher for working-class and Latinx voices. Romero has performed at nearly a hundred colleges and universities across 34 states and internationally. His poem You Were Born a Tree was sent to the Moon by NASA in 2025 as part of the Lunar Codex.
David Whyte
David Whyte (born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England) is a poet and philosopher who has become widely known for his integration of poetry into organizational and leadership development. Educated in marine zoology at the University of Wales, Bangor, he is the author of several collections including Songs for Coming Home (1984), Where Many Rivers Meet (1990), The House of Belonging (1997), and River Flow: New and Selected Poems (Many Rivers Press, 2012). He has been an associate fellow at Templeton College at Oxford University and has given acclaimed talks for organizations worldwide. His prose works include Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity (2001).
David Wojahn
David Wojahn (born 1953, Saint Paul, Minnesota) is an American poet widely regarded as one of the leading narrative and elegiac voices in contemporary American poetry. His debut collection, Icehouse Lights (1982), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. Among his many collections are Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982–2004 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), World Tree (Pittsburgh, 2011), and For the Scribe (Pittsburgh, 2017). His Mystery Train sequence — a crown of sonnets about rock and roll history — is considered a landmark achievement in formal verse. He teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA program.
Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel (born in Woonsocket, Rhode Island) is an American poet known for wit, feminist consciousness, and formally inventive engagement with popular culture and contemporary life. She is the author of more than fifteen collections, including Scald (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017), Blowout (Pittsburgh, 2013), Ka-Ching! (Pittsburgh, 2009), and Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (Pittsburgh, 2001). Her work draws on Barbie dolls, consumer culture, and female experience, blending sharp humor with genuine emotional depth. A Guggenheim Fellow and multiple NEA fellowship recipient, she is a professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.
Derek Walcott
Derek Walcott (1930–2017) was born in Castries, Saint Lucia, and is regarded as the preeminent poet of the Caribbean literary tradition. His poetry engages the complex legacies of colonialism, creole culture, and the fractured history of the African diaspora. His epic poem Omeros (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990) reimagines Homer's Iliad in a Caribbean setting and is his most celebrated achievement. He was also a major playwright and cofounder of the Trinidad Theatre Workshop. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, with the Swedish Academy citing his dedication to his multicultural inheritance. His collections include Another Life (1973) and The Arkansas Testament (1987).
Diane Seuss
Diane Seuss (born in Edwardsburg, Michigan) is a poet whose work confronts poverty, addiction, grief, survival, and desire with unflinching lyric honesty. She is a professor emerita at Kalamazoo College. Her collection frank: sonnets (Graywolf, 2022) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry Collection in a single year. Her earlier collections include Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl (Graywolf, 2018) and Four-Legged Girl (Graywolf, 2015), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and an NEA Fellowship.
Donald Hall
Donald Hall (1928–2018) was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and became one of the most celebrated American poets of his generation. He edited the influential anthology New Poets of England and America (1957) and published extensively across six decades. He and his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, settled on Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, which became the landscape of much of his late work. After Kenyon's death from leukemia in 1995, he wrote Without (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), a collection of elegy. He served as United States Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2007. Among his other major collections are The One Day (1988), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and White Apples and the Taste of Stone (2006).
Donna Ashworth
Donna Ashworth is a Scottish poet and bestselling author known for accessible, uplifting verse about love, loss, resilience, and everyday life. Based in Scotland, she built a large following on social media before publishing her first collection, I Have a Feeling We've Met Before (2021), which became a bestseller in the UK and internationally. Subsequent collections include Wild Hope (2022), Life (2023), and Loss (2023), which draws on her personal experience of grief. Her poetry is widely shared across social media platforms, and she has become one of the most widely read contemporary poets in the United Kingdom.
Donovan McAbee
Donovan McAbee is a poet, essayist, and scholar who grew up in the foothills of South Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains. He holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a PhD in Contemporary Poetry from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and is Professor of Religion and the Arts at Belmont University in Nashville. His debut poetry collection, Holy the Body (Texas Review Press, 2026), explores faith, grief, and the sacred through dark humor and lyrical precision. His earlier chapbook, Sightings, appeared in the Floodgate Poetry Series. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Hudson Review, The Sun, and The Christian Century, and he received a Tennessee Williams Scholarship at the Sewanee Writers' Conference.
Dorianne Laux
Dorianne Laux (born in Augusta, Maine) is a poet known for her frank, emotionally powerful poems about working-class life, sexuality, violence, and survival. She worked as a sanatorium cook, maid, and gas station attendant before pursuing poetry. She received her MFA from the University of Oregon and teaches in the MFA program at North Carolina State University. Her collections include Awake (BOA Editions, 1990), What We Carry (BOA, 1994), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Book of Men (Norton, 2011), which won the Paterson Poetry Prize. She has received an NEA Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement.
Dorothea Lasky
Dorothea Lasky (born 1978, St. Louis, Missouri) is an American poet, essayist, and educator known for her intensely expressive, confessional, and spiritually charged writing. She is the author of six full-length collections: AWE (Wave Books, 2007), Black Life (Wave Books, 2010), Thunderbird (Wave Books, 2012), ROME (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2014), Milk (Wave Books, 2018), and The Shining (Wave Books, 2023). Her work, which has influenced a generation of younger writers, appears in The New Yorker, Paris Review, and American Poetry Review. She earned a BA from Washington University, an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. A 2013 Bagley Wright Fellow, she is an associate professor of poetry at Columbia University's School of the Arts.
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, and became one of the sharpest wits in twentieth-century American letters. A founding member of the Algonquin Round Table, she wrote poetry, short fiction, drama criticism, and screenplays. Her poetry collections Enough Rope (Boni and Liveright, 1926) and Sunset Gun (1928) were bestsellers notable for their epigrammatic irony and dark humor on love, death, and disappointment. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay twice, for A Star Is Born (1937) and Smash-Up (1947). Her work appeared regularly in The New Yorker, and she remained a prominent figure in American cultural life through the mid-twentieth century.
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss (1904–1991), born Theodor Seuss Geisel in Springfield, Massachusetts, was an American children's author, illustrator, and poet who transformed children's literature. After studying at Dartmouth College and Lincoln College, Oxford, he began his career as a cartoonist and advertising illustrator before publishing his first children's book, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, in 1937. His inventive rhyme, invented creatures, and subversive humor are defining features of books including The Cat in the Hat (1957), How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1957), and Green Eggs and Ham (1960). He received two Academy Awards, a Peabody Award, and a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 1984.
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas (1914–1953) was born in Swansea, Wales, and is regarded as one of the most important Welsh poets writing in English. His early collection 18 Poems (1934), published when he was twenty, announced a major new voice — dense, incantatory, and rooted in the body and the natural world. His later collections include Deaths and Entrances (1946), containing Fern Hill and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London. His verse drama for radio, Under Milk Wood, was broadcast posthumously in 1954. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, a villanelle addressed to his dying father, is among the most celebrated poems in the English language. He died in New York at thirty-nine.
E
↑e.e. cummings
E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and became one of the most innovative American poets of the twentieth century. His work is characterized by typographical experimentation — unusual punctuation, unconventional capitalization, and disrupted syntax — alongside a commitment to lyric tenderness and erotic directness. His debut collection, Tulips and Chimneys (1923), established his distinctive style. He published more than sixty books of poetry over his career, including Complete Poems: 1904–1962 (Liveright). He also worked as a painter and essayist. Educated at Harvard University, he was awarded the Bollingen Prize in 1958 and the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1950.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and is among the most celebrated writers in American literary history. Orphaned young and raised by the Allan family in Virginia, he studied briefly at the University of Virginia and West Point before pursuing a literary career. His poetry, known for its musicality and melancholic grandeur, includes The Raven (1845), Annabel Lee (1849), and The Bells. His collection The Raven and Other Poems (1845) remains widely read. Poe is also considered a foundational figure in the development of the short story, gothic fiction, and detective fiction. He died in Baltimore under mysterious circumstances at age forty.
Edgar Kunz
Edgar Kunz (born 1988, Framingham, Massachusetts) is an American poet who reckons honestly with working-class life, blue-collar masculinity, and class mobility. His debut collection, Tap Out (Ecco/Mariner, 2019), was a New York Times New & Noteworthy pick and received the 2019 Julia Ward Howe Award. His second collection, Fixer (Ecco, 2023), was a New York Times Editors' Choice Book. He holds an MFA from Vanderbilt University and has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Poetry. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) was born in Rockland, Maine, and became one of the most celebrated poets of the early twentieth century. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, awarded in 1923 for The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver. A central figure in Greenwich Village bohemian culture, her sonnets and lyrics combined technical mastery with themes of female independence, love, and mortality. Her collections include A Few Figs from Thistles (1920) and Fatal Interview (1931). She graduated from Vassar College in 1917. Her poem Renascence, written when she was nineteen, brought her early national recognition after appearing in an anthology in 1912.
Elena Brower
Elena Brower is an American yoga teacher, author, and poet based in New York. She has taught yoga and meditation internationally for more than twenty years and studied with senior teachers in both Iyengar and Anusara traditions. As a writer, she is the author of the bestselling yoga and journaling books Practice You: A Journal (Sounds True, 2017) and Being of Grace (2018). Her poetry and prose engage themes of mindfulness, grief, spiritual transformation, and self-compassion. She has collaborated with other artists and teachers and has spoken at conferences and events worldwide. She holds degrees from Cornell University.
Elisa Gabbert
Elisa Gabbert (born 1979, El Paso, Texas) is an American poet, essayist, and critic whose aphoristic, philosophically curious work blurs the boundaries between lyric poetry, personal essay, and criticism. She is the author of seven books, including Any Person Is the Only Self (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), Normal Distance (Soft Skull, 2022), The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays (FSG, 2020), and The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013). The Self Unstable was named one of The New Yorker's best books of 2013. She writes the On Poetry column for The New York Times. Gabbert earned a BA in linguistics from Rice University and an MFA from Emerson College.
Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander (born in New York City) is a poet, educator, and cultural leader who delivered the inaugural poem Praise Song for the Day at President Obama's inauguration in 2009. She received her BA from Yale, her MA from Boston University, and her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. Her collections include The Venus Hottentot (1990), Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Graywolf, 2010), and American Sublime (Graywolf, 2005), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She taught for many years at Yale University and was chair of the African American Studies department.
Elizabeth Bishop
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and raised primarily in Nova Scotia following her father's death and her mother's institutionalization. Her poetry is recognized for its precise observation, restrained emotional register, and geographical range. She is the author of four poetry collections, including North & South (Houghton Mifflin, 1946), which won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award, and Questions of Travel (1965). She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956 for Poems: North & South — A Cold Spring. She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950 and received both a National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Ellen Bass
Ellen Bass (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a poet whose work bears witness to trauma, the body, mortality, and the irreducible resilience of ordinary life. She received an MA in creative writing from Boston University, where she studied with Anne Sexton. Her collections include Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002), winner of the Lambda Literary Award, The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007), and Indigo (Copper Canyon, 2020), a finalist for the National Book Award. She co-authored the widely read self-help book The Courage to Heal (1988). She teaches in the Pacific University MFA program and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the NEA.
Elyse Myers
Elyse Myers is an American content creator and author who became widely known for viral storytelling videos on TikTok before publishing her debut book, I Don't Think God Hates You (HarperOne, 2023), a memoir and essay collection on faith, anxiety, mental health, and belonging. Known for her humor and transparency about living with anxiety and ADHD, she built a following in the tens of millions before translating that connection into a bestselling book. Her writing speaks directly to younger readers seeking accessible, emotionally honest prose about navigating a complicated world.
Emily Dickinson
Emily Dickinson (1830–1886) was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, and spent almost her entire life in that town, much of it in deliberate seclusion. Despite publishing only a handful of poems during her lifetime, she left behind nearly 1,800 poems discovered after her death, making her one of the most significant American poets. Her work is characterized by slant rhyme, unconventional dashes, compressed syntax, and a preoccupation with death, immortality, and the inner life. Her poems appeared in a heavily edited form beginning in 1890, but were not published in their intended form until Thomas H. Johnson's landmark edition of 1955. She attended Amherst Academy and briefly studied at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary.
Enzo Silon Surin
Enzo Silon Surin is a Haitian-born poet, educator, and social advocate who grew up in Queens, New York. His poetry explores race, immigration, identity, and social justice, drawing on his Caribbean roots and urban American experience. He holds an MFA from Lesley University and teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. The founder of Central Square Press, he is the author of American Scapegoat and When My Body Was a Clinched Fist (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, as well as the chapbooks Higher Ground (Finishing Line Press) and A Letter of Resignation. He is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry and a recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation.
Erin Murphy
Erin Murphy is an American poet and educator credited with inventing the demi-sonnet, a seven-line poetic form. She is the author of more than a dozen books, including Human Resources (Salmon Poetry, 2025), Fluent in Blue (Grayson Books, 2024), winner of the 2025 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Poetry, Taxonomies: Demi-Sonnets (2022), and Assisted Living: Demi-Sonnets (Brick Road Poetry Press, 2018), winner of the Brick Road Poetry Press Prize. Her awards include the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Paterson Prize for Literary Excellence, and the Rattle Poetry Prize Readers' Choice Award. She holds an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a professor at Penn State Altoona, serving since 2022 as Poet Laureate of Blair County, Pennsylvania.
Evie Shockley
Evie Shockley (born in Nashville, Tennessee) is an American poet and scholar who earned a BA from Northwestern University, a JD from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in English from Duke University. Her collections include suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), a National Book Award finalist and NAACP Image Award winner; semiautomatic (Wesleyan, 2017), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Hurston/Wright Legacy Award winner; and the new black (Wesleyan, 2011), also a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award winner. A Cave Canem Fellow, she has received the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, and the Holmes National Poetry Prize. She is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
F
↑Faith Shearin
Faith Shearin is an American poet who grew up in Kitty Hawk, on North Carolina's Outer Banks. She is the author of seven full-length poetry collections: The Owl Question (2004, winner of the May Swenson Award), The Empty House (Word Press, 2008), Moving the Piano (SFA University Press, 2011), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press, 2015), Orpheus Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin's Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud by Garrison Keillor on The Writer's Almanac and featured in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Yaddo, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. She lives in West Virginia.
Frank Chipasula
Frank Chipasula (born 1949, Malawi) is one of Africa's most distinguished poets and a foundational voice in postcolonial African literature. Exiled from Malawi during the authoritarian regime of Hastings Banda, he studied at the University of Zambia and later at Yale and Brown Universities. His collections include O Earth, Wait for Me (Ravan Press, 1984) and Whispers in the Wings (Heinemann, 1991), poetry that mourns political oppression while celebrating African life and landscape. He is the editor of the landmark anthology When My Brothers Come Home: Poems from Central and Southern Africa (1985). His work is widely taught in postcolonial literature courses. He taught African literature at the University of Nebraska at Omaha.
Frank O'Hara
Frank O'Hara (1926–1966) was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and became a central figure in the New York School of poetry. Educated at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, he worked as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York while producing a body of poetry that engaged deeply with the city, with Abstract Expressionist painting, and with everyday life. His casual, conversational poems — attentive to the immediate moment — redefined lyric possibility. His collections include Lunch Poems (City Lights, 1964) and Meditations in an Emergency (Grove Press, 1957). He died at age forty following an accident on Fire Island. His Collected Poems won the National Book Award in 1972.
G
↑Gabbie Hanna
Gabbie Hanna is an American content creator, singer, and author who published two bestselling poetry collections. Adultolescence (Simon & Schuster, 2017) became a #1 New York Times bestseller, drawing on themes of young adulthood, anxiety, and identity in accessible, free-verse form. Its follow-up, Dandelion (Gallery Books, 2019), continued this exploration. Hanna's poetry resonates with a generation of young readers drawn to her digital authenticity, blending humor with raw emotional exposure. Her work sits within the broader wave of instapoetry, prioritizing directness and emotional accessibility over formal complexity.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Gabrielle Calvocoressi (born in New Haven, Connecticut) is a poet who writes expansive, formally inventive verse at the intersection of American music, landscape, race, and gender identity. They received their MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and have taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Their collections include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart (Persea Books, 2005), Apocalyptic Swing (Persea, 2009), and Rocket Fantastic (Persea, 2017), which won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They have received a Stegner Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, and an NEA Fellowship.
Gail Mazur
Gail Mazur (born 1937, Massachusetts) is an American poet known for warmly meditative, elegiac, and formally assured work. A graduate of Smith College who studied with Robert Lowell, she is the author of eight collections including Land's End: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2020), Forbidden City (2016), and They Can't Take That Away from Me (2001), a National Book Award finalist. Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press, 2005) won the Massachusetts Book Award. In 1973 she co-founded the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Harvard Square, directing it for 29 years. A longtime faculty member at Emerson College and Boston University, she has twice been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute.
Gareth Hinds
Gareth Hinds is an American comic artist and author best known for his critically acclaimed graphic novel adaptations of literary classics. His works include The Odyssey (Candlewick Press, 2010), Romeo and Juliet (2013), King Lear (2009), Beowulf (2007), The Iliad (2019), and Poe: Stories and Poems (2017). While not a poet by vocation, his work translates classic poetry and dramatic verse into visual narrative for new generations of readers. His adaptations are widely used in schools and have earned praise from educators and critics for their imaginative fidelity to source texts.
Gary D. Grossman
Gary D. Grossman is a poet, scientist, and naturalist who spent his career as Professor of Animal Ecology at the University of Georgia, where he is now Professor Emeritus. His poetry draws on a lifetime of engagement with the natural world—particularly rivers, fish, and the Southern landscape—alongside reflections on aging, memory, Judaism, and family. He is the author of two collections, Lyrical Years (Kelsay Books) and What I Meant to Say Was... (Impspired Press), and his work has appeared in more than forty literary journals, including Verse-Virtual, Salvation South, Sheila-Na-Gig, and Delta Poetry Review. He has received Pushcart Prize and Best Small Fictions nominations, and for ten years wrote the popular Ask Dr. Trout column for American Angler Magazine.
Gary Soto
Gary Soto (born in Fresno, California) is a poet and author who has written extensively about the lives of Mexican Americans in California's Central Valley, drawing on his working-class upbringing among farmworkers and laborers. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine, and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. His first collection, The Elements of San Joaquin (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), won the United States Award of the International Poetry Forum. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times. He is also a prolific author of fiction and memoir for young readers.
Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343–1400) was born in London and is regarded as the father of English literature. As a diplomat, civil servant, and courtier under three monarchs, he occupied an unusual position as a poet of the late medieval court who wrote in the vernacular English rather than Latin or French. His Canterbury Tales, composed in the final decade of his life, is a collection of stories told by pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas Becket, encompassing comedy, romance, satire, and moral allegory. His other major works include Troilus and Criseyde and The Parliament of Fowls. His flexible use of iambic pentameter influenced the development of English prosody for centuries.
George Monteiro
George Monteiro (born in New Bedford, Massachusetts) is a poet, scholar, and professor emeritus of English and Portuguese and Brazilian studies at Brown University, where he taught for many years. His scholarly work has focused on Stephen Crane, Henry James, and the literary culture of New England and Portugal. He is also a poet whose verse engages the Portuguese Atlantic world and New England landscapes. His poetry collections include The Coffee Exchange and Double Weaver's Knot (2002). He has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and has served as a scholar at the Camões Institute in Lisbon.
Gertrude Stein
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and became one of the most influential modernist writers and arts patrons of the twentieth century. After studying psychology under William James at Radcliffe College and medicine at Johns Hopkins, she settled in Paris in 1903, where she and her partner Alice B. Toklas hosted a famous salon frequented by Picasso, Matisse, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Her highly experimental prose-poetry, characterized by repetition, circularity, and disrupted syntax, is collected in works including Tender Buttons (1914). Her The Making of Americans and Three Lives were foundational texts of American modernism. She coined the phrase the Lost Generation.
Gregory Pardlo
Gregory Pardlo (born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a poet and essayist whose work explores Black masculinity, class, jazz, family history, and American identity with formal elegance and wit. He received his MFA from New York University. His collection Digest (Four Way Books, 2014) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His debut collection Totem (American Poetry Review, 2007) won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. He is a professor of English and director of the MFA in writing program at Rutgers University-Camden. His memoir Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (Knopf, 2018) recounts his father's experience as an air traffic controller during the 1981 PATCO strike.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) was born in Topeka, Kansas, and raised in Chicago, which remained the landscape of her life and poetry. In 1950 she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, awarded for Annie Allen (Harper, 1949). Her debut collection, A Street in Bronzeville (Harper, 1945), brought immediate recognition for its precise, empathetic portraits of Black urban life. Her poem We Real Cool is among the most widely anthologized in American literature. From 1968, she became an influential mentor to younger Black poets associated with the Black Arts Movement. She served as Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death and as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.
H
↑Hafez
Hafez (c. 1315–1390), born Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī in Shiraz, Persia, is the most beloved lyric poet in the Persian literary tradition. His Divan, a collection of hundreds of ghazals, is found in nearly every Persian-speaking household and is consulted for divination. His poetry dwells on wine, love, the beauty of the beloved, and spiritual longing, often interpreted simultaneously on sensory and mystical planes. Deeply versed in Islamic theology, he memorized the Quran — the name Hafez denotes one who has done so. His influence on Goethe, whose West-Eastern Divan was written in response to Hafez, marks one of the most celebrated encounters between Eastern and Western literary traditions.
Hafiz
Hafez (c. 1315–1390), born Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī in Shiraz, Persia, is the most beloved lyric poet in the Persian literary tradition. His Divan, a collection of hundreds of ghazals, is found in nearly every Persian-speaking household and is consulted for divination. His poetry dwells on wine, love, the beauty of the beloved, and spiritual longing, often interpreted simultaneously on sensory and mystical planes. Deeply versed in Islamic theology, he memorized the Quran — the name Hafez denotes one who has done so. His influence on Goethe, whose West-Eastern Divan was written in response to Hafez, marks one of the most celebrated encounters between Eastern and Western literary traditions.
Hala Alyan
Hala Alyan (born in Carbondale, Illinois) is a Palestinian-American poet and novelist whose work explores diaspora, displacement, memory, and the experience of living between cultures and languages. She is a clinical psychologist practicing in New York. Her poetry collections include Four Cities (2015), Atrium (2016), winner of the Arab American Book Award, and The Twenty-Ninth Year (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Her novel Salt Houses (2017) was a national bestseller. She has received a Pushcart Prize and a fellowship from the Brooklyn Poets Foundation. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Ploughshares, and Poetry.
Halina Birenbaum
Halina Birenbaum (born 1929, Warsaw, Poland) is a Polish-Israeli poet and Holocaust survivor whose testimony and verse have borne witness to the destruction of Polish Jewry for over seven decades. Deported as a child to the Warsaw Ghetto, she survived Majdanek, Auschwitz-Birkenau, Ravensbrück, and Neustadt-Glewe before immigrating to Israel in 1947. Her memoir Hope Is the Last to Die (1967) became a foundational Holocaust document. Her poetry distills grief, memory, and miraculous survival through spare, powerful verse, and her collections include I'm Still Alive (1992) and This Burning Land (1998). She has received honorary doctorates from Polish universities and has dedicated her life to bearing witness in schools and institutions worldwide.
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib (born in Columbus, Ohio) is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic whose work engages Black music, American culture, grief, and joy with extraordinary intimacy and intelligence. His debut collection The Crown Ain't Worth Much (Button Poetry, 2016) was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. His essay collection They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017) was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. His second poetry collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster (Tin House, 2019), won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021 and teaches at Yale University.
Harry Baker
Harry Baker (born 1993, England) is a British poet, mathematician, and TEDx speaker who became the World Poetry Slam champion in 2012. He is the author of The Sunshine Kid (2013) and Paper People (2014), both published in the UK. His TED Talk A Love Poem for Lonely Prime Numbers, which weaves mathematical wordplay into a heartfelt meditation on belonging, has been viewed tens of millions of times and remains one of the most widely seen poetry performances in online history. Baker's spoken word performances combine intricate formal structures with genuine emotional warmth, making his work accessible to unusually broad audiences.
Hayley Grace
Hayley Grace is a poet and spoken word artist who built a devoted following through TikTok, where her account @hayleygracepoetry has accumulated over 1.3 million followers and tens of millions of likes. Her work draws on deeply personal experiences of struggle, survival, love, and self-acceptance, written in an intimate, accessible voice that resonates widely with readers navigating mental health and healing. Her debut collection, save me an orange (2024), traces the roots of her youth hardships and her journey toward choosing to live. Her second collection, life after you (2024), explores the emotional arc of love, loss, and reclamation. Both books became bestsellers in their Amazon categories. Her poetry is defined by emotional honesty and a belief in the transformative power of putting difficult feelings into words.
Hedy Habra
Hedy Habra is a Lebanese poet and critic who writes in English, Spanish, and Arabic. She studied at the University of Michigan and Western Michigan University, where she received her MA and PhD in Spanish literature. Her poetry collections include Under Brushstrokes (Press 53, 2013), a finalist for the Best Book Award of the International Book Awards, Tea in Heliopolis (Press 53, 2013), winner of the Best Book Award, and The Taste of the Earth (Press 53, 2019), winner of the Silver Medal for Poetry from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her work draws on art history, the landscapes of Lebanon and Egypt, and the experience of cultural displacement. She is professor emerita of Spanish and French at Kalamazoo College.
Heid E. Erdrich
Heid E. Erdrich (born in Breckenridge, Minnesota) is an Ojibwe poet, editor, and visual artist of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. She received her BA from Dartmouth College and her MFA from Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry collections include Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (Michigan State University Press, 2017), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry. Earlier collections include National Monuments (2008) and Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems (2012). She has received a Loft-McKnight Award, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and the First Nations Communities Read Recognition. She teaches at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota and is the sister of novelist Louise Erdrich.
Heidi Seaborn
Heidi Seaborn is an American poet who spent nearly four decades as a communications executive, including as Chief Communications Officer of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, before returning to poetry in 2016. She earned an MFA from New York University and quickly established herself with nominations and wins across more than two dozen competitions. She is the author of three full-length collections: Give a Girl Chaos (C&R Press, 2019), An Insomniac's Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe (PANK Books, 2021; 2020 PANK Poetry Prize winner), and tic tic tic (Cornerstone Press, 2025). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Beloit Poetry Journal, and American Poetry Journal. She serves as Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal.
Hoa Nguyen
Hoa Nguyen (born 1967, Vĩnh Long, Mekong Delta, Vietnam) is a Vietnamese-American poet and educator who grew up in Washington, D.C. and studied poetics at New College of California. A dual U.S.-Canadian citizen, she has published six acclaimed collections, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave Books, 2021), which won the Canada Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Governor General's Literary Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books, 2016), nominated for the Griffin Poetry Prize. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the 2024 C.D. Wright Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She teaches at Toronto Metropolitan University.
Homer
Homer is the ancient Greek poet credited with composing the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational epics of Western literature. Ancient tradition placed him in Ionia — possibly on the island of Chios or in Smyrna — and dated him to around the eighth century BCE, though modern scholarship debates both his historical existence and the process by which the poems were composed. The Iliad recounts events during the Trojan War, centering on the wrath of Achilles; the Odyssey follows Odysseus on his ten-year journey home. Both epics draw on a long tradition of oral composition and have exerted incalculable influence on Western literature, art, and thought from antiquity through the present day.
I
↑Iain Thomas
Iain Thomas (born in Cape Town, South Africa) is a writer and poet whose work is widely shared on social media and has reached audiences across the globe. He is best known for the Tumblr project and subsequent collection I Wrote This for You (Central Avenue Publishing, 2011), which he created with photographer Pleasefindthis. The collection uses prose-poetry paired with photography to explore themes of love, loss, and meaning in intimate, accessible language. Subsequent volumes include I Wrote This for You and Only You (2014) and I Wrote This for You: Just the Words (2011). He has also co-written other creative projects. His work has been widely shared and translated into multiple languages.
Ilya Kaminsky
Ilya Kaminsky (born in Odessa, Ukraine) came to the United States as a refugee in 1993 and has become one of the most celebrated poets writing in English as an adopted language. He is deaf and the question of listening — political, historical, and personal — runs through his work. His debut collection Dancing in Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) received the Whiting Writers' Award and the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award. His second collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), set in an occupied fictional country, won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University.
IN-Q
IN-Q is an award-winning American spoken word poet, actor, and songwriter widely recognized as one of the most powerful performance poets of his generation. Based in Los Angeles, he has collaborated with artists including Alicia Keys and performed across international stages. He is the author of the bestselling poetry collection Inquire Within (2014), exploring purpose, resilience, and human connection. Named one of Oprah Winfrey's Super Soul 100 influencers, IN-Q has appeared on Netflix, ESPN Films, and in national campaigns. His spoken word performances have accumulated tens of millions of online views.
Ishmael Reed
Ishmael Reed (born in Chattanooga, Tennessee) is one of the most iconoclastic and prolific voices in American literature, having worked for over fifty years as a poet, novelist, playwright, and cultural critic. A leading figure of the Black Arts Movement and postmodernist tradition, he developed a literary aesthetic he called Neo-HooDoo, fusing African American vernacular religion with formal experimentation. His poetry collections include Catechism of D Neoamerican Hoodoo Church (1970), Secretary to the Spirits (1978), and New and Collected Poems 1964–2006 (2006). His novels include the satirical Mumbo Jumbo (1972). He received the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.
J
↑J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and is best known as the author of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). A scholar of Old and Middle English, he was a professor at Oxford University, where he was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Throughout his life he composed a large body of original poetry, much of it embedded in his fiction. His verse includes the poems of Middle-earth collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. His posthumous collection The Fall of Arthur (2013) presents his unfinished verse retelling of Arthurian legend in alliterative metre.
Jackie Kay
Jackie Kay (born in Edinburgh, Scotland) is a Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright and the national makar (Poet Laureate) of Scotland since 2016. Born to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, she was adopted as an infant by a white couple from Glasgow. Her debut collection The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe, 1991), which won a Forward Prize, a Saltire Award, and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, recounts the experience of adoption in three interwoven voices. Her later collections include Fiere (Picador, 2011), winner of the Costa Poetry Award. She has received the British Book Awards Author of the Year and an OBE. She is a professor of creative writing at Newcastle University.
Jacques Dupin
Jacques Dupin (1927–2012) was a French poet, art critic, and gallery director closely associated with surrealism and the work of Joan Miró. Born in Privas, Ardèche, he worked at the Galerie Maeght in Paris for decades and became a foundational figure in postwar European poetics. His major collections include Gravir (Gallimard, 1963), L'Embrasure (Gallimard, 1969), and Echancré (P.O.L., 1991). His verse is characterized by spare, fragmented language and a sustained engagement with silence, stone, and the body. Dupin also wrote definitive critical studies on Joan Miró, Alberto Giacometti, and Antoni Tàpies. His work has been translated into English and is considered essential to understanding the French postwar lyric.
Jalal al-Din Rumi
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273) was born in Balkh, in present-day Afghanistan, and became the most widely read poet in the world, with work translated into dozens of languages. A Persian-language poet, Islamic scholar, and Sufi mystic, he spent most of his adult life in Konya, in what is now Turkey, founding the Mevlevi order of the whirling dervishes. His major works include the Masnavi, a six-volume poem of extraordinary scope exploring spiritual love and the soul's longing for union with the divine, and the Divan-e Shams-e Tabrizi, lyrics dedicated to his spiritual teacher. His poetry meditates on love, longing, unity, and the nature of God with an ecstatic lyric power that has transcended cultural and religious boundaries for centuries.
James Richardson
James Richardson (born 1950, Oceanside, New York) is an American poet and aphorist known for work that synthesizes lyric precision, philosophical inquiry, and wit. He is the author of By the Numbers: Poems and Aphorisms (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), a National Book Award finalist; During (Copper Canyon, 2016); and Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays (Ausable Press, 2001), among other collections. His aphorisms have earned him a devoted readership and widespread critical admiration for their compression and surprise. He has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and teaches at Princeton University.
Janaka Stucky
Janaka Stucky is an American poet and mystic whose work is deeply engaged with esoteric traditions, ecstatic verse, and the pursuit of transcendence. He is the author of The Prelude to the Prelude (Black Ocean, 2013), Your Name Is the Only Freedom (Black Ocean, 2016), and Ascend Ascend (Third Man Books, 2019). He co-founded Black Ocean, an independent poetry press. His performances combine poetry with ritual and sound, drawing on Gnostic and occult philosophy. His work has been praised for its spiritual urgency and formal daring.
Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield (born in New York City) is a poet whose work draws on Zen Buddhism, deep ecology, and a sustained attention to the natural world to probe the nature of consciousness and existence. She graduated from Princeton University in its first coeducational class in 1973 and spent eight years in Zen Buddhist practice and study. Her collections include Given Sugar, Given Salt (HarperCollins, 2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and The Beauty (Knopf, 2015). She was elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2012 and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, the Academy of American Poets, and the Rockefeller Foundation.
Jane Kenyon
Jane Kenyon (1947–1995) was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and received her BA and MA from the University of Michigan. She married the poet Donald Hall and settled on Eagle Pond Farm in New Hampshire, which became the landscape of her lyric poetry. Her poems are marked by clarity, restraint, and a deep attentiveness to the textures of rural New England life, grief, and depression. Her collections include From Room to Room (1978), The Boat of Quiet Hours (1986), Let Evening Come (1990), and the posthumous Otherwise: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 1996). She served as New Hampshire's Poet Laureate from 1995 until her death from leukemia. She has been praised as one of the finest lyric poets of her generation.
Jane Miller
Jane Miller (born 1949, New York City) is an American poet and essayist known for her lyric fragmentation, philosophical range, and painterly approach to language. She is the author of more than ten collections, including A Palace of Pearls (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), Thunderbird (Copper Canyon, 1999), and Memory at These Speeds: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon, 1996). Her work engages desire, loss, and perception with formal boldness. A longtime faculty member in the MFA program at the University of Arizona, Miller has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Jane Wong
Jane Wong is an American poet born to Chinese immigrant parents in New Jersey, whose work engages diaspora, family history, ecological grief, and the interior lives of women of color. She is the author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016) and How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James Books, 2021). Her poetry appears in Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Washington, and is an associate professor at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
January Gill O'Neil
January Gill O'Neil (born in Norfolk, Virginia) is a Black American poet whose work traces how place, history, and moral inheritance shape identity and intimate life. She is the author of four collections published by CavanKerry Press: Underlife (2009), Misery Islands (2014), Rewilding (2018), and Glitter Road (2024), which received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize. She earned her BA from Old Dominion University and her MFA from New York University. A Cave Canem fellow, she served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival (2012–2018), was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, and chairs the AWP Board of Directors. She teaches at Salem State University.
Jasmine Mans
Jasmine Mans is a Black American spoken word poet and artist from Newark, New Jersey. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin Madison with a BA in African American Studies, she is the author of Chalk Outlines of Snow Angels (2012) and Black Girl, Call Home (Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2021), exploring queer Black identity, Newark girlhood, and mother-daughter bonds. The book was named one of Oprah's Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books, a TIME Magazine Must-Read, and won a Stonewall Book Award. Essence named Mans the #1 contemporary Black poet to know. She has served as inaugural Poet-in-Residence at Express Newark and as resident poet at the Newark Public Library.
Jeff Hardin
Jeff Hardin was born in Savannah, Tennessee, and is an eighth-generation descendant of the county's founder. He holds a BS from Austin Peay State University and an MFA from the University of Alabama, and is a professor of English at Columbia State Community College in Columbia, Tennessee. His poetry inhabits the rural South with lyrical precision and spiritual attentiveness, seeking moments of mercy and communal understanding in everyday landscapes. He is the author of seven collections, including Fall Sanctuary (Story Line Press; Nicholas Roerich Prize), Restoring the Narrative (Donald Justice Prize), No Other Kind of World (Texas Review Press; X.J. Kennedy Prize), and Watermark (Madville Publishing, 2022). His work appears in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, and Poetry Northwest.
Jenny Molberg
Jenny Molberg is an American poet from Texas who earned her BA at Louisiana State University, her MFA at American University, and her PhD at the University of North Texas. She is the author of Marvels of the Invisible (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize, a debut collection parsing the intersections of science, family history, and grief. Her second collection, The Court of No Record, bears witness to violence against women through a documentary feminist lens. Her poems appear in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, and Copper Nickel. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri and co-edits Pleiades magazine.
Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison (1937–2016) was born in Grayling, Michigan, and became one of the most versatile and beloved American writers of his generation, working across poetry, fiction, essay, and screenwriting. His poetry is rooted in landscape — the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Montana, Arizona — and in an earthy, vital engagement with appetite, mortality, and the non-human world. His novella collections, including Legends of the Fall (1979), brought him wide public readership. His poetry collections include Plain Song (1965) and the massive Collected Poems (Copper Canyon, 2017). He received the Spirit of the West Award and the Mark Twain Award. His long poem series Letters to Yesenin (1973) is among his most celebrated achievements.
Joanna Fuhrman
Joanna Fuhrman (born 1972) is an American poet known for her humorous, surrealist, and formally inventive work drawing on both pop culture and literary tradition. A graduate of the University of Washington's MFA program, she is the author of seven collections, including Pageant (Alice James Books, 2009), winner of the Kinereth Gensler Prize, The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press, 2015), To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press, 2021), and Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press, 2024). Her poem Stagflation won a 2011 Pushcart Prize. She is a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press and teaches poetry at Rutgers University.
Johann Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was born in Frankfurt am Main and is considered the greatest figure in German literary history. His lyric poetry, collected in works including the West-Eastern Divan (1819) — a response to his encounter with the Persian poet Hafez — and his celebrated early lyrics, established him as a master of German verse. His early novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) brought him European fame; his two-part verse drama Faust, composed over sixty years, is his masterwork. He served as a minister at the court of Weimar for much of his adult life. A universal genius who also made significant contributions to science and art theory, he remains the central figure of German classical literature.
John Ashbery
John Ashbery (1927–2017) was born in Rochester, New York, and became one of the most celebrated and critically discussed American poets of the postwar era. Associated early with the New York School, his work is characterized by shifting registers, deflected syntax, and a resistance to fixed meaning that reflects the instability of perception itself. His collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Viking, 1975), inspired by the Parmigianino painting, won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award — all three major American poetry prizes in a single year. He received the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and numerous other honors throughout his career.
John Milton
John Milton (1608–1674) was born in London and is considered one of the preeminent poets in the English language. Educated at Christ's College, Cambridge, he produced major early works including Lycidas (1637) and Il Penseroso before taking up a career as a political pamphleteer for the Puritan cause during the English Civil War, serving as Secretary for Foreign Tongues under Oliver Cromwell. His epic Paradise Lost (1667), composed after he had become completely blind, reimagines the biblical fall of man in twelve books of blank verse and is considered among the greatest works in Western literature. His other major works include Paradise Regained (1671) and the verse drama Samson Agonistes (1671).
John O’Donohue
John O'Donohue (1956–2008) was born in Connemara, County Galway, Ireland, and became a philosopher, poet, and Catholic priest whose work offered a deeply Celtic approach to beauty, belonging, and the inner life. He completed a doctorate in philosophical theology at the University of Tübingen on the mystical philosophy of Meister Eckhart. His prose work Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom (Bantam Books, 1997) became an international bestseller. His poetry collections include Conamara Blues (Doubleday, 2001) and Benedictus: A Book of Blessings (Bantam, 2007). His blessings and prayers have been widely shared in digital culture. He died suddenly of a cerebral aneurysm in France.
John Skoyles
John Skoyles (born 1949, Flushing, New York) is an American poet, memoirist, novelist, and essayist with an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. He is the author of seven books of poems — all from Carnegie Mellon University Press — including A Little Faith (1981), Inside Job (2013), and Yes and No (2021), along with five prose books including the memoir A Moveable Famine: A Life in Poetry. His work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Poetry, and The Paris Review. He served as poetry editor of Ploughshares from 2007 to 2025 and taught at Emerson College. He has received two NEA fellowships and twice served as Executive Director of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Johnny Cash
Johnny Cash (1932–2003) was born in Kingsland, Arkansas, and became one of the most iconic figures in American music and a poet of the American experience at its most plain-spoken and elemental. Known as the Man in Black, he wrote lyrics that addressed the dispossessed, the imprisoned, and the spiritually conflicted across a fifty-year career. His major works include the albums At Folsom Prison (1968) and At San Quentin (1969). His American Recordings series, produced by Rick Rubin late in his career, is considered some of the most profound recordings of his life. He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the Gospel Music Hall of Fame.
Jonathan Aaron
Jonathan Aaron (born 1941, Massachusetts) is an American poet who graduated from the University of Chicago and Yale University, where he earned his PhD. He is the author of three collections: Second Sight (1982), Corridor (Wesleyan University Press, 1992), and Journey to the Lost City (University of Chicago Press, 2006). His poems — described as emerging from the collision of memory, dream, and history — have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and The London Review of Books, and have been anthologized five times in Best American Poetry. He received fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He taught for decades at Emerson College.
Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham (born in New York City) is one of the most ambitious and celebrated American poets of her generation. Raised in Rome and educated in France and the United States, she holds degrees from NYU, Columbia, and the University of Iowa. Her poetry engages philosophical and phenomenological inquiry — consciousness, time, ecology, and the limits of perception — in expansive, formally restless lines. Her collection The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994 (Ecco, 1995) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University. Her other notable collections include Erosion (1983), Swarm (2000), and Fast (2017).
Joseph Brodsky
Joseph Brodsky (1940–1996) was born in Leningrad, USSR, and became one of the most significant poets of the twentieth century writing in Russian and English. Arrested by Soviet authorities in 1964 for refusing to be employed outside of poetry, he was sentenced to five years of hard labor in the Soviet Arctic, though international pressure led to his early release. Expelled from the USSR in 1972, he settled in the United States and taught at many universities, including Michigan and Mount Holyoke. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1987 and served as United States Poet Laureate from 1991 to 1992. His major collections include A Part of Speech (1980) and To Urania (1988).
Joseph Millar
Joseph Millar is an American poet whose plainspoken, working-class verse honors manual labor, masculine tenderness, and the landscapes of the American West. Before turning to poetry, he spent years working in commercial fishing, telecom installation, and other trades. His collections include Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), Fortune (Eastern Washington University Press, 2007), Blue Rust (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2012), and Overtime: Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon, 2020). His work extends the tradition of Philip Levine with sensory precision and emotional directness. He teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Joseph Nguyen
Joseph Nguyen is an American author known for the self-help memoir Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning and End of Suffering (2022), which became a New York Times bestseller and an international phenomenon. While not primarily a poet, his introspective writing on thought patterns, consciousness, and inner peace draws on philosophical and spiritual traditions to offer accessible wisdom to a broad readership. The book found its audience largely through word of mouth and social media, touching millions of readers seeking relief from anxiety and self-doubt.
Joshua Weiner
Joshua Weiner (born 1963, Boston) is an American poet, essayist, and translator who grew up in central New Jersey. A graduate of Northwestern University and the University of California, Berkeley, he is the author of three poetry collections from the University of Chicago Press: The World's Room (2001), From the Book of Giants (2006), and The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish (2013), the latter centering on Rock Creek in Washington, D.C. He also translated Nelly Sachs's Flight and Metamorphosis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), shortlisted for the National Translation Award. His honors include the Rome Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is a professor at the University of Maryland.
Joy Harjo
Joy Harjo (born in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is a poet, musician, and member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served as the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2019 to 2022, becoming the first Native American to hold the position. Her poetry draws on Native American oral tradition, myth, and music, alongside meditations on survival, justice, memory, and the natural world. She is the author of nine poetry collections, including She Had Some Horses (Thunder's Mouth Press, 1983) and An American Sunrise (Norton, 2019). She received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2015 and has been awarded the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Joyelle McSweeney
Joyelle McSweeney (born 1976, Augusta, Georgia) is an American poet, playwright, fiction writer, and theorist known for her apocalyptic, genre-bending, and intellectually radical work. She is the author of numerous books, including Toxicon and Arachne (Nightboat Books, 2020), Salamandrine: 8 Gothics (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2013), and the critical work The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (University of Michigan Press, 2014). Her poetry blends horror, classical mythology, pop culture, and political critique in a mode she has called the Necropastoral. She co-founded Action Books, a press specializing in international poetry in translation, and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Juan Felipe Herrera
Juan Felipe Herrera (born in Fowler, California) is a poet, performance artist, and children's author who served as the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States from 2015 to 2017, the first Latino to hold the position. He is the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers and grew up moving between California's Central Valley and San Francisco's Mission District. He received his BA from UCLA and his MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. His many collections include Half the World in Light: New and Selected Poems (University of Arizona Press, 2008), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He was the California Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014 and is an emeritus professor at the University of California, Riverside.
June Jordan
June Jordan (1936–2002) was born in Harlem, New York, to Jamaican immigrant parents and became a powerful political poet, essayist, and activist over her forty-year career. Her poetry and prose addressed race, gender, sexuality, and imperialism with extraordinary clarity and urgency. Her collections include Things That I Do in the Dark (1977), Passion (1980), and Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon, 2005). She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded the Poetry for the People program, committed to teaching poetry as a tool for social change. She received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
K
↑Kahlil Gibran
Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) was born in Bsharri, in what is now Lebanon, and emigrated to the United States as a child, settling in Boston. Writing in both Arabic and English, he became one of the best-selling poets of all time. His prose-poem collection The Prophet (Alfred A. Knopf, 1923), presented as the teachings of a wise man departing from a city, has never been out of print and has been translated into more than one hundred languages. His Arabic works, including The Broken Wings (1912) and Spirits Rebellious (1908), shaped modern Arabic literature. He studied art in Paris and was deeply influenced by William Blake and Friedrich Nietzsche. He died in New York at forty-eight.
Karen Solie
Karen Solie (born 1966, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan) is one of Canada's most celebrated contemporary poets, known for her acute intelligence, moral seriousness, and restless traversal of prairie, urban, and northern landscapes. She is the author of six collections, including Short Haul Engine (Brick Books, 2001), winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize; Pigeon (Anansi, 2009), which won the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Book Award, and the Pat Lowther Award; The Road In Is Not the Same Road Out (Anansi/FSG, 2015); and West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Kingsley Tufts Award. A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of the Latner Poetry Prize, she has taught at the Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Kate Baer
Kate Baer (born in Lancaster, Pennsylvania) is a poet who gained a wide readership through Instagram, where her work on motherhood, womanhood, and the messy reality of daily life resonated with millions of readers. Her debut collection, What Kind of Woman (Harper Perennial, 2020), debuted at number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Her second collection, I Hope This Finds You Well (Harper Perennial, 2021), which uses an erasure technique applied to online messages, also became a New York Times bestseller. She has been praised for her frank engagement with domesticity, desire, and the competing demands placed on women's lives. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and four children.
Katie Farris
Katie Farris is an American poet, translator, and academic who received her MFA from Brown University. She is the author and co-translator of several books, including boysgirls (Tupelo Press, 2019) and the memoir-in-poems Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023), which was a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize and listed among Publishers Weekly's Top 10 Poetry Books of 2023. The collection confronts breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and survival alongside themes of love, American political upheaval, and the example of Emily Dickinson. Her chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in Its Weaving won the 2021 Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. She has received the Pushcart Prize and the Anne Halley Poetry Prize. She is the longtime partner and co-translator of poet Ilya Kaminsky, and is an associate professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali (born 1971, United Kingdom) is a British-born American poet, essayist, novelist, and translator of Indian Muslim heritage who has lived transnationally across Canada, the U.S., India, France, and the Middle East. His poetry collections include Sukun (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), The Voice of Sheila Chandra (Alice James Books, 2020), Inquisition (Wesleyan, 2018), Sky Ward (Wesleyan, 2013), winner of the Ohioana Book Award in Poetry, and The Far Mosque (Alice James Books, 2005), winner of Alice James Books' New England/New York Award. His hybrid prose memoir Bright Felon (Wesleyan, 2009) meditates on coming of age between cultures and queer Muslim identity. Ali co-founded Nightboat Books and is a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Keetje Kuipers
Keetje Kuipers (born in Pullman, Washington) is an American poet whose work explores the erotic, elegiac, and ecological across the landscapes of the American West. She earned a BA from Swarthmore College and an MFA from the University of Oregon, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. Her four collections — all published by BOA Editions — include Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize; The Keys to the Jail (2014); All Its Charms (2019), a Washington State Book Award finalist; and Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, she is editor of Poetry Northwest.
Kelli Russell Agodon
Kelli Russell Agodon is an American poet from the Pacific Northwest and co-founder of Two Sylvias Press. She is the author of several collections, including Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Hourglass Museum (White Pine Press, 2014), and Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room (White Pine Press, 2010), which won the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her work engages the natural world, grief, female experience, and the digital present with wit and lyric grace. She has received fellowships from the Hedgebrook Foundation and the Jack Straw Foundation and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Pacific Lutheran University.
Kevin Young
Kevin Young (born in Lincoln, Nebraska) is a poet, editor, and literary administrator who became the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2020. He previously served as poetry editor of The New Yorker and director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He received his BA from Harvard University and his MFA from Brown University. His many collections include Jelly Roll: A Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), Book of Hours (2014), and Brown (Knopf, 2018), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the American Book Award.
Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio (born in Washington, D.C.) is a poet and fiction writer known for her blues-inflected, formally accomplished poetry that engages desire, mortality, the body, and the pleasures and sorrows of ordinary life with unflinching directness and humor. She studied at George Mason University. Her collection Tell Me (BOA Editions, 2000) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Other major collections include What Is This Thing Called Love (Norton, 2004) and Mortal Trash (Norton, 2016). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She co-authored with Dorianne Laux the widely used craft book The Poet's Companion (1997). She lives in Oakland, California.
Kwame Dawes
Kwame Dawes (born in Accra, Ghana) is a poet, editor, and literary entrepreneur who grew up in Jamaica. He is the Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner and a Chancellor's Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. His many collections include Wisteria: Twilight Poems from the Swamp Country (2006) and Prophets (2013), and the Grammy-nominated album Country: The New Definition. He is the author of Bob Marley: Lyrical Genius (2002). He founded the Calabash International Literary Festival in Jamaica and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and the Musgrave Gold Medal from the Institute of Jamaica.
L
↑Lang Leav
Lang Leav (born in a Thai refugee camp, raised in New South Wales, Australia) is a poet whose accessible, emotionally direct verse about love, longing, and loss has reached a global readership, particularly through social media. She moved to New Zealand and later to New York. Her debut collection, Love & Misadventure (Andrews McMeel, 2013), sold widely and was praised for bringing poetry to new audiences. Subsequent collections include Lullabies (2014), The Universe of Us (2016), Sea of Strangers (2018), and September Love (2020). She is the recipient of the Newcastle Poetry Prize and Qantas Spirit of Youth Awards for her visual art. She has also written the novel Sad Girls (2017).
Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes (1902–1967) was born in Joplin, Missouri, and became the central poet of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as one of the most enduring voices in American literature. His debut collection, The Weary Blues (Alfred A. Knopf, 1926), incorporated blues and jazz rhythms into poetry in groundbreaking ways. His work celebrates Black life, confronts racial injustice, and employs vernacular language to achieve both intimacy and political force. He is also the author of the celebrated sequence Montage of a Dream Deferred (1951) and the short story collections featuring Jesse B. Semple. He studied briefly at Columbia University and graduated from Lincoln University. He received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP in 1960.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021) was born in Yonkers, New York, and became one of the defining figures of the San Francisco Renaissance and the Beat Generation. In 1953 he co-founded City Lights Books in San Francisco, the first all-paperback bookstore in the United States, which became a center of avant-garde publishing and culture. His publication of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems in 1956 led to his arrest on obscenity charges; his acquittal was a landmark victory for free speech. His own collection A Coney Island of the Mind (City Lights, 1958) has sold more than a million copies, making it one of the best-selling poetry collections in American history. He received the National Book Award's Literarian Award in 2005.
Leila Chatti
Leila Chatti (born 1990, Oakland, California) is a Tunisian-American poet of dual citizenship who grew up between Tunisia and the United States. She is the author of Deluge (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), a debut collection meditating on illness, bodily autonomy, and the tensions between her Catholic and Muslim heritage, which won the 2021 Levis Reading Prize and the 2021 Luschei Prize for African Poetry. Her chapbook Tunsiya/Amrikiya (Bull City Press, 2018) explores multicultural identity and belonging. A second full-length collection, Wildness Before Something Sublime, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2025. She holds MFAs from North Carolina State University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has received the Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) was born in Westmount, Quebec, and became one of the most beloved poets, novelists, and singer-songwriters of the twentieth century. He published his first poetry collection, Let Us Compare Mythologies (Contact Press, 1956), at the age of twenty-two, and followed it with The Spice-Box of Earth (1961) and Flowers for Hitler (1964). Widely regarded as one of Canada's greatest poets, he turned to music in the late 1960s and produced an acclaimed body of song. He received the Prince of Asturias Award for Literature in 2011, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada in 2003.
Leslie Contreras Schwartz
Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer born in Houston, Texas, with Mexican American roots going back several generations in Texas. She earned a BA from Rice University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. A member of the Macondo Writers' Collective, her work examines the individual and public body, centering the voices of those historically silenced and the lived complexities of identity, place, and belonging. She is the author of five collections, including Fuego (Saint Julian Press, 2016), Nightbloom & Cenote (2018), Black Dove / Paloma Negra (FlowerSong Press, 2020), and The Body Cosmos (2023). She served as Houston Poet Laureate from 2019 to 2021 and received a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee (born in Jakarta, Indonesia) is a Chinese-Indonesian American poet whose family fled Indonesia in 1959 following persecution under Sukarno. He grew up in various Asian countries before the family settled in the United States. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Arizona, and SUNY Brockport. His debut collection Rose (BOA Editions, 1986) won the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, and The City in Which I Love You (BOA, 1990) was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets. His work explores his Chinese heritage, his father's ministry, and the tensions between memory and presence. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NEA grant, and the American Book Award.
Lili Reinhart
Lili Reinhart is an American actress best known for her role on the CW series Riverdale who published her debut poetry collection Swimming Lessons: Poems (Gallery Books, 2020). The collection explores depression, self-image, toxic relationships, and mental health recovery, quickly reaching the New York Times bestseller list. Reinhart has been open about her struggles with depression and body dysmorphia, and the book gives direct expression to those experiences. Her willingness to write candidly about mental illness resonated with a large young-adult readership. She is also an advocate for mental health awareness.
Louis Reyes Rivera
Louis Reyes Rivera (1945–2012) was a Puerto Rican poet, educator, and activist born in New York City, a foundational voice in the Nuyorican poetry movement. His collections include Who Pays the Cost (Shamal Books, 1977), This One for You (Shamal Books, 1983), and Scattered Scripture (Shamal Books, 1996). As editor of Shamal Books, he championed the work of diasporic Caribbean and Black writers for over three decades. He co-edited the landmark anthology Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam (Crown, 2001) and taught for decades at colleges in New York. He died in 2012, remembered as one of the most dedicated teachers and cultural guardians of his generation.
Louise Glück
Louise Glück (born in New York City) received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020, recognized for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2003 to 2004. Her collection The Wild Iris (Ecco, 1992) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other major collections include Ararat (1990), The Triumph of Achilles (1985), and Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006). She received the National Book Award for Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). She holds the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence position at Yale University and a senior lectureship at Stanford. She has received a MacArthur Fellowship and the Bollingen Prize.
Luci Shaw
Luci Shaw (born 1928, London, England) is a British-American poet, essayist, and publisher whose work has shaped Christian literary culture in North America for more than five decades. She co-founded Harold Shaw Publishers with her late husband and later became a fellow at Regent College, Vancouver. Her many collections include Listen to the Green (1971), Writing the River (1994), Polishing the Petrie Dish (2013), and Eye of the Beholder (2019). Her verse meditates on faith, creation, friendship, grief, and the natural world through precise, luminous imagery. A longtime literary collaborator with Madeleine L'Engle, Shaw has shaped generations of writers through teaching and editorial work.
Lynne Thompson
Lynne Thompson is an American poet and attorney born in Los Angeles whose work draws on African American history, diasporic memory, and the textures of everyday life. She is the author of Fretwork (Marsh Hawk Press, 2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Poetry Prize, Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), and Start with a Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013). Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. From 2021 to 2023, Thompson served as Poet Laureate of Los Angeles, becoming the first Black woman to hold the position. Her work has been praised for its lyric grace and moral clarity in confronting the legacy of African American experience.
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↑Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith (born in Columbus, Ohio) is a poet who became one of the most widely read American poets after her poem Good Bones went viral in 2016 following the Orlando nightclub shooting. Her work explores parenthood, grief, divorce, the natural world, and what endures. Her collection Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017) brought her international recognition. Her subsequent collections include Goldenrod (Atria, 2021). Her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria, 2023) was a New York Times bestseller. She has received an NEA Fellowship, Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She teaches in the Ashland University MFA program.
Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008) was born in Al-Birwa, a village in Mandatory Palestine, which was destroyed in 1948. He became the national poet of Palestine and one of the most widely translated Arab poets of the twentieth century. His poetry transforms personal exile and collective loss into a lyric of extraordinary beauty and resilience. His collections include A Lover from Palestine (1966), Memory for Forgetfulness (1982), and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (2003). He served as a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and edited the literary journal Al-Karmel. He received the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983 and the Prince Claus Award in 2004.
Mahtem Shiferraw
Mahtem Shiferraw is an Ethiopian-Eritrean American poet and fiction writer who grew up between Ethiopia and Eritrea before immigrating to the United States. Her debut collection, Fuchsia (TriQuarterly Books, 2016), won the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and meditates on memory, the body, displacement, and the complexities of diasporic womanhood. Her second collection, Your Body Is War (University of Nebraska Press, 2022), extends these themes with attention to violence, survival, and ancestral inheritance. Her poems appear in Prairie Schooner and Callaloo. Drawing on oral and visual traditions of the Horn of Africa, Shiferraw's work occupies an important place in contemporary African American poetry.
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood (born in Ottawa, Ontario) is one of Canada's most celebrated writers, internationally recognized for her novels including The Handmaid's Tale (1985) and the MaddAddam trilogy. She is also a significant poet who published her first collection, Double Persephone, in 1961. Her poetry collections include The Circle Game (1966), which won the Governor General's Award, Power Politics (1971), and Morning in the Burned House (1995). She studied at Victoria College, University of Toronto, and Radcliffe College, Harvard, where she received her MA. She has received the Booker Prize twice, the Franz Kafka Prize, the PEN Pinter Prize, and the Walter Scott Prize, among dozens of other honors.
Margaret Rhee
Margaret Rhee is a Korean American feminist poet, new media artist, and scholar. She received her BA from the University of Southern California and her PhD in ethnic and new media studies from UC Berkeley. Her debut poetry collection Love, Robot (The Operating System, 2017) explores relationships between humans and robots in a science fictional world, interrogating technology, race, gender, and desire through formal experimentation. The collection was named a Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine, received the 2018 Elgin Award from the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and won the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry from the Asian American Studies Association. Her new media art project The Kimchi Poetry Machine is part of the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. She is an assistant professor at The New School, where she chairs the art writing concentration in the creative writing MFA program.
Maria Popova
Maria Popova (born 1984, Sofia, Bulgaria) is a Bulgarian-American writer and the creator of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), one of the most celebrated cultural commentary websites in the English-speaking world. While primarily an essayist, she is also the author of the lyrical nonfiction work Figuring (Pantheon Books, 2019), a sweeping exploration of science, art, love, and meaning, and the illustrated poetry anthology A Velocity of Being (Macmillan, 2018). Her writing draws on the lives of scientists, artists, and poets throughout history, and she is one of the most influential voices in contemporary long-form cultural writing. She is a TED Senior Fellow.
Marianne Moore
Marianne Moore (1887–1972) was born in Kirkwood, Missouri, and educated at Bryn Mawr College. One of the preeminent poets of American modernism, her work is celebrated for its syllabic precision, intricate observation of the natural world, and wide-ranging quotation from diverse sources. Her Complete Poems (Viking, 1967) was preceded by Observations (1924) and Collected Poems (1951), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bollingen Prize simultaneously. She worked as a librarian and as editor of The Dial literary magazine from 1925 to 1929. A longtime resident of Brooklyn, she became a celebrated public figure known for her distinctive dress and love of baseball.
Marilyn Hacker
Marilyn Hacker (born 1942, New York City) is an American poet and translator widely regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of formal verse in contemporary American poetry. She is the author of more than a dozen collections including Presentation Piece (1974), which won the National Book Award; Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons (1986); Winter Numbers (1994); and A Stranger's Mirror: New and Selected Poems 1994–2014 (Norton, 2015). Her work demonstrates that traditional forms — sonnets, villanelles, ghazals — can be powerful vehicles for feminist and erotic consciousness. She has received the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Robert Frost Medal, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and is also a prolific translator of contemporary French-language poetry.
Marina Diamandis
Marina Diamandis, known professionally as Marina, is a Welsh singer-songwriter of Greek-Welsh heritage who published her debut poetry collection, Venus Fly Trap (2023). Known for theatrical, literary pop albums such as Electra Heart (2012) and Love + Fear (2019), Marina brought the same introspective lyricism to print. Venus Fly Trap explores womanhood, grief, personal mythology, and self-discovery through verse. The collection was met with enthusiasm from her devoted fanbase as well as wider literary audiences, affirming the natural extension of her song craft to the poetic form.
Mark Doty
Mark Doty (born in Maryville, Tennessee) is a poet whose work meditates on beauty, grief, gay identity, and the relationship between art and mortality with extraordinary precision and lyric intensity. He attended Drake University and received his MFA from Goddard College. His collection My Alexandria (University of Illinois Press, 1993), written during the AIDS crisis, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His collection Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2008) won the National Book Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and the Academy of American Poets, and the Witter Bynner Prize. He teaches at Rutgers University.
Mark Strand
Mark Strand (1934–2014) was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and became one of the most distinctive American poets of the late twentieth century. His poetry is characterized by dreamlike imagery, metaphysical unease, and an uncanny exploration of absence and identity. His collections include Reasons for Moving (1968), Darker (1970), and Blizzard of One (Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1990 to 1991. He was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. He taught at the University of Chicago and other institutions.
Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver (1935–2019) was born in Maple Heights, Ohio, and became one of the most widely read American poets of her generation. Her work is grounded in close, contemplative attention to the natural world — birds, flowers, grasses, and the rhythms of the seasons — and asks persistent questions about how to live with meaning and awareness. Her collection American Primitive (Little, Brown, 1983) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. New and Selected Poems (Beacon Press, 1992) won the National Book Award. Her other major collections include Why I Wake Early (2004) and Upstream (2016). She studied briefly at Ohio State University and Vassar College and was a longtime resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Masaoka Shiki
Masaoka Shiki (1867–1902) was born in Matsuyama, Iyo Province, Japan, and is regarded as one of the four masters of haiku, alongside Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and Kobayashi Issa. Dying of tuberculosis at thirty-four, he produced an enormous body of haiku, tanka, essays, and literary criticism that modernized Japanese poetry. Rejecting what he saw as the sentimentalism of much contemporary haiku, he advocated shasei — sketch from life — as the foundation of honest poetic practice. He is also credited with reviving the classical tanka form. His critical essays and thousands of haiku and tanka composed on his sickbed, collected in works including A Drop of Ink, transformed Japanese poetry in the Meiji era.
Matthew Johnson
Matthew Johnson is a poet, editor, and literary magazine publisher originally from New Rochelle, New York, who spent his childhood in Stratford, Connecticut. His poetry draws on American history, sports, jazz, and race, blending the demotic and the mythic in verse that celebrates and interrogates the nation's cultural landscape. He is the author of Shadow Folk and Soul Songs (Kelsay Books) and Far From New York State (New York Quarterly Press), as well as the chapbook Too Short to Box with God (Finishing Line Press, 2024). He is a multiple Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee, serves as managing editor of The Portrait of New England, and is poetry editor of The Twin Bill.
Matthew McConaughey
Matthew McConaughey (born 1969, Uvalde, Texas) is an Academy Award-winning American actor who published the memoir and philosophical journal Greenlights (Crown, 2020), which debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. While not a poet by vocation, Greenlights is written in a distinctive blend of prose, anecdote, and personal philosophy, drawing from journals McConaughey has kept for decades. The book reflects on his life, values, and meaning-making, and includes lyrical sections and personal poetry. Though primarily a celebrity memoir, its introspective writing resonated with a broad readership.
Maureen N. McLane
Maureen N. McLane (born 1967, Portland, Maine) is an American poet and literary critic whose work explores the intersection of lyric poetry, history, and feminist thought. A graduate of Harvard University, Oxford University, and Harvard's doctoral program, she is the author of several collections, including This Blue (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), a National Book Award finalist; Same Life (FSG, 2008); Mz N: the serial (FSG, 2016); and My Poets (FSG, 2012), a hybrid memoir-criticism. Her poetry fuses classical reference with contemporary fragmentation and emotional directness. She is a professor of English and comparative literature at New York University.
Maxine Kumin
Maxine Kumin (1925–2014) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is recognized as one of the major American poets of the post-war era. A close friend and artistic peer of Anne Sexton, she taught at Tufts, Columbia, and Princeton. Her collection Up Country: Poems of New England (Harper and Row, 1972) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other major collections include Connecting the Dots (1996) and Still to Mow (2007). She served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1981 to 1982 and as Poet Laureate of New Hampshire from 1989 to 1994. She received the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou (1928–2014) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and became one of the most celebrated writers, poets, and public figures in American history. Her poem Still I Rise and her inaugural poem for President Clinton in 1993, On the Pulse of Morning, brought her poetry to millions of readers. She is the author of several poetry collections, including Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie (1971) and I Shall Not Be Moved (1990). Her autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) remains one of the most widely taught memoirs in American schools. She held a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
Maya C Popa
Maya C. Popa is a Romanian-American poet and editor born in Romania and raised in New York. Her debut collection, Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022), meditates on cosmology, biology, mortality, and wonder in the face of loss. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Best American Poetry. She holds degrees from King's College London and New York University and serves as the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly. Her second collection, Social Contract (W.W. Norton, 2025), extends her exploration of science, civic life, and lyric perception. Her work has been recognized with support from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and the Poetry Foundation.
Megan Falley
Megan Falley is a queer poet, author, and teaching artist who studied at the State University of New York at New Paltz. She became a full-time touring spoken word poet after winning the Write Bloody Open Book Competition with her debut collection, After the Witch Hunt (Write Bloody, 2012). Her subsequent collections include Redhead and the Slaughter King (Write Bloody, 2014) and Drive Here and Devastate Me (Write Bloody, 2018), which was praised as a love letter to the queer community. She co-wrote How Poetry Can Change Your Heart (Chronicle Books, 2019) with her partner, poet Andrea Gibson. She lives in Longmont, Colorado, and teaches poetry workshops online. Her chapbook Bad Girls, Honey won the 2015 Tired Hearts Chapbook Prize.
Megan Fernandes
Megan Fernandes is an American poet of Indian and Portuguese descent whose work explores diaspora, desire, loss, and contemporary city life with witty, intellectual precision. Born in Vancouver, she is the author of Good Boys (Tin House, 2022), her debut collection, which examines heartbreak, grief, and postcolonial identity through a confident lyric voice. Earlier work includes The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books, 2015). Her poems appear in BOMB Magazine, The Nation, and POETRY. She holds a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Fernandes has been praised for her ability to navigate between personal intimacy and broader cultural critique.
Megan Fox
Megan Fox (born 1986, Oak Ridge, Tennessee) is an American actress who published Pretty Boys Are Poisonous (Gallery Books, 2023), a poetry collection exploring trauma, relationships, self-perception, and survival. The book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. Fox has discussed how writing poetry allowed her to process difficult emotional experiences and offer an honest perspective on life in the public eye. The book found a wide audience among her fanbase and readers drawn to celebrity confessional writing.
Megan Merchant
Megan Merchant is a poet and visual artist who lives in Prescott, Arizona. She holds an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and brings lyrical precision and unsettling imagery to subjects including grief, motherhood, the body, and the natural world. She is the author of five collections: Gravel Ghosts (Glass Lyre Press, 2016), The Dark's Humming (2017; 2015 Lyrebird Award winner), Grief Flowers (2018), Before the Fevered Snow (Stillhouse Press, 2020), and Hortensia, in Winter (2024). Her honors include the COG Literary Award, the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize, and the New American Poetry Prize. She is a multi-year Pushcart Prize nominee and editor of Pirene's Fountain.
Melania Luisa Marte
Melania Luisa Marte (born in New York City) is an Afro-Latina poet, writer, and musician from a Dominican immigrant family who lives between New York, Texas, and the Dominican Republic. Her slam poetry gained international visibility through her viral poem Afro-Latina, which was featured by Instagram for National Poetry Month and accumulated over nine million views. She ranked fifth at the 2018 Women of the World Poetry Slam Competition. Her debut poetry collection Plantains and Our Becoming (Tiny Reparations/Plume/Penguin Random House, 2023) explores Afro-Dominican identity, colonialism, ancestral knowledge, and Black diaspora experience. The collection was praised by National Book Award-winning author Elizabeth Acevedo.
Molly Fisk
Molly Fisk (born in San Francisco) is a poet, radio commentator, and writing coach based in Nevada City, California. She has been a commentator for NPR member stations, delivering short personal essays and poems about daily life in Northern California. Her collections include Listening to Winter (Roundhouse Press, 2000) and The More Difficult Beauty (Hip Pocket Press, 2010). She received a California Arts Council grant and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. She has taught private workshops in-person and online since 1994. She is known for bringing poetry to broad popular audiences through radio and community engagement.
Molly Peacock
Molly Peacock (born 1947, Buffalo, New York) is an American-Canadian poet known for her formally accomplished, intimate verse about the body, consciousness, family, and female selfhood. She is the author of numerous collections, including Cornucopia: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2002), The Second Blush (Norton, 2008), and Alphabetique (2014). Her memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece (1998) explores her decision not to have children. A pioneer in using the sonnet for personal and feminist subject matter, Peacock also helped found the Poetry in Motion transit poetry program, which brought verse to New York City subways and buses. She lives in Toronto and is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
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↑Nadia Arioli
Nadia Arioli is a New England-based poet and multi-disciplinary artist, and the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Thimble Literary Magazine. Their work, which ranges across poetry, visual art, and ekphrasis, appears in Cider Press Review, Rust + Moth, Mom Egg Review, Hunger Mountain, Penn Review, and elsewhere. A three-time Best of the Net nominee and Pushcart Prize nominee, Arioli has published chapbooks with Cringe-Worthy Poetry Collective and Dancing Girl Press, a full-length collection with Spartan Press, and the collection Poems for Kay Sage (Kelsay Books), an ekphrastic journey through the life and work of the overlooked Surrealist painter. Their poetry is known for its lyrical wit, surrealist undertow, and tender attentiveness to the overlooked and the strange.
Najwa Zebian
Najwa Zebian (born in Bekaa, Lebanon) is a Lebanese-Canadian poet, author, educator, and activist who moved to Ontario, Canada at sixteen during the 2006 Lebanon War. She earned a Bachelor of Science from the University of Western Ontario, a Master of Education in Curriculum Studies, and a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership. Working as a teacher, she began writing to connect with her students, many of them young refugees, and in doing so found a way to heal her own experience of displacement and abuse. Her debut collection, Mind Platter (Andrews McMeel, 2018), drew on those reflections. Subsequent collections include The Nectar of Pain (2018) and Sparks of Phoenix (2019). Her work has been featured in the New York Times and she founded Soul Academy, a digital school for personal development.
Nancy Milford
Nancy Milford (born 1938) is an American literary biographer best known for her landmark biography Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Random House, 2001), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award that spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list. Her earlier biography, Zelda (1970), a groundbreaking study of Zelda Fitzgerald, was also a National Book Award finalist and remains a foundational work of feminist literary biography. While not primarily a poet, Milford's work has brought the lives of important American women poets to wide public attention and shaped the way literary biography engages with poetry and its cultural context.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye (born in St. Louis, Missouri) is a poet of Palestinian-American heritage whose work celebrates cultural connections, the ordinary lives of people across boundaries, and the healing power of attention and language. She has served as Young People's Poet Laureate for the Poetry Foundation and as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Her collections include Fuel (BOA Editions, 1998), 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Tiny Journalist (BOA, 2019). She has received four Pushcart Prizes, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Prize, and numerous awards for her children's and young adult writing.
Natalie Diaz
Natalie Diaz (born in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California) is a Mojave and Latina poet whose work engages the violence of American colonialism, Indigenous language loss, addiction, and the body with lyric ferocity. She was a professional basketball player before turning to poetry. She received her MFA from Old Dominion University. Her debut collection When My Brother Was an Aztec (Copper Canyon, 2012) received the American Book Award. Her second collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf, 2020) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A MacArthur Fellow, she is the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University and co-director of the Language and Culture Center for the Mojave people.
Natalie Shapero
Natalie Shapero (born in Chester, Pennsylvania) is an American poet known for dark wit, sardonic intelligence, and formally restrained engagement with mortality, motherhood, and contemporary American life. She earned a BA from Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in Poetry from Ohio State University, and a JD from the University of Chicago. She is the author of No Object (Saturnalia Books, 2013), winner of the Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award; Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Popular Longing (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). Her poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Kenyon Review. She has received an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and teaches at the University of California, Irvine.
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey (born in Gulfport, Mississippi) served as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014. Born to a Black mother and a white father on Confederate Memorial Day — a date she has explored in her poetry — her work engages history, racial identity, and the American South with lyric rigor. She received her BA from the University of Georgia, her MFA from Hollins University, and a second MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her collection Native Guard (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Other collections include Thrall (2012) and Monument: Poems New and Selected (Houghton Mifflin, 2018). She is a professor at Northwestern University.
Nathanael O'Reilly
Nathanael O'Reilly is an Irish-Australian poet born and raised in Warrnambool, Australia. He has lived outside Australia since 1995, spending extended periods in England, Ireland, Germany, Ukraine, and the United States, where he is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Arlington. His poetry explores exile, diaspora, belonging, and homesickness, drawing on the landscapes and histories of multiple continents. He is the author of more than ten collections, including Distance (Ginninderra Press, 2015), Preparations for Departure (UWAP Poetry, 2017; named a Book of the Year in Australian Book Review), (Un)belonging (Recent Work Press, 2020), and Dublin Wandering (Recent Work Press, 2024). He is poetry editor of Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature.
Nathaniel Terrell
Nathaniel Terrell is a poet, storyteller, and spoken word artist based in Rochester, New York. Drawing on influences including Gil Scott-Heron, Edgar Allan Poe, and Tupac Shakur, his work combines spiritual reflection, social commentary, and personal testimony in accessible, energetic verse. He began writing seriously around 2008, finding poetry as both creative expression and personal therapy. He is the author of two collections, Is There Not a Cause? (Atmosphere Press, 2021)—a finalist for the American Writing Award—and Before the World Moves On (Warrington Publishing), which received an Honorable Mention in the 2025 Readers' Favorite Book Awards. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Oddball Magazine, New Plains Review, and other literary journals.
Nazim Hikmet
Nazim Hikmet (1902–1963) was born in Thessaloniki, in what was then the Ottoman Empire, and became the most celebrated poet in Turkish literary history. His embrace of free verse and Marxist politics made him a controversial figure throughout his life; he was imprisoned for over a decade in Turkey and spent his final years in exile in Eastern Europe. His poetry ranges from intimate love lyrics to sweeping political panoramas. His major works include Human Landscapes from My Country, composed during his imprisonment, and Things I Didn't Know I Loved. His work has been translated into dozens of languages, and his poem On Living is one of the most widely quoted in world literature. He died in Moscow.
Nicky Finney
Nikky Finney (born in Conway, South Carolina) is a poet and professor whose work engages Black Southern history, the body, the sea, and the lives of women with lyric force and historical depth. She is the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. Her collection Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) won the National Book Award for Poetry. Her earlier collections include Rice (Sister Vision Press, 1995) and The World Is Round (Inner Light Books, 2003). She was a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets and studied at Talladega College. She received an NAACP Image Award and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation.
Nikita Gill
Nikita Gill (born in New Delhi, India) is a British-Indian poet and writer whose work draws on mythology, feminism, and emotional healing to reach a large readership through social media. She grew up in Northern Ireland and later lived in London. Her poetry collections include Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire and Beauty (Trapeze, 2017), Great Goddesses: Life Lessons from Myths and Monsters (2019), and Fierce Fairytales: And Other Stories to Stir Your Soul (2018). Her retellings of classical myths from feminist and feminist perspectives have been widely praised. Her work has appeared on BBC Radio 4 and she is among the most-followed poets on Instagram and Tumblr.
Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni (born in Knoxville, Tennessee) is one of the most celebrated and widely read American poets, known since the late 1960s for her electrifying presence and politically engaged verse. Associated with the Black Arts Movement, her early collections Black Feeling Black Talk (1968) and Black Judgement (1968) established her as a defining voice of the era. Her later work broadened to address childhood, spirituality, nature, and love. She is the author of more than thirty poetry collections and books for children. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech, where she has taught since 1987. She received the Langston Hughes Medal, the NAACP Image Award, and numerous honorary doctorates.
Nikki Grimes
Nikki Grimes (born in New York City) is an American poet and author whose work for children and young adults has earned her a place as one of the most honored voices in contemporary children's literature. She studied at Rutgers University. Her poetry collections include Bronx Masquerade (Dial, 2002), winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, and Ordinary Hazards: A Memoir (WordSong, 2019), a memoir in verse that received the Sibert Medal, the Printz Honor, and the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. She received the Children's Literature Legacy Award from the American Library Association in 2006. Her many books for young readers address identity, family, community, and justice.
Nikky Finney
Nikky Finney (born in Conway, South Carolina) is a poet and professor whose work engages Black Southern history, the body, the sea, and the lives of women with lyric force and historical depth. She is the John H. Bennett Jr. Chair in Southern Letters at the University of South Carolina. Her collection Head Off & Split (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2011) won the National Book Award for Poetry. Her earlier collections include Rice (Sister Vision Press, 1995) and The World Is Round (Inner Light Books, 2003). She was a founding member of the Affrilachian Poets and studied at Talladega College. She received an NAACP Image Award and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation.
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange (1948–2018) was born Paulette Linda Williams in Trenton, New Jersey, and became a pioneering poet, playwright, and novelist. Her chorepoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975) — a series of poetic monologues performed by seven women — was a landmark in American theater and Black feminist art, nominated for Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Awards after its Broadway debut in 1976. She received her BA from Barnard College and an MA from the University of Southern California. Her poetry collections include nappy edges (1978) and a daughter's geography (1983). She taught at several universities, including Houston, Rice, and the University of Florida.
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↑Ocean Vuong
Ocean Vuong (born in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam) came to the United States as a refugee at age two and grew up in Hartford, Connecticut, raised by his mother and grandmother, neither of whom could read. He received his MFA from New York University. His debut poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon, 2016) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Whiting Award, the Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin, 2019) became a New York Times bestseller. He is a MacArthur Fellow and an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Odysseus Elytis
Odysseus Elytis (1911–1996) was born Odysseas Alepoudelis in Heraklion, Crete, and became the most celebrated Greek lyric poet of the twentieth century. Associated with the Surrealist movement in his early work, he developed a poetry rooted in the Aegean landscape, the Greek tradition, and a radiant celebration of light and life. His major work Axion Esti (Worthy It Is, 1959), a complex poem blending liturgy, history, and lyric, is considered a national poem of Greece. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1979. Other significant collections include Orientations (1940) and The Sovereign Sun. He studied law and literature in Athens and spent important years in Paris.
Olivia Gatwood
Olivia Gatwood (born 1992, Albuquerque, New Mexico) is an American poet, novelist, and spoken word artist whose work engages female adolescence, gendered violence, feminism, and true crime culture. She began writing poetry at age eleven in Trinidad and Tobago. A graduate of Pratt Institute's fiction program, she is the author of New American Best Friend (Button Poetry, 2017), a runner-up for the Goodreads Choice Award for Poetry, and Life of the Party (Dial Press, 2019), a meditation on fear and the media's obsession with murdered women. She has developed widely used consent workshops for schools across the country. Her debut novel, Whoever You Are, Honey, was published in 2024.
Orion Carloto
Orion Carloto is a writer, poet, and content creator born and raised in rural Georgia who built a large following on YouTube and Instagram by sharing aesthetic photography and personal writing. Her debut collection Flux (Andrews McMeel, 2017) explored love, loss, depression, and longing in lyric prose and poetry. Her second collection Film for Her (Andrews McMeel, 2020) combined her own 35mm film photographs with poetry and prose, tracing memory, travel, and personal experience across her twenties. She lives in New York and has been praised for the intimacy of her hybrid approach, integrating visual and textual storytelling.
Ovid
Ovid (43 BCE–17/18 CE), born Publius Ovidius Naso in Sulmo, in central Italy, was one of the most prolific and influential poets of ancient Rome. Educated in Rome and Athens in rhetoric and philosophy, he became a celebrated poet before being banished by the Emperor Augustus in 8 CE to Tomis on the Black Sea, where he spent the rest of his life. His major works include Metamorphoses, a mythological epic in fifteen books exploring transformation from creation to Julius Caesar; Ars Amatoria, an ironic guide to love; and Tristia, poems of exile. The Metamorphoses has been among the most influential texts in Western literature, shaping art and poetry from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Ted Hughes.
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↑Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in Parral, Chile, and became the most widely read and translated Spanish-language poet of the twentieth century. His early work Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924), written at nineteen, became a beloved classic. His three-volume Residencia en la Tierra (1933–1947) marks a surrealist turn, while Canto General (1950) is a sweeping epic of Latin American history. He served as a Chilean diplomat and senator and was a member of the Chilean Communist Party. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971 and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953.
Paisley Rekdal
Paisley Rekdal (born 1970, Seattle, Washington) is a poet of Chinese-Norwegian heritage and one of the most critically acclaimed American poets of her generation. She is the author of seven poetry collections, including Animal Eye (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), winner of the Rilke Prize; Nightingale (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), a reimagining of Ovid's myths of transformation and sexual violence; and West: A Translation (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. She earned a BA from the University of Washington and an MFA from the University of Michigan. Named Utah's Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2022, she has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Fellowship. She is a Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah.
Patricia Smith
Patricia Smith (born in Chicago, Illinois) is one of the most celebrated poets in contemporary America, known for her mastery of dramatic persona, her engagement with Black history, and her work as a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam. She received her BA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her collection Blood Dazzler (Coffee House Press, 2008), documenting the devastation of Hurricane Katrina through the voices of victims and survivors, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her collection Incendiary Art (TriQuarterly, 2017) won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. She is a professor at the College of Staten Island and in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University.
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who had been enslaved, and became the first African American poet to achieve national prominence. The son of a Civil War veteran, he published his debut collection Oak and Ivy (1893) at his own expense and gained national attention with Lyrics of Lowly Life (Dodd, Mead, 1896), which included an introduction by William Dean Howells. He wrote in both standard English and African American vernacular dialect, and his work explores Black life, joy, sorrow, and the conditions of post-Reconstruction America. His collections include Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899). He also published four novels. He died of tuberculosis at thirty-three.
Paul Tran
Paul Tran is a Vietnamese-American poet whose work confronts generational trauma, sexual violence, and survival with formal precision and emotional ferocity. A Kundiman Fellow and Cave Canem Fellow, they are the author of All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books, 2022), a debut collection drawing on Greek mythology, personal history, and the Vietnamese-American experience to examine the relationship between language and survival. The collection received widespread praise for its formal innovation and unflinching engagement with harm and healing. Tran has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Poetry Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. Their poems appear in The New Yorker and Poetry. They teach at Washington University in St. Louis.
Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin (1922–1985) was born in Coventry, England, and is regarded as one of the greatest British poets of the post-war era. Educated at St. John's College, Oxford, he spent his professional life as a librarian, ultimately serving as University Librarian at the University of Hull from 1955 until his death. His collections The Less Deceived (1955), The Whitsun Weddings (1964), and High Windows (1974) established him as a poet of austere wit and elegiac precision, preoccupied with mortality, loneliness, and the texture of ordinary English life. He declined the position of Poet Laureate in 1984. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1965 and the Companion of Honour in 1985.
Philippe Jaccottet
Philippe Jaccottet (1925–2021) was born in Moudon, Switzerland, and became one of the most distinguished French-language poets of the twentieth century. He studied in Lausanne and spent much of his adult life in Grignan in the Drôme region of southern France, whose landscape pervades his poetry. His work, characterized by spare lyric attention to the natural world and a sustained meditation on light, time, and mortality, includes L'Ignorant (1958), Leçons (1969), and À la lumière d'hiver (1977). He was also a celebrated translator from German, including Rilke, Musil, and Hölderlin. He received the Grand Prix de Poésie de l'Académie française and the European Prize for Literature.
Phillis Wheatley
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753–1784) was born in West Africa and transported to Boston as a slave child. Purchased by the Wheatley family, she received an exceptional education and began composing poetry as a teenager. In 1773 she became the first African American and one of the first American women to publish a book of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Archibald Bell, London, 1773). Her work is grounded in neoclassical forms and themes of religious devotion, but also engages questions of freedom and the African experience. She was manumitted after the publication of her book. She met with George Washington in 1776. Her work remained largely forgotten until its scholarly recovery in the twentieth century.
Pierre Alex Jeanty
Pierre Alex Jeanty (born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti) is a Haitian-American poet, author, and publisher who immigrated to the United States in 2000, settling in Immokalee, Florida. He founded Jeanius Publishing and has become one of the most widely read contemporary poets in the field of love and relationship poetry. His poetry and prose collections, beginning with Unspoken Feelings of a Gentleman (2014), have reached international audiences. His best-selling series Her (2016) and Her Vol. 2 (2017) celebrate femininity, resilience, and the complexities of romantic relationships in accessible verse. Other collections include Him, To the Women I Once Loved, and Apologies That Never Came. His work has been widely shared on social media and translated internationally.
Poetry by Courtney LeBlanc
Courtney LeBlanc is a poet, editor, and publisher based in Arlington, Virginia. Her poetry addresses grief, friendship, the body, and survival with candor and emotional directness. She is the author of four full-length collections: Beautiful and Full of Monsters (VA Press, 2020), Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart (Riot in Your Throat, 2021), Her Whole Bright Life (Write Bloody, 2023), winner of the Jack McCarthy Book Prize, and Her Dark Everything (Riot in Your Throat, 2025). She served as the third Poet Laureate of Arlington County, Virginia from 2023 to 2025. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press, and a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow.
Poetry by Jendi Reiter
Jendi Reiter is a poet, novelist, and editor whose work engages identity, queerness, and the politics of language with formal range and emotional acuity. They are the author of poetry collections including A Talent for Sadness (Turning Point Books, 2003), Bullies in Love (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2015), Made Man (Little Red Tree Publishing, 2022), and Introvert Pervert (The Word Works, 2026), as well as the chapbooks Swallow (Amsterdam Press, 2009) and Barbie at 50 (Cervena Barva Press, 2010). Their work has appeared in Poetry, The New Criterion, and Best American Poetry 1990. They have received two Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists' Grants for Poetry and the 2010 Anderbo Poetry Prize, and serve as vice president of Winning Writers.
Poetry by Kathy Fagan
Kathy Fagan is a poet and educator based in Columbus, Ohio, where she cofounded the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University. Her collections include Bad Hobby (Milkweed Editions, 2022), Sycamore (Milkweed, 2017), a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2023–24 Guggenheim Fellow, her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, and Best American Poetry. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council. She teaches poetry and coedits The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize Series.
Pádraig Ó Tuama
Pádraig Ó Tuama (born in Cork, Ireland) is a poet, theologian, and conflict mediator whose work engages language, reconciliation, love, and the complexities of Irish identity. He studied theology at Trinity College Dublin and King's College London and served as the leader of the Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland, the island's oldest peace and reconciliation organization, from 2014 to 2019. His poetry collections include Sorry for Your Troubles (Canterbury Press, 2013) and In the Shelter: Finding a Home in the World (Hodder & Stoughton, 2015). He is the host of the Poetry Unbound podcast from the On Being Project, through which he has introduced poetry to millions of listeners worldwide. He lives in New York.
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↑r.h. Sin
r.h. Sin (born in New Brunswick, New Jersey) is a contemporary American poet known for his direct, emotionally raw verse addressing love, heartbreak, resilience, and the experience of women in relationships. He grew up between New Jersey and Florida before moving to New York. His debut collection, Whiskey Words and a Shovel (Andrews McMeel, 2015), was a bestseller and the first of a trilogy, followed by volumes II and III. His writing is distinguished by short, declarative poems that resonate with readers navigating difficult relationships. His subsequent collections include Planting Gardens in Graves and Empty Bottles Full of Stories, all published by Andrews McMeel. His work has reached millions of readers through social media and has appeared in The New Yorker.
Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) was born in Calcutta, Bengal, into a prominent Bengali family, and became the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1913. A poet, philosopher, novelist, playwright, musician, and painter, he worked in Bengali and English and produced an extraordinary body of creative work. His poetry collection Gitanjali (Song Offerings), translated into English with an introduction by W.B. Yeats, won the Nobel Prize. He also composed the national anthems of India and Bangladesh. He founded Visva-Bharati University in West Bengal in 1921, seeking to blend Eastern and Western traditions. His work encompasses more than two thousand songs, the form known as Rabindra Sangeet.
Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout (born in Vallejo, California) is a central figure in the Language Poetry movement and one of the most influential experimental American poets of her generation. She studied at the University of California, San Diego, where she later taught for decades. Her collection Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work is characterized by compressed, interrogative lyric that resists easy interpretation, often probing the processes of perception and social conditioning. She has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Holloway Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) was born in Prague, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and is considered one of the most lyrically gifted poets in the German language. His major works include Das Stunden-Buch (The Book of Hours, 1905), New Poems (1907–1908), The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (prose, 1910), the Duino Elegies (1923), and the Sonnets to Orpheus (1923). Traveling widely across Europe and spending important years in Paris — where he briefly served as Rodin's secretary — he developed a poetry of rigorous inwardness and intense attention to objects. He died in Switzerland from leukemia. His Letters to a Young Poet remains one of the most read books on the craft of writing.
Ray González
Ray Gonzalez (born 1952, El Paso, Texas) is a Chicano poet, essayist, and editor widely recognized as one of the most important voices in Chicano literature. He is the author of more than a dozen collections including Consideration of the Guitar: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2005), The Hawk Temple at Tierra Grande (BOA Editions, 2002), and The Religion of Hands (University of Arizona Press, 2005). He has edited numerous anthologies of Latino poetry, including Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today's Latino Renaissance (1998). Born on the U.S.–Mexico border, his work draws on Chicano history, mythology, and the spiritual landscape of the borderlands. A recipient of the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award, he teaches at the University of Minnesota.
Raymond Antrobus
Raymond Antrobus (born in Hackney, London, England) is a British-Jamaican poet who is among the most acclaimed young poets in the United Kingdom. He holds a degree from Goldsmiths, University of London, and an MA in creative writing from Goldsmiths. Deaf since childhood, his debut collection The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018) won the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, the Sunday Times / Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award, and the Rathbones Folio Prize — a remarkable sweep of major British prizes. His second collection All the Names Given (Picador, 2021) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. He is a Cave Canem Fellow and has won a Pushcart Prize.
Rebecca Gayle Howell
Rebecca Gayle Howell (born in Knoxville, Tennessee) is a poet and translator whose work is rooted in Appalachian landscape, labor history, and the lives of rural communities. She earned her MFA from the University of Virginia and has taught at the Sewanee Writers' Conference. Her debut collection Render / An Apocalypse (Cleveland State University Press, 2013) won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center prize. She has translated the poetry of the Lebanese poet Maxime Kumin and the Jordanian poet Amjad Nasser. She is the poetry editor of Oxford American and has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.
Richard Blanco
Richard Blanco (born in Madrid, Spain) is a Cuban-American poet who was the fifth inaugural poet in United States history, reading One Today at President Obama's second inauguration in 2013, and the first Latino, immigrant, and openly gay person to serve in that role. He grew up in Miami and studied engineering and creative writing at Florida International University, where he also received his MFA. His collections include City of a Hundred Fires (Pittsburgh, 1998), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019). He received the Paterson Poetry Prize and a National Humanities Medal. He teaches at Harvard University's Extension School.
Rick Lupert
Rick Lupert has been a central figure in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990. Known for his wit and travel-inflected observation, he draws on everyday life, Judaism, and the pleasures of the mundane to create accessible, humorous verse. He is the author of more than twenty-seven collections, including God Wrestler: A Poem for Every Torah Portion, The Tokyo-Van Nuys Express, and I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii (Ain't Got No Press). He founded the Poetry Super Highway, an online resource for poets, and hosted the Cobalt Cafe reading series for over twenty years. He is the recipient of the 2017 Ted Slade Award and the 2014 Beyond Baroque Distinguished Service Award, and is a three-time Pushcart Prize nominee.
Rita Dove
Rita Dove (born in Akron, Ohio) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, the first African American and the youngest person to hold the position. She received her BA from Miami University and her MFA from the University of Iowa. Her collection Thomas and Beulah (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986), a narrative sequence based on her maternal grandparents' lives, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia. Her many honors include the National Humanities Medal, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service, and the Heinz Award. Her selected poems are collected in Collected Poems 1974–2004 (Norton, 2016).
Robert Bly
Robert Bly (1926–2021) was born in Madison, Minnesota, and became one of the most influential American poets, translators, and cultural critics of the second half of the twentieth century. He founded the literary magazine The Fifties (later The Sixties, The Seventies), which introduced deep image poetry and significant translations to American readers. His collection The Light Around the Body (Harper and Row, 1967) won the National Book Award. He was a prominent anti-Vietnam War activist. His later cultural work includes Iron John: A Book About Men (1990), a bestselling investigation of masculine mythology. His translations of Neruda, Rilke, Lorca, and Kabir were enormously influential in shaping American poetry's relationship to world literature.
Robert Frost
Robert Frost (1874–1963) was born in San Francisco, California, but is most identified with rural New England, the landscape of his greatest poetry. His debut collection A Boy's Will (1913) and its successor North of Boston (1914) were published in England to immediate critical acclaim. Returning to America, he became the most celebrated American poet of his time. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, for New Hampshire (1923), Collected Poems (1930), A Further Range (1936), and A Witness Tree (1942). He recited The Gift Outright at John F. Kennedy's inauguration in 1961. His apparently simple verse conceals formal mastery and a deeply ambivalent vision of the natural world and human isolation.
Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, into a prominent New England family, and became one of the central figures of confessional poetry. His landmark collection Life Studies (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959), which broke with formal verse to narrate intimate family history, transformed American poetry. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice — for Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and The Dolphin (1973). He was a conscientious objector during World War II and was imprisoned for that refusal. He taught at Boston University, where his students included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He received the National Book Award and served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.
Robinson Jeffers
Robinson Jeffers (1887–1962) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and settled in Carmel, California, where he built Tor House and its stone tower by hand on the rugged Pacific coast — a landscape that gave his poetry its elemental character. He developed a philosophy he called inhumanism, turning away from human solipsism toward the enduring beauty of the non-human world. His major works include Tamar and Other Poems (1924), Roan Stallion, Tamar and Other Poems (1925), and The Double Axe and Other Poems (1948). He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Ron Padgett
Ron Padgett (born 1942, Tulsa, Oklahoma) is an American poet, translator, and essayist associated with the second generation of the New York School. He studied with Kenneth Koch at Columbia University and has lived on the Lower East Side of New York City since the 1960s. Among his more than twenty collections are Great Balls of Fire (1969), Collected Poems (Coffee House Press, 2013), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Alone and Not Alone (Coffee House Press, 2015). How Long (Coffee House Press, 2011) was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. Seven of his poems appear in Jim Jarmusch's 2016 film Paterson. He is also an accomplished translator of Guillaume Apollinaire and other French poets.
Ross Gay
Ross Gay (born in Youngstown, Ohio) is a poet and essayist whose work explores joy, grief, Black American life, and the radical possibilities of delight with exuberant lyric energy. He received his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and his PhD from Temple University. His debut collection Against Which (CavanKerry Press, 2006) was followed by Bringing the Shovel Down (Pittsburgh, 2011) and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (Pittsburgh, 2015), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His essay collection The Book of Delights (Algonquin, 2019) was a New York Times bestseller. He is a professor at Indiana University Bloomington and a founding editor of the Bloomington Community Orchard.
Rudy Francisco
Rudy Francisco (born in San Diego, California) is a slam poet and author whose work addresses race, love, masculinity, and the search for identity with directness and emotional honesty. He is one of the most prominent figures in contemporary spoken word and has won multiple competitions including the San Diego Grand Slam championship and the Individual World Poetry Slam. He is the author of Helium (Button Poetry, 2017), which became a national bestseller, and I'll Fly Away (Button Poetry, 2021). He received his BA from the University of San Diego and later earned a master's degree in social psychology. His work has been widely shared online and has reached millions of viewers worldwide.
Rupi Kaur
Rupi Kaur (born in Punjab, India) immigrated to Canada as a child and grew up in Brampton, Ontario. She studied rhetoric and professional writing at the University of Waterloo. Her debut collection milk and honey (Andrews McMeel, 2014), self-published before being picked up by Andrews McMeel, sold over three million copies and spent more than a year on The New York Times bestseller list, making Kaur one of the best-selling poets of the twenty-first century. Her subsequent collections the sun and her flowers (2017) and home body (2020) have also been international bestsellers. Her work, distributed widely through Instagram, addresses trauma, healing, femininity, and the immigrant experience in spare, accessible verse.
Ruth Stone
Ruth Stone (1915–2011) was born in Roanoke, Virginia, and is recognized as one of the most remarkable voices in twentieth-century American poetry, whose work gained its fullest recognition only late in her life. She received her BA from the University of Illinois. Following the suicide of her husband, the poet Walter Stone, in 1959, she raised three daughters alone, teaching at dozens of universities to support her family before settling at SUNY Binghamton. Her collection In the Next Galaxy (Copper Canyon, 2002) won the National Book Award for Poetry. She received the Wallace Stevens Award and the Vermont Poet Laureate designation. Her What Love Comes To: New & Selected Poems was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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↑Saeed Jones
Saeed Jones (born in Memphis, Tennessee) is a poet and essayist who grew up in Lewisville, Texas. He received his MFA from Rutgers University-Newark. His debut collection Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014) won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and the Stonewall Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award. His memoir How We Fight for Our Lives (Simon & Schuster, 2019) won the Kirkus Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography. He was the co-host of BuzzFeed News's LGBT morning show AM to DM and received a Whiting Award.
Sandra Beasley
Sandra Beasley is an American poet and nonfiction writer known for witty, formally dexterous work on science, American history, and the domestic body. She is the author of Theories of Falling (New Issues Press, 2008); I Was the Jukebox (Norton, 2010), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize; Count the Waves (Norton, 2015); and Made to Explode (Norton, 2021). Her memoir Don't Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life (Crown, 2011) chronicles living with severe multiple food allergies. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, Poetry, and Ploughshares. She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Tampa and American University.
Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros (born in Chicago, Illinois) is a Chicana author best known for her celebrated novel The House on Mango Street (Arte Público Press, 1984), a touchstone of Chicano literature widely taught in schools and universities. She studied at Loyola University Chicago and received her MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She has published two collections of poetry: Bad Boys (Mango Publications, 1980) and Loose Woman (Knopf, 1994). She has received the MacArthur Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. She has been a writer-in-residence at universities across the United States and lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
Sappho
Sappho (c. 630–570 BCE) was born on the island of Lesbos in ancient Greece and is one of the earliest lyric poets in the Western literary tradition whose work has survived, however fragmentarily. Ancient sources credited her with nine books of poetry, of which only fragments remain — the most complete being the Hymn to Aphrodite and the Tithonus poem, rediscovered on papyrus in 2004. Her verse is characterized by musical refinement, personal directness, and the expression of erotic longing, primarily directed at women. Plato called her the Tenth Muse. The Sapphic stanza, a metrical form she employed, bears her name and was adopted by Catullus and Horace. The word lesbian derives from the island of her birth.
Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale (1884–1933) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and became a celebrated lyric poet known for her mellifluous, emotionally direct verse on love, beauty, and death. Her collection Love Songs (Macmillan, 1917) won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize, an award that later became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry — making her effectively the first recipient. Her other notable collections include Rivers to the Sea (1915), Flame and Shadow (1920), and Strange Victory (1933), published after her death by suicide. Her work, though written in traditional forms, influenced the development of American lyric poetry in the early twentieth century.
Seamus Heaney
Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) was born on a farm in County Derry, Northern Ireland, and became the most celebrated Irish poet since W.B. Yeats. His debut collection, Death of a Naturalist (Faber and Faber, 1966), announced a major new voice steeped in rural Irish landscape and the textures of ordinary life. His later work engaged the political violence of the Troubles, memory, and translation, most notably in Field Work (1979), Station Island (1984), and his acclaimed translation of Beowulf (Faber, 1999), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He taught at Harvard University and was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1989 to 1994.
Serhiy Zhadan
Serhiy Zhadan (born in Starobilsk, Ukraine) is the most prominent Ukrainian poet and writer of his generation and a prominent figure of cultural resistance following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He received his PhD in philology from Kharkiv Pedagogical University and is based in Kharkiv, where he remained throughout the war. His poetry collections include Antenna (2018) and How Fire Descends (Yale University Press, 2023), and he has published novels including Mesopotamia (2015) and The Orphanage (2019). He received the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking, the Carl Zuckmayer Medal, the Petrarch Prize for literature, and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2022.
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. Best known for thirty-seven plays ranging from tragedy to comedy to history, he was also a poet of significant achievement. His Sonnets, first published in 1609, comprise 154 poems exploring themes of love, beauty, time, and mortality, addressed to an unnamed Fair Youth and Dark Lady. His longer narrative poems include Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). He was a shareholder and principal playwright at the Globe Theatre. His work has been translated into every major language and performed continuously since the late sixteenth century.
Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds (born in San Francisco, California) is one of the most celebrated and widely read American confessional poets, known for the unflinching explicitness of her poems about the body, sexuality, family, and the visceral textures of human experience. She received her BA from Stanford University and her PhD from Columbia University. Her collection The Dead and the Living (Knopf, 1984) won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lamont Poetry Selection. Stag's Leap (Knopf, 2012), documenting the end of her marriage, won both the Pulitzer Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize — a rare double recognition. She has been a clinical professor of creative writing at New York University for many years.
Shel Silverstein
Shel Silverstein (1930–1999) was born in Chicago, Illinois, and became one of the most beloved children's poets in American literary history, while also working as a cartoonist, songwriter, and author. His poetry collections for children, Where the Sidewalk Ends (Harper and Row, 1974) and A Light in the Attic (1981), have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and remain perennial bestsellers. His verse combines anarchic humor, gentle subversiveness, and memorable imagery to encourage the pleasure of reading. As a songwriter, he wrote A Boy Named Sue, recorded by Johnny Cash, and The Cover of the Rolling Stone. He was also a longtime cartoonist for Playboy magazine.
Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz Sharif (born in Istanbul, Turkey) is an Iranian-American poet whose debut collection Look (Graywolf, 2016), which appropriates the language of the U.S. Department of Defense's Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her second collection, Customs (Graywolf, 2022), continues her investigation of war, language, and displacement. Born to Iranian parents, she grew up in Miami and received her MFA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and the Rome Prize. She teaches at Arizona State University.
Sophus Helle
Sophus Helle is a Danish translator and cultural historian specializing in the poetry of ancient Iraq. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from Aarhus University and an MA in Assyriology from the University of Copenhagen. He won the European Young Researcher Award 2020 and has been a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. His English translation of Gilgamesh: A New Translation of the Ancient Epic (Yale University Press, 2021), made directly from the Akkadian, was praised in the New York Review of Books and the Boston Globe. His translation of The Complete Poems of Enheduana, The World's First Author (Yale University Press, 2023) introduced the ancient Sumerian high priestess to English-speaking readers. He is managing editor of the Library of Babylonian Literature.
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enjoyed a literary career of extraordinary longevity, publishing his final collection at the age of ninety-seven. Educated at Harvard University, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Selected Poems: 1928–1958 (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1958). He served as Poet Laureate of the United States twice, in 1974 and from 2000 to 2001. His collection The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928–1978 won the National Book Award. He cofounded the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Poets House in New York City, and was a founding member of the journal Antaeus. He taught at Columbia University for many years.
Stephen Mitchell
Stephen Mitchell (born in Brooklyn, New York) is an American poet and translator known for his influential English versions of major canonical texts, including the Tao Te Ching (1988), the Bhagavad Gita (2000), the Book of Job (1987), and the complete poetry and prose of Rainer Maria Rilke. His translations are celebrated for their lyric accessibility and spiritual attunement. He studied at Amherst College, the University of Paris, and Yale University. His original poetry is collected in Parables and Portraits (1990) and The Frog Prince: A Fairy Tale for Consenting Adults (1999). He is also the author of A Mind at Home with Itself (2018), a commentary on the Diamond Sutra, co-written with Byron Katie.
Steve Kowit
Steve Kowit (1938–2015) was born in Brooklyn, New York, and became a poet, teacher, and activist based in San Diego, California. He studied at Brooklyn College, San Francisco State University, and the University of San Diego. Known for his humor, his warm teaching presence, and his engagement with animal rights and social justice, he taught widely in the San Diego area and influenced generations of poets through his craft book In the Palm of Your Hand: The Poet's Portable Workshop (Tilbury House, 1995), one of the most widely used introductions to writing poetry. His poetry collections include Lurid Confessions (1983) and The First Noble Truth (2007). He was a founder of San Diego Writers Ink.
Su Cho
Su Cho (born in South Korea) is a Korean American poet and essayist who grew up in Indiana after immigrating with her family as a young child. She received her MFA in poetry from Indiana University and her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her debut collection The Symmetry of Fish (Penguin, 2022) won the 2021 National Poetry Series, chosen by Paige Lewis, and received a starred review in Library Journal. The collection braids Korean family memory, immigrant language, food, and folklore to trace how stories and phrases are passed down across generations. She has served as editor-in-chief of Indiana Review and Cream City Review, and as guest editor of Poetry magazine. She received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Vanderbilt University.
Suheir Hammad
Suheir Hammad (born in Amman, Jordan) is a Palestinian-American poet, author, and activist who grew up in Brooklyn, New York, after her family fled the Lebanese Civil War. She first gained national attention as a cast member of the critically acclaimed Def Poetry Jam Broadway show in 2002. Her poetry collections include Born Palestinian, Born Black (1996), Drops of This Story (1996), and ZaatarDiva (2005). Her poem First Writing Since, written in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, was widely circulated and is considered one of the most significant literary responses to that event. She received a Pushcart Prize and the Audre Lorde Award.
Susan Rich
Susan Rich (born in Boston, Massachusetts) is a poet and teacher whose work engages travel, diplomacy, global justice, and the intersections of place and identity. She has worked as an election supervisor in Bosnia-Herzegovina and as a human rights trainer with Amnesty International in Gaza and Nigeria. Her collections include The Cartographer's Tongue / Poems of the World (2000), Cures Include Travel (White Pine Press, 2006), and Cloud Pharmacy (White Pine, 2014). She received an Arts Innovator Award from the Artist Trust of Washington State, Fulbright Senior Specialist designation, and a PEN/USA Literary Award. She teaches at Highline College in Washington State.
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and is among the most widely read and studied American poets of the twentieth century. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she met Ted Hughes. Her sole collection published in her lifetime, The Colossus and Other Poems (Heinemann, 1960), was followed posthumously by Ariel (1965), whose confessional intensity and formal power established her as a major poet. The Collected Poems (Harper and Row, 1981), edited by Hughes, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1982. Her novel The Bell Jar (1963) is a widely taught autobiographical work.
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↑T.S. Eliot
T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and became the most influential poet of twentieth-century modernism in the English language. Educated at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Merton College, Oxford, he settled in England and became a British subject in 1927. His poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) announced a radically new poetic sensibility; The Waste Land (1922), with its fragmented structure and allusive density, reshaped the possibilities of poetry. His four long poems Four Quartets (1943) are considered a crowning achievement. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 and the Order of Merit the same year. He spent much of his career as an editor and publisher at Faber and Faber.
Tayi Tibble
Tayi Tibble (born in Wellington, New Zealand) is a Māori poet of Te Ātitawa and Ngāti Porou descent who has rapidly become one of the most celebrated young voices in New Zealand literature. She studied at Victoria University of Wellington. Her debut collection Poūkahangatus (Victoria University Press, 2018) was published when she was twenty-two and immediately established her as a major new voice, winning the Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry. Her second collection Rangikura (2021) further confirmed her reputation. She received the Sarah Broom Poetry Prize and the University of Otago's Robert Burns Fellowship. Her work has been praised for its irreverent, playful engagement with Māori identity, digital culture, and femininity.
Ted Kooser
Ted Kooser (born in Ames, Iowa) served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2004 to 2006 and is one of the most beloved American poets of the Great Plains. He worked for thirty-five years as an executive at Lincoln Benefit Life Company in Nebraska while writing poetry. He received his MA from the University of Nebraska. His collection Delights & Shadows (Copper Canyon, 2004) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has received two NEA fellowships and a Pushcart Prize. His American Life in Poetry newspaper column, which he began as Poet Laureate, reaches millions of readers weekly. He is Presidential Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Terrance Hayes
Terrance Hayes (born in Columbia, South Carolina) is one of the most formally inventive and critically acclaimed American poets of his generation. He received his BA from Coker College and his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he later became a professor. His collection Lighthead (Penguin, 2010) won the National Book Award for Poetry. Earlier collections include Wind in a Box (Penguin, 2006) and Hip Logic (Penguin, 2002). His collection American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin, 2018) was a finalist for the National Book Award. He has received a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and fellowships from the NEA. He is a professor at New York University.
Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux (1946–2017) was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, and became one of the most beloved and widely taught American poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He received his MFA from Emerson College. He taught at Sarah Lawrence College for more than thirty years before moving to Georgia Tech, where he was the Bourne Professor of Poetry. His collections include Memory's Handgrenade (1972), Half Promised Land (Houghton Mifflin, 1986), Split Horizon (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), and New and Selected Poems 1975–1995 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). He received the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was known for his surreal wit and accessibility.
Toi Derricotte
Toi Derricotte (born in Hamtramck, Michigan) is a poet and educator whose work explores race, the Black middle class, trauma, and the intimate textures of womanhood and family with lyric precision and unflinching candor. She received her BA from Wayne State University and her MFA from New York University. Her collections include Natural Birth (Crossing Press, 1983), Tender (Pittsburgh, 1997), and I (Pittsburgh, 2019), which won the PEN/Voelcker Award. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem, the influential workshop and retreat for African American poets, in 1996. She received the Paterson Poetry Prize, the Lucille Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Tomas Tranströmer
Tomas Tranströmer (1931–2015) was born in Stockholm, Sweden, and became the most celebrated Scandinavian poet of the twentieth century. Working as a psychologist for most of his professional life, he published sparingly — fewer than ten thin collections — but with exceptional concentration and impact. His poetry employs vivid imagery to meditate on the threshold between sleeping and waking, the interior life and the external world, silence and language. His collections include 17 Poems (1954) and The Half-Finished Heaven. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2011, cited for giving readers fresh access to reality. Robert Bly's translations of his work introduced him to a wide American readership.
Tony Hoagland
Tony Hoagland (1953–2018) was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and became one of the most widely taught and discussed American poets of his generation, known for his satirical intelligence, emotional candor, and formal dexterity. His collections include Sweet Ruin (University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), winner of the Brittingham Prize, Donkey Gospel (Graywolf, 1998), and What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf, 2003). He taught in the MFA programs at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Houston. He received the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, the James Laughlin Award, and an NEA Fellowship. His craft essays were collected in Real Sofistikashun (Graywolf, 2006).
Traci Brimhall
Traci Brimhall (born in Iowa) is a poet whose work engages loss, grief, ecological devastation, and the tensions between faith and doubt with lyric intensity and mythological range. She received her MFA from Western Michigan University and her PhD from Florida State University. Her debut collection Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010) won the Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award. Subsequent collections include Our Lady of the Ruins (Norton, 2012), which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize, and Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod (Copper Canyon, 2020). She is an associate professor of creative writing at Kansas State University and has received NEA and Sustainable Arts Foundation fellowships.
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith (born in Falmouth, Massachusetts) served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She received her BA from Harvard University and her MFA from Columbia University. Her collection Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her other collections include Duende (Graywolf, 2007), winner of the James Laughlin Award, and Wade in the Water (Graywolf, 2018). As Poet Laureate, she brought poetry to rural communities across America through the American Conversations project. She is a professor of creative writing at Harvard University and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets.
Trista Mateer
Trista Mateer is an American poet and author from Maryland known for emotionally direct, intimate poetry about love, loss, grief, and self-discovery. Her collections include Honeybee (Central Avenue Publishing, 2015), The Dogs I Have Kissed (Central Avenue, 2016), and Aphrodite Made Me Do It (Central Avenue, 2019), a myth-inspired retelling that reimagines the goddess's stories through a contemporary lens. Mateer's work has resonated with a generation of young readers through its accessible verse and honest engagement with trauma, queer identity, and mental health. She also runs a popular Patreon and has built a community around her writing workshops.
V
↑Victor Hernández Cruz
Victor Hernandez Cruz (born in Aguas Buenas, Puerto Rico) emigrated to New York City as a child and became a foundational voice in Nuyorican poetry. His debut collection, Snaps (Random House, 1969), published when he was nineteen, was among the first bilingual Latino poetry collections to receive major mainstream attention. His work blends Spanish and English, jazz rhythms, Caribbean oral tradition, and New York street life in a formally inventive poetry of celebration and resistance. He is a founding member of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. His collections include Mainland (1973), Tropicalization (1976), and Red Beans (1991). He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang (born in Detroit, Michigan) is a poet whose work has increasingly moved toward elegy and formal experimentation to confront grief, the loss of language, and questions of identity. She received her BA from the University of Michigan, her MA from Harvard University, and her MBA and MFA from Stanford University. Her collection Obit (Copper Canyon, 2020), composed of obituary-style poems written after her mother's death, received the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Her collection The Trees Witness Everything (Copper Canyon, 2022) was awarded the Poetry Society of America Norma Farber First Book Award. She is the Program Chair of Antioch University's low-residency MFA program.
Victoria Redel
Victoria Redel is an American poet and fiction writer known for lyric work that moves across tenderness, grief, and the elemental textures of domestic and erotic life. She is the author of the novel Loverboy (Harcourt, 2001) and the poetry collections Already the World (2019), Woman Without Umbrella (Four Way Books, 2012), and Swoon (University of Chicago Press, 2003). Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and Ploughshares. She has received fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College.
Virgil
Virgil (70 BCE–19 CE), born Publius Vergilius Maro in Mantua, in northern Italy, is one of ancient Rome's greatest poets. He wrote three major works: the Eclogues (c. 37 BCE), pastoral poems influenced by Theocritus; the Georgics (c. 29 BCE), a didactic poem on agriculture and rural life that celebrates the Italian landscape; and the Aeneid, an epic in twelve books recounting the journey of Aeneas from Troy to the founding of Rome, left unfinished at his death. The Aeneid became the foundational text of Roman imperial identity and one of the most influential works in Western literary history, shaping Dante, Milton, and countless others. Virgil was closely associated with the patron Maecenas and Emperor Augustus.
W
↑W. H. Auden
W.H. Auden (1907–1973) was born in York, England, and is widely considered one of the greatest English-language poets of the twentieth century. Educated at Christ Church, Oxford, he became the leading voice of a group of politically engaged poets in the 1930s. He emigrated to the United States in 1939, becoming an American citizen in 1946. His major collections include The Orators (1932), The Age of Anxiety (Random House, 1947) — which won the Pulitzer Prize — and About the House (1965). He received the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, and served as Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1956 to 1961. His elegies In Memory of W.B. Yeats and Musée des Beaux Arts are among the most celebrated poems of the century.
W. S. Merwin
W.S. Merwin (1927–2019) was born in New York City and became one of the most honored American poets of the post-war era, celebrated for the moral clarity of his environmental consciousness and formal evolution across eight decades of work. He served as United States Poet Laureate from 2010 to 2011. His collection The Carrier of Ladders (Atheneum, 1970) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He received a second Pulitzer for The Shadow of Sirius (Copper Canyon, 2009). A committed environmental advocate, he spent his later life on a reclaimed pineapple plantation in Hawaii that he restored to native forest. He received the Bollingen Prize, the Tanning Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Walt Whitman
Walt Whitman (1819–1892) was born in West Hills, Long Island, New York, and is widely regarded as the father of free verse and one of the defining voices of American literature. His landmark collection Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855 and revised across nine editions, contains Song of Myself, I Sing the Body Electric, and When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, his elegy for Abraham Lincoln. He worked as a journalist, essayist, and government clerk, and volunteered as a nurse during the Civil War — an experience that deeply shaped his later poetry. His embrace of the body, democracy, and multitudinous selfhood transformed American poetry.
Wanda Coleman
Wanda Coleman (1946–2013) was born in Watts, Los Angeles, and became one of the most powerful and uncompromising voices in Los Angeles literary culture, widely regarded as the unofficial poet laureate of the city. She received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the 2012 Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her many collections include Imagoes (Black Sparrow, 1983), African Sleeping Sickness (Black Sparrow, 1990), and Mercurochrome (Black Sparrow, 2001), a National Book Award finalist. Her poetry engages race, poverty, sexuality, and the violent beauty of urban life with vernacular precision.
Warsan Shire
Warsan Shire (born in Nairobi, Kenya) is a British-Somali poet who grew up in London and is among the most celebrated young poets writing in English. She was the inaugural Young Poet Laureate for London in 2013 and was named Poet in Residence for the 2015 migration crisis in Europe by Amnesty International. Her debut pamphlet Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (flipped eye, 2011) brought her wide recognition. She gained international attention when her poetry was featured in Beyoncé's visual album Lemonade (2016) and her poetry collection Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head (Random House, 2022) became her first full-length collection. She received a Forward Prize nomination and the Brunel University African Poetry Prize.
Wendy Cope
Wendy Cope (born in Erith, Kent, England) is one of the most widely read British poets, celebrated for her comic intelligence, formal skill, and the way she applies classical forms to contemporary emotional life. She studied history at St Hilda's College, Oxford. Her debut collection Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis (Faber and Faber, 1986) was an immediate bestseller, and she has remained one of the top-selling poets in the United Kingdom. Other collections include Serious Concerns (1992) and Family Values (2011). She received the CBE in 2010 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2020. Her verse satirizes the pretensions of literary culture with particular sharpness.
Whitney Hanson
Whitney Hanson (born in rural Montana) is a poet and TikTok phenomenon who reached millions of readers by reciting her short, emotionally accessible poems on social media. She attended university in South Carolina. Her debut collection Climate (self-published, 2021) was assembled organically from poems she wrote and shared online during the pandemic. Her follow-up collection Home (Penguin, 2022), a lyrical map to navigating heartbreak with poems tracing the stages of grief and healing, became a bestseller reaching multiple countries. She has since published Harmony (2023) and The Love of My Life. She has over 1.6 million followers on TikTok and is known for her belief that poetry is a key to genuine vulnerability and human connection.
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) was born in Oswestry, Shropshire, England, and is regarded as the greatest poet of the First World War. Commissioned as an officer in the British Army, he suffered shell shock and was treated at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, who encouraged and shaped his verse. His poems — including Dulce et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting, and Anthem for Doomed Youth — confront the horror of trench warfare with stark imagery and technical mastery. Only five of his poems were published during his lifetime. He was killed in action one week before the Armistice. His Collected Poems were edited posthumously by Sassoon in 1920.
William Blake
William Blake (1757–1827) was born in London and is one of the most singular figures in the history of English literature and visual art. Working as an engraver, he produced his poetry as illuminated books — hand-lettered and illustrated — of which Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) are the most widely known. His prophetic books, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (c. 1790) and Milton (c. 1804–1811), develop an elaborate personal mythology opposing institutional religion and materialist philosophy. Almost entirely unrecognized as a poet during his lifetime, his posthumous reputation grew steadily; he is now considered a foundational figure of Romanticism and a visionary artist of extraordinary originality.
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams (1883–1963) was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and practiced medicine there his entire life while producing a body of poetry central to American modernism. Educated at the University of Pennsylvania medical school, where he knew Ezra Pound and H.D., he developed a poetics grounded in the American vernacular, the local, and the visual — summarized in the dictum: no ideas but in things. His major collections include Spring and All (1923), Paterson (New Directions, 1946–1958), a book-length poem about his home city, and Pictures from Brueghel (1962), which won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously. He received the National Book Award in 1950 and the Bollingen Prize in 1953.
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, and is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language. Best known for thirty-seven plays ranging from tragedy to comedy to history, he was also a poet of significant achievement. His Sonnets, first published in 1609, comprise 154 poems exploring themes of love, beauty, time, and mortality, addressed to an unnamed Fair Youth and Dark Lady. His longer narrative poems include Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). He was a shareholder and principal playwright at the Globe Theatre. His work has been translated into every major language and performed continuously since the late sixteenth century.
William Sieghart
William Sieghart (born in England) is a British publisher, charity founder, and poetry advocate who founded the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 1992, establishing one of the most prestigious annual prizes in British poetry. He is the chair of Forward Arts Foundation. He compiled the anthology Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry and the popular volume The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried-and-True Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul (Particular Books, 2017), which draws on poetry as a tool for emotional and psychological health. He is a former chairman of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and received a CBE for services to the arts in 2017.
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) was born in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England, and is one of the founding figures of English Romanticism. With Samuel Taylor Coleridge, he co-authored Lyrical Ballads (1798), whose Preface, advocating a poetry of ordinary language and natural emotion, became the manifesto of English Romantic poetry. His long autobiographical poem The Prelude, composed over much of his adult life and published posthumously in 1850, traces the growth of a poet's consciousness. Other major works include Tintern Abbey, Ode: Intimations of Immortality, and the sonnet The World Is Too Much with Us. He was appointed Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom in 1843.
X
↑Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo (born in San Gabriel, California) is a Chicana poet, educator, and activist, the daughter of Mexican immigrants. She received her BA from California State University, Long Beach, and her MFA in creative writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. Her debut collection Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016), inspired by volunteer work with the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths at the Arizona-Mexico border, received widespread praise. Her second collection Incantation: Love Poems for Battle Sites (Mouthfeel Press, 2023) memorializes Black and brown lives lost to state violence. She is a former Steinbeck Fellow, a co-founder of Women Who Submit, and was the first Poet in the Parks resident at Gettysburg National Military Park in partnership with the Poetry Foundation.
Y
↑Yrsa Daley-Ward
Yrsa Daley-Ward (born in Chorley, Lancashire, England) is a British-Jamaican poet and model whose work explores race, sexuality, trauma, and healing with raw emotional directness. She self-published her debut collection bone in 2014 before it was reissued by Penguin Books in 2017, reaching an international audience. Her second collection The How (Penguin, 2019) expanded her readership further. Her memoir in verse The Terrible (Penguin, 2018) recounts her Jehovah's Witness upbringing and path to self-acceptance. Her work has been widely shared on Instagram and praised for its capacity to give voice to experiences of trauma and survival. She has appeared in campaigns for H&M, Nike, and Victoria's Secret.
Yung Pueblo
Yung Pueblo is the pen name of Diego Perez, a writer and meditator born in Ecuador who grew up in Massachusetts. His poetry and prose, strongly influenced by his meditation practice in the Vipassana tradition, explores emotional healing, self-awareness, and inner transformation. His debut collection Inward (Andrews McMeel, 2018) became a bestseller. Subsequent titles include Clarity & Connection (2021) and The Way Forward (2022). His work has been widely shared on social media, particularly Instagram. He has been open about overcoming addiction as a young person and credits meditation with his personal transformation. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and collaborator.
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa (born in Bogalusa, Louisiana) is one of the major American poets of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, known for the musical richness of his verse and its engagement with jazz, Vietnam, race, and Southern Black experience. He served in the Vietnam War and worked as a military journalist. His collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1993) won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and the William Faulkner Prize. He received his MFA from the University of California, Irvine. He is a professor at New York University. His other major collections include Dien Cai Dau (1988) and Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000).
Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016) was born in Tours, France, and became the preeminent French poet of the second half of the twentieth century. His debut collection Du Mouvement et de l'Immobilité de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, 1953), a meditation on death and presence, established him as a major voice. His poetry engages the question of presence and the real against the abstractions of language, drawing on art history, philosophy, and metaphysics. He held the Chair of Comparative Studies of Poetic Function at the Collège de France from 1981 to 1993. He received the Prix Goncourt for poetry, the Franz Kafka Prize, and the Griffin International Poetry Prize. He was also a celebrated translator of Shakespeare and Yeats into French.
Z
↑Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi
Zaynab Iliyasu Bobi is a Nigerian poet who writes in English and Hausa. She is among the most widely recognized voices in contemporary African poetry, known for her work engaging northern Nigerian culture, womanhood, Islam, and the politics of identity. She is the founding editor of Nagari, a literary magazine focused on Nigerian writing. She received the Brunel University African Poetry Prize in 2019 and was longlisted for the Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, World Literature Today, and other major publications. She studies and advocates for poetry in Hausa, one of the most widely spoken languages in West Africa, alongside her work in English.
Zeina Hashem Beck
Zeina Hashem Beck (born in Tripoli, Lebanon) is a Lebanese poet writing in English whose work braids together the personal and the political — family, displacement, Arabic music, and the violence of the contemporary Middle East. She received her BA from the American University of Beirut and her MA from the University of Birmingham. Her debut collection To Live in Autumn won the 2013 Backwaters Prize. Her collection Louder than Hearts (Bauhan Publishing, 2017) won the May Sarton Poetry Prize. Her collection O (Penguin, 2022) was published internationally. She has received the Poetry Foundation's Arab American Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.