STEPHEN DOBYNS born 1941, has published 12 books of poems and 20 novels. His collections include Mystery, So Long (2005); The Porcupine’s Kisses (2002); Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (1999); Common Carnage (1996); Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (1994). He has won a Melville Cane Award; the National Poetry Series; and the Lamont Poetry Prize of The Academy of American Poets. His renowned book of essays, Best Words, Best Order (1996) is now in its 2nd edition. Recipient of NEA and Guggenheim fellowships, he has taught in MFA programs at Warren Wilson, Sarah Lawrence, Iowa, Emerson, Syracuse, Boston University, and more.
Stephen Dobyns is teaching an advanced workshop, "The Poem's Intention" at this year's festival. Find out more about Stephen Dobyns at the Academy of American Poets website.
While CAROLYN FORCHÉ is a poet most strongly identified with social conscience and “the poetry of witness,” her work is also deeply spiritual, mystical, and filled with praise for human existence. She was powerfully influenced by the time she spent in El Salvador as a human rights activist, and later her work in Lebanon and South Africa. Her first volume, Gathering the Tribes, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize, was followed by The Country Between Us, The Angel of History, and Blue Hour. She has also translated Mahmoud Darwish, Claribel Alegria and Robert Desnos. Her famed international anthology, Against Forgetting, has been praised by Nelson Mandela as "itself a blow against tyranny, against prejudice, against injustice." In 1998 in Stockholm, she received the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture Award, for her human rights advocacy and the preservation of memory and culture. She is currently at work on a memoir, begun at the prompting of her former student, Ilya Kaminsky which is, in part, a conversation between them. Forché holds the Lannan Chair of Poetry at Georgetown University.
Find out more about Carolyn Forché at the Academy of American Poets website: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/214.
THOMAS LUX’s latest collection is God Particles (Houghton Mifflin 2008). Other books include The Cradle Place; The Street of Clocks; New and Selected Poems: 1975-1995, a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize; The Blind Swimmer: Selected Early Poems: 1970-1975; and Split Horizon, winner of the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award. His distinguished teaching career includes twenty-seven years on the writing faculty and as Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence. He has taught at Emerson College, Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and other universities. A finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and recipient of three NEA grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
The Academy of American poets has an extensive page on Thomas Lux to be found at http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/115.
An interview conducted by J.M. Spalding of The Cortland Review may be accessed here: http://www.cortlandreview.com/issue/8/lux8i.htm
JEAN VALENTINE, Poet Laureate of the State of New York, has lived most of her life in New York City. She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her tenth and most recent book of poetry is Little Boat (Wesleyan, 2007). Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965 - 2003, won the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Lucy, a chapbook, is just out from Sarabande Books. Author of ten other books, Jean has received fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, Bunting Institute, Rockefeller Foundation, New York Council for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, Teasdale Poetry Prize, and Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, New York University, Columbia University, and the 92nd Street Y.
Jean Valentine's website can be found here: http://www.jeanvalentine.com/ or you can read more about Jean at the American Academy of Poets website: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/760.
DAVID WOJAHN's most recent collection, Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 (Pittsburgh, 2006) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, and Icehouse Lights. Wojahn is the recipient of the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Society of Midland Authors Book Award, the George Kent Memorial Prize, the Weinstein Prize, and three Pushcart Prizes, among others. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and his first collection was selected for the Yale Younger Poets series. He is professor of English and director of creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the low residency MFA in Writing program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Find out more about David Wojahn at various links on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Wojahn or listen to an interview with William Matthews in Blackbird, VCU's online journal: http://www.blackbird.vcu.edu/v4n1/nonfiction/wojahn_d/index.htm.
KEVIN YOUNG is the author of six collections of poetry and the editor of Library of America’s John Berryman: Selected Poems, the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthologies Blue Poems and Jazz Poems, and Giant Steps, The New Generation of African American Writers. His book Jelly Roll was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and won the Paterson Poetry Prize. His collection For the Confederate Dead, won the 2007 Quill Award for poetry and the Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. Recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing and Curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University in Atlanta.
Find out more about Kevin Young at the Academy of American Poets website: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/416 or see the interview on the News Hour http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june07/young_03-01.html.
MARY CORNISH's book Red Studio (Oberlin Press) won the 2006 FIELD Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Her poems have appeared in many reviews, including Poetry, New England Review, FIELD, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest, as well as a number of anthologies. Cornish holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and was a recipient of a Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University. She is also the author and illustrator of several picture books for children. Cornish teaches at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies/Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.
Find out more about Mary Cornish at http://www.slc.edu/writing/Mary_Cornish.php or read a poem on Verse Daily, http://www.versedaily.org/2007/aboutmarycornishrs.shtml
ILYA KAMINSKY was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union in 1977, and arrived to the United States in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the American government. Ilya is the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004) which won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, the Ruth Lilly Fellowship given annually by Poetry magazine. Dancing In Odessa was also named Best Poetry Book of the Year 2004 by ForeWord Magazine. In 2008, Kaminsky was awarded Lannan Foundation's Literary Fellowship. He teaches Contemporary World Poetry, Creative Writing, and Literary Translation in the Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing at San Diego State University.
Find out more about Ilya Kaminsky on his homepage at www.ilyakaminsky.com or in an article written for Centrum Writing Center at http://www.centrum.org/writing/2008/08/the-sunlight-of.html, or at Blue Flower Arts website: http://www.blueflowerarts.com/ikaminsky.html
OTHER FEATURED READERS
FLORIDA POETS:
JAY HOPLER was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 and he has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars, and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Mid-American Review, The New Delta Review, New Voices: 1989—1998 (Academy of American Poets), The New Yorker, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Seattle Review, Sonora Review, and Under the Rock Umbrella: Modern American Poets from 1951—1976 (Mercer University Press).
Green Squall (Yale University Press, 2006) was chosen by Louise Glück as the winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and also received the 2007 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, a 2006 Florida Book Award Silver Medal, a 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award, and a 2007 National Best Books Award from USA Book News. The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire, was published in 1996. His next book, The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poetry, will be published by Yale University Press in 2009. Hopler is Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing/Poetry) at the University of South Florida.
Visit Jay Hopler's website at http://www.jayhopler.com/.
SIDNEY WADE has published five collections of poems, the most recent is Stroke, Persea Books, 2008. Her poems and translations have appeared in a wide variety of journals, including Poetry, The New Yorker, Grand Street, Paris Review, The New Republic, The Gettysburg Review, Two Lines, and The Kenyon Review, among others. She translates the poems of Melih Cevdet Anday, Yahya Kemal, and several others, from the Turkish. She recently served as President of the AWP, the Association for Writers and Writing Programs, and has taught at the University of Florida in the Creative Writing Program since 1993. She is the poetry editor of the literary journal Subtropics and was recently elected Secretary/Treasurer of the American Literary Translators’ Association, ALTA.
For more information, visit Sidney Wade's website at: http://www.sidneywade.com.
COFFEE HOUSE PERFORMANCE POETS
ANDREA GIBSON rouses audiences throughout the United States and Canada with her poignant message and her genuine interest in generating change, her words are powerful, compassionate, and inspiring. She is a queer poet/activist who is "political, opinionated, and partial to the big issues" (The Westword). In 1999, Andrea moved from New Orleans to Colorado, where she began attending poetry readings at The Mercury Café. In a years time she had made her mark with the 2000 Denver Slam Team at The National Poetry Slam in Providence, Rhode Island. In the same year, Andrea joined Vox Feminista, a performance tribe of radical, political women bent on social change through cultural revolution. She went on to become a four-time Denver Grand Slam Champion. Andrea took 4th place out of 350 poets in the individual finals at the 2004 National Poetry Slam in St. Louis, while simultaneously leading Team Denver to a 2nd place title in the team competition. A headliner from the Nuyorican Poet's Café, to Pride Fests and Lady Fests, to high schools and universities throughout the country, she has been showcased on Free Speech TV, Dyke TV, the documentary Slam Planet, and Independent Radio Stations nationwide. She is featured on New York City's 2004 Best of Urbana CD, and is currently a member of the prestigious Bullhorn Collective "30 of the highest ranking slam poets and most accomplished performance poets in the world." Andrea is an independent artist who has self-released three CDs, Bullets and Windchimes, Swarm, and When the Bough Breaks as well as one book, Trees that Grow in Cemeteries.
You can find out more about Andrea Gibson on her website: http://www.andreagibson.org/home/home.html.
ANIS MOJGANI is a spoken word superhero and the 2007 World Cup Poetry Slam Champion. He is also the 2005 & 2006 National Poetry Slam Individual Champion, a back-to-back honor shared only by fellow artist Buddy Wakefield. He won France’s 2007 World Cup Poetry Slam. Mojgani is the 2006 Seattle Grand Slam Champion and has been featured on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, National Public Radio’s ‘The Beat’, and in the documentary ‘Slam Planet: War of the Words’. A former resident of the Oregon Literary Arts Writer’s-In-The-Schools program, he has appeared on HBO and NPR. Anis’ work has appeared in Rattle and alongside the works of US Poet Laureates Ted Kooser and Billy Collins, in the anthology Spoken Word Revolution Redux. His latest book Over the Anvil We Stretch, is published by Write Bloody Publishing, and was recently nominated for the 2008 Pushcart Prize. He currently lives in a white house in Portland, Oregon.
You can find out more about Anis Mojgani at his livejournal site: http://mojgani.livejournal.com/
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