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Philip Nikolayev
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:15 minutes)
Philip Nikolayev was born in Moscow, Russia, in 1966 and grew up fully bilingual in Russian and English thanks to his father, a linguist. He started out as a Russian poet, but came to the United States in 1990 to attend Harvard University, and has since been writing primarily in English. Mr. Nikolayev lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, the poet Katia Kapovich, and their daughter Sophia. His most recent collections of poems are Letters from Aldenderry (Salt Publishing, 2006) and Monkey Time (Verse Press, 2003) winner of the 2001 Verse Prize. He co-edits Fulcrum: an annual of poetry and aesthetics. His poems have also appeared in such journals as The Paris Review, Grand Street, Verse, Stand, Jacket, and many others across the English-speaking world.
Naomi Shihab Nye
Listen to Audio Webcast (58 minutes)
Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Fuel (1998) and other books, was a Witter Bynner fellow in 2000, selected by Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. Originally from St. Louis, MO, Nye now lives in San Antonio with her photographer husband and their son. The daughter of a Palestinian father and an American mother, she has also written Hugging the Jukebox (1982), Red Suitcase (1994), a new collection of poems, Come with Me.
William Palmer
Listen to Audio Webcast (56:57 minutes)
William Palmer is a professor of English at Alma College in central Michigan. He has published poems and essays in The Christian Science Monitor, Bellingham Review and Chicago Tribune. The second edition of his college textbook Discovering Arguments: An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Writing (co-authored with Dean Memering) was recently published by Prentice Hall.
Linda Pastan
Listen to Audio Webcast (58 minutes)
Linda Pastan is the author of The Last Uncle (Norton, 2002), Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998 (1998), and several other books of poetry. Among her many awards and honors are a Pushcart Prize, a Dylan Thomas Award, and the Di Castagnola Award. She lives in Potomac, Maryland, and from 1991-94 she was Poet Laureate of Maryland. Photo courtesy of Goodman/Van Ripper Photography.
Robert Pinsky
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:16 minutes)
Robert Pinsky was the ninth Poet Laureate of the United States, and the first poet to hold the position for three consecutive terms (1997-2000). Most notable during his tenure was the development of the Favorite Poem Project, a nationwide poetry project that resulted in three poetry anthologies which he co-edited, and videos for public television. Pinsky is the first American poet to serve as a regular contributor to a PBS News Service. He has authored several books of poetry; as well as books of essays and criticism in his fields of interest, poetry and culture. Robert Pinsky was awarded the Saxifrage Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in poetry, the Howard Morton Landon Prize for translation, the Harold Washington Literary Award, and the Oscar Blumenthal Prize, along with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Guggenheim Foundation, and other literary honors.
Stanley Plumly
Listen to Audio Webcast (56:40 minutes)
Stanley Plumly has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His prose publications include a new book of essays, Argument & Song: Sources & Silences in Poetry. His New and Selected Poems, Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me, received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is a Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at the University of Maryland.
Spencer Reece
Listen to Audio Webcast (56:25 minutes)
Spencer Reece was born in 1963 in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the winner of the 2003 Katharine Bakeless Nason Prize for poetry, selected by former-U.S. poet laureate Louise Gluck and awarded by Middlebury College and the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Boulevard, and small magazines in Canada, Australia, and Britain. The Clerk's Tale was fifteen years in the making. Reece is an assistant manager at Brooks Brothers in Palm Beach. He lives in Lantana, Florida.
Len Roberts
Listen to Audio Webcast (56:36 minutes)
Len Roberts is known for his work in education, helping teachers to use poetry in the classroom. He's published nine books of poetry, including his most recent book, The Silent Singer: New and Selected Poems (U. of Illinois Press, 2001). He has also published three books of translations of the renowned Hungarian poet, Sandor Csoor, the most recent being Before and After the Fall: New Poems by Sandor Csoori (BOA Editions, 2004). His major awards include the Guggenheim, a Lannan Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as selection of his book Black Wings for the National Poetry Series.
Kay Ryan
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:58 minutes)
Kay Ryan is the 16th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. She has written six books of poetry, plus a limited edition artist’s book, along with a number of essays. Her books are: Dragon Acts to Dragon Ends (1983), Strangely Marked Metal (Copper Beech, 1985), Flamingo Watching (Copper Beech, 1994), Elephant Rocks (Grove Press,1996), Say Uncle (Grove Press, 2000), Believe It or Not! (2002, Jungle Garden Press, edition of 125 copies), and The Niagara River (Grove Press, 2005). Her awards include the Gold Medal for poetry, 2005, from the San Francisco Commonwealth Club; the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from The Poetry Foundation in 2004; a Guggenheim fellowship the same year; a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Maurice English Poetry Award in 2001; the Union League Poetry Prize in 2000; and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award in 1995. She has won four Pushcart Prizes and has been selected four different years for the annual volumes of the Best American Poetry. Since 2006, she has been a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Photo courtesy of Christina Koci Hernandez.
John Rybicki
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:01 minutes)
John Rybicki’s latest book is We Bed Down into Water (Northwestern University Press, 2008). He is an associate professor and writer-in-residence at Alma College. He also teaches creative writing to inner-city children in his hometown of Detroit, and through Wings of Hope Hospice, to children who have been through trauma or loss. His work is represented in The Best American Poetry 2008. Rybicki’s poems and stories have appeared in North American Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, TriQuarterly, the Antioch Review, the Iowa Review, and Michigan Quarterly, as well as in numerous anthologies. His first book of poems, Traveling at High Speeds (New Issues Poetry Press), appeared in 1996, followed by the book Fire Psalm. His collection of poems Yellow-Haired Girl with Spider (March Street Press) was published in 2002. Mr. Rybicki sometimes works in a paint factory in Detroit and at a tire shop in Kalamazoo, when not teaching. He lives in Delton, Michigan with his son, Martel.
Avideh Shashaani
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:45 minutes)
Avideh Shashaani is the founder and president of the Fund for the Future of our Children (FFC), a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., dedicated to developing innovative educational and multicultural programs that encourage the healthy integration of body, mind and heart in children and youth and empower them to be agents of peace in local and global environments. She promotes intercultural and interfaith understanding through lectures, workshops and publications. She is the author of two books, Promised Paradise (poetic prose) and Remember Me (poetry). She has translated 10 Persian mystical texts into English. She served as vice president of the Literary Friends of the DC Public Library for five years. She is a former co-director of the International Institute for Rehabilitation in Developing Countries (founded by the UN, UNESCO, UNDP and Rehabilitation International). She is the past board chair of Refugee Women in Development and the founding chair of MOSAICA: The Center for Nonprofit Development and Pluralism. She holds a bachelor's degree in experimental psychology, a master's degree in educational planning and management and a Ph.D. in Sufi studies.
Vivian Shipley
Listen to Audio Webcast (59:02 minutes)
Vivian Shipley won the 2006 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement for her seventh book of poetry, Hardboot: Poems New & Old (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2005). A Connecticut State University distinguished professor who teaches at Southern Connecticut State University, Shipley is the editor of Connecticut Review. She won the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award for Service to the Literary Community from the Library of Congress Connecticut Center for the Book and the 2005 SCSU Faculty Scholar Award for When There Is No Shore, which also won the 2003 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry and the 2002 Word Press Poetry Prize. Her honors include the Lucille Medwick Prize from PSA, the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize from University of Southern California, the Daniel Varoujan Prize from NEPC, the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize and the Marble Faun Prize from the William Faulkner Society.
Jane Shore and Jean Nordhaus
Listen to Audio Webcast (48:00 minutes)
Jane Shore has taught at Harvard University, Sarah Lawrence, the University of Hawaii, and, since 1989, George Washington University. Her books include: Eye Level, winner of The Juniper Prize (1977); The Minute Hand, which won the Lamont Prize (1986); Music Minus One, which was a finalist for the 1996 National Critics Book Circle Award; and Happy Family (1999). Her new book of poems, A Yes-or-No Answer, is from Houghton Mifflin & Co. (2008). Jean Nordhaus is author of the book of poems, Innocence (2006), which won the Charles B. Wheeler prize from Ohio State University Press. Her previous book, The Porcelain Apes of Moses Mendelssohn was published by Milkweed Editions in 2002. A selection of poems from that book won the 1997 Edward Stanley Award from Prairie Schooner. Her other books include My Life in Hiding, winner of the Colladay award, and two earlier volumes of poetry, A Bracelet of Lies and A Language of Hands.
Edgar Gabriel Silex
Listen to Audio Webcast (55:33 minutes)
Edgar Gabriel Silex is the author of two poetry collections from Curbstone Press, Acts of Love (2004) and Through All The Displacements (1995). Recent work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Rattle and The New American Poets: A Breadloaf Anthology. Silex has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maryland State Arts Council. He is a professor of English at the Maryland Institute and College of Art in Baltimore. He lives in Laurel, Md. with his family.
Charles Simic
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Charles Simic is the 15th Poet Laureate Poetry Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published in 1967. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something (Harcourt, 2008); My Noiseless Entourage (2005); Selected Poems: 1963-2003 (2004), for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM: Selected Late and New Poems (2003); Night Picnic (2001); The Book of Gods and Devils (2000); and Jackstraws (1999), which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. His other books of poetry include Walking the Black Cat (1996), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Wedding in Hell (1994); Hotel Insomnia (1992); The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems (1990), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Selected Poems: 1963-1983 (1990); and Unending Blues (1986). Charles Simic has published many books of translations, as well as essays, and has edited numerous anthologies. He is professor emeritus of creative writing and literature at the University of New Hampshire where he taught for 34 years. (Photo of Charles Simic used with permission of Philip Simic.)
Rose Solari, Hilary Tham, Karren Alenier, and Kim Roberts
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Rose Solari, Hilary Tham, Karren Alenier, and Kim Roberts are all from Washington D.C., Virginia and Maryland. They are each teachers, editors, and prose writers, as well as poets. Rose Solari holds the Randall Jarrell Poetry Prize and the Academy of American Poets' University Prize. She's author of a new book Orpheus in the Park; Hilary Tham is a visual artist as well as a writer. Her latest book is The Tao of Mrs. Wei. Hilary's short stories won the Washington Writers Publishing House Award for Fiction; Karren Alenier's latest publication is Looking for Divine Transportation, which won the Towson Prize for Literature. Karren heads The Word Works Press and reading series; and Kim Roberts' collection of poems is The Wishbone Galaxy. Kim is an organizer of community art and cultural centers. She is editor/publisher of Beltway Poetry Quarterly.
Shelby Stephenson
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A North Carolina poet, Shelby Stephenson grew up on a small farm near Benson. “My early teachers were the thirty-five foxhounds my father hunted, the trees and streams, fields, the world of my childhood–all that folklore–those are my subjects,” he observed. Stephenson received the Ph.D. degree in 1974 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Photo by Jan G. Hensley.
Joseph Stroud
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:01 minutes)
Joseph Stroud is the author of four books of poetry, In the Sleep of Rivers (Capra Press, 1974), Signatures (BOA Editions, 1982), Below Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon Press, 1998) and Country of Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). He has also written three chapbooks and limited editions, including Unzen (Tangram Press, 2001), Burning the Years (Tangram, 2002) and Three Odes of Pablo Neruda (Tangram, 2005). His work earned a Pushcart Prize in 2000 and has been featured on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. He was a finalist for the Northern California Book Critics Award in 2005. In 2006 he was selected by the Poet Laureate of the United States for a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress. He divides his time between his home in Santa Cruz on the California coast and a cabin in the Sierra Nevada.
Matthew Thorburn
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Matthew Thorburn's first book, Subject to Change (2004), was selected by Brenda Hillman for the New Issues Poetry Prize. He is the recipient of a 2008 Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, selected by Poet Laureate Charles Simic. His other honors include the Mississippi Review Prize, two Hopwood Awards from the University of Michigan, and the Belfast Poetry Festival's inaugural Festivo Prize. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Michigan Quarterly Review and other journals, and he has contributed book reviews to Boston Review, Rattle and Octopus. A graduate of the University of Michigan and the MFA program at The New School, Matthew Thorburn lives in New York City, where he works as the business development writer for an international law firm. He recently completed a new collection of poems, entitled Like Luck.
David Tucker
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:03 minutes)
David Tucker was chosen by Poet Laureate Donald Hall as a 2007 Witter Bynner Fellow. He has won the 2005 Bakeless Prize for his book, Late for Work, selected by Philip Levine, and published by Houghton Mifflin. He also won the national chapbook contest sponsored by Slapering Hol Press for Days When Nothing Happens, published in 2004; and the 2002 Solo prize for the poem "All This Time." His poems have appeared in over 60 publications. Mr. Tucker has had various newspaper jobs and is currently Deputy Managing Editor for news at the New Jersey Star Ledger. He ran the paper's award winning two-year investigation of racial profiling by the New Jersey State Police and in 2005 was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for breaking news.
David Wagoner
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:08 minutes)
David Wagoner is former Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets, and was editor of Poetry Northwest from 1966 until its last issue in 2002. He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Good Morning and Good Night (University of Illinois Press, 2005); The House of Song (2002); Traveling Light: Collected and New Poems (1999); Walt Whitman Bathing (1996); Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems (1987); First Light (1983); Landfall (1981); and In Broken Country (1979). His Collected Poems, 1956-1976 was nominated for the National Book Award in 1977. Wagoner is also the author of ten novels, including The Escape Artist (1965), which was adapted into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He is also the editor of Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke, 1943-63 (1972). He has received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Sherwood Anderson Award, the Fels Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Eunice Tietjens Memorial and English-Speaking Union prizes from Poetry magazine, and fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Bothell, Washington.
Martin Walls
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:56 minutes)
Martin Walls was chosen as a Witter Bynner Fellow by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser. Also a recipient of a 1998 Joan Leiman Jacobsen "Discovery" award from The Nation, Walls has published two books of poems: Small Human Detail in Care of National Trust (New Issues Press, 2000) and Commonwealth (March Street Press, 2005). He lives in Solvay, N.Y. with his wife Christine Braunberger and son, Alexander. Walls is a magazine editor and also a professional soccer referee.
Connie Wanek
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Connie Wanek is the author of two books of poems, Bonfire (1997) and Hartley Field (2002). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Virginia Quarterly, and many other journals. She was a 2006 Witter Bynner Fellow of the Library of Congress, selected by Ted Kooser. Wanek lives in Duluth, Minnesota, where she works at the public library.
Thom Ward
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Thom Ward is Editor/Production Director at BOA Editions, Ltd., an independent publishing house of American poetry, poetry in translation and literary fiction. At BOA, he has edited more than 80 collections of poetry and poetry in translation. His own poetry collections include Tumblekid, Small Boat with Oars of Different Size, Fog in a Suitcase, and Various Orbits. His most recent book, a collection of prose poems, The Matter of the Casket, was published by CustomWords in May, 2007. Ward lives with his wife and children in upstate New York.
Rebecca Wee
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Rebecca Wee's first book, Uncertain Grace, received the 2000 Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets, and was published by Copper Canyon Press. In 2002 Wee received a Witter Bynner Fellowship in poetry from the Library of Congress, awarded by U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Wee received her MFA in poetry from George Mason University, where she served as an editorial assistant on Carolyn Forche's anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. Her poems have been published in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Sonora Review, and other journals. Ms. Wee is an Associate Professor of English at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and she is working to complete her second collection of poems, Instead.
Joshua Weiner
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Joshua Weiner, who received the Ph.D. degree from the University of California at Berkeley, was director of the Writing Program at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and now teaches at Northwestern University. His first book of poetry, The World's Room, was published in the Phoenix Poets Series ©2001 by The University of Chicago Press. He was a 2000 recipient of the Witter Bynner fellowship, selected by Poet Laureate Robert Pinksy.
David Whyte
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:11 minutes)
David Whyte grew up among the hills and valleys of Yorkshire, England. He holds a degree in Marine Zoology, is the recipient of an Honorary Degree from Neumann College, Pennsylvania and an Associate Fellow of Templeton College at the University of Oxford. His latest work is River Flow: New & Selected Poems 1984-2007. His previous volumes include Songs for Coming Home, Where Many Rivers Meet, Fire in the Earth, The House of Belonging, and Everything is Waiting for You. In addition, he is the author of two bestselling books of prose: The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America and Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity. His third prose book, The Three Marriages: Work, Self & Other, will be published in 2009. David Whyte lives with his family in the Pacific Northwest.
Monica Youn
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Monica Youn, is a Witter Bynner Fellow, selected by Charles Simic for 2008. She is an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law and an adjunct assistant professor of creative writing at Columbia University. She is the author of Barter (2003). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the Paris Review, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and the Norton Anthology: Language for a New Century. She has earned a bachelor's degree from Princeton, a master's of philosophy from Oxford and a law degree from Yale. She has received the Rhodes Scholarship and the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University.
Grace Cavalieri's interviews and book reviews have appeared in various journals including The American Poetry Review. Ms. Cavalieri created the original "Poet and the Poem" series on public radio in 1977, and in 1997, "The Poet and the Poem from the Library of Congress" became an outgrowth of that show. Approximately ten episodes from the Library of Congress series are produced each season, and a number of these are being added to this site. Ms. Cavalieri also has 13 books of poetry and several produced plays to her credit. She holds the Brodighera Poetry Award, a Paterson Poetry Prize, and a CPB Silver Medal, among other awards. Her recent book, Water on the Sun, is on the Pen American Center's "Best Books" list. Ms. Cavalieri's official Web site can be found at http://www.gracecavalieri.com. Photo by Dan Murano.