Poet and the Poem Webcasts

Kwame Alexander and Peter Klappert
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:55 minutes)

Kwame Alexander is a poet, publisher, and producer of literary programs. Alexander has authored/edited ten books, including a young adult title, Crush: Love Poems, and Family Pictures: Poems and Photographs Celebrating Family. He resides in the Washington, DC area, where he produces the annual Capital BookFest presented by The Washington Post, and currently serves as the President of Book-in-a-Day, a literacy program that teaches and inspires youth in the writing and publishing process. Peter Klappert is the author of six collections of poems, including Lugging Vegetables to Nantucket (Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1971), The Idiot Princess of the Last Dynasty (Alfred A. Knopf, 1984; to be reprinted in the Classic Contemporary series of Carnegie-Mellon University Press) and Chokecherries: New and Selected Poems 1966-1999 (Orchises, 2000). He has taught at Rollins College, Harvard University, New College (FL), The College of William and Mary, and The Graduate Writing Program of George Mason University.

Quique Avilés
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:34 minutes)

Quique Avilés is a poet and performer whose work addresses social issues, especially issues of race, identity and the plight of the poor. A native of El Salvador and a graduate of the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, Avilés has been writing, performing, teaching workshops and mentoring young and emerging artists for more than 25 years. He has written and performed in five one-man shows: Caminata: A Walk through Immigrant America, Chaos Standing, Latinhood, Los Otros Dos/The Other Two and Salvatrucans. He was the founding artistic director of Sol & Soul, a DC-based arts and activism organization. Avilés' first book of poetry, The Immigrant Museum, was published in 2003 in collaboration with Raices de Papel, a design and bookbinding workshop based in Mexico City. He is currently working on his next one-man show, Rehab, which deals with the issue of addiction.

Holly Bass and Mary Morris
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:31 minutes)

Holly Bass is a writer, choreographer and performer. She has presented her solo work at the Kennedy Center (DC), the Whitney Museum (NY) and the Experience Music Project (Seattle). Her poems have been published in Callaloo, nocturnes (re)view, Role Call (Third World Press, 2002) and The Ringing Ear. She has been awarded two Artist Fellowship grants from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Holly studied modern dance and creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College before earning a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University. Mary Morris is the winner of the 2007 Rita Dove Award, and the 2005 New Mexico Discovery Award. She was finalist for the Faulkner Award and Pablo Neruda Prize. She has published in many journals including Quarterly West, Nimrod, Red Rock Review, Indiana Review, and The Sun. She was recipient of a Southwest Literary Foundation Award. Morris grew up in Oklahoma and lived for many south of Guadalajara, Mexico. She taught poetry in northern New Mexico. She has one son and lives with her husband in Washington, DC and Santa Fe.

James H. Beall
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:39 minutes)

James. H. Beall is a member of the faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, a senior consultant to the E.O. Hulburt Center for Space Research at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and a Senior Adjunct Professor at the College of Science at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He is an astrophysicist, a poet, and an author on issues related to public policy. He is also a member of the Science and Engineering Advisory Board of High Frontier in Arlington, Virginia. He holds the degrees of B.A., M.S., and Ph.D., all in physics. Dr. Beall was the administrator for "In the Shadow of the Capitol," a history of the Black Intellectual Community in Washington, DC, between the years 1922 and 1963. His first book was Hickey, the Days; a forthcoming book is entitled Republic.

Anne Becker, Ernie Wormwood, Moira Egan and Lyn Lifshin
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:39 minutes)

The Poet and the Poem program "A Gathering of Women Poets," features Anne Becker, Ernie Wormwood, Moira Egan and Lyn Lifshin. Anne Becker is a poet, teacher, and former producer of literary recordings. Her book, The Transmutation Notebooks: Poems in the Voices of Charles and Emma Darwin, was published in 1996. A chapbook, The Good Body, is forthcoming. Ernie Wormwood is a teacher and poet. Her forthcoming books are Intimacies and All Bodies Do Not Rise. Moira Egan has an MFA from Columbia University, where James Merrill chose her manuscript for the Austin Prize. Her first book of poems, Cleave (2004), was nominated for the National Book Award. Recently published books by Lyn Lifshin include The Licorice Daughter: My Year With Ruffian and Another Woman Who Looks Like Me. She has more than 120 books & four edited anthologies to her publishing credit.

Jody Bolz, Sarah Browning, Donna Denizé and Judith McCombs
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:02 minutes)

Jody Bolz, Sarah Browning, Donna Denizé and Judith McCombs are poets, teachers and editors. Jody Bolz is the author of A Lesson in Narrative Time. She edits Poet Lore, America's oldest poetry magazine. She taught in the English Department of George Washington University. Sarah Browning is the author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden. She is coeditor of D.C. Poets Against the War: An Anthology, and coordinates the group of the same name. Donna Denizé is the author of The Lover's Voice and Broken Like Job. She was awarded by Williams College the George Olmsted Jr. Prize for excellence in teaching She teaches literature at St. Albans School for Boys in Washington D.C. Judith McCombs is the founding editor of Moving Out, which survived for three decades as one of the nation's oldest feminist literary magazines. Her publications include Critical Essays on Margaret Atwood and Margaret Atwood: A Reference Guide. She has also published several books of poems, most recently Habit of Fire: Poems Selected & New.

George Bilgere
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George Bilgere, author of The Good Kiss and Witter Bynner fellow in 2001, was selected for the fellowship by Poet Laureate Billy Collins. Mr. Bilgere writes about having grown up in a one-parent, Midwestern family, learning to ride a bicycle on his own, and dealing with the difficulties of fragmented family life both then and now. He is also author of The Going: Poems (1994).

Fleda Brown and W.D. Snodgrass
Listen to Audio Webcast (56:03 minutes)

Fleda Brown and W.D. Snodgrass are distinguished American poets. Fleda Brown won the Felix Pollak Prize for her newest collection of poems, Reunion. She is the author of five previous collections, most recently The Women Who Loved Elvis All Their Lives, Fishing With Blood, Do Not Peel the Birches, The Devil's Child, and Breathing In, Breathing Out, winner of the Philip Levine Prize, Anhinga Press. She is the current poet laureate of Delaware, and recently retired from the University of Delaware. W.D. Snodgrass was Born in Beaver Falls, PA, in 1926 . He published his first book of poems, Heart's Needle, in 1959. Since then he has published over twenty books of poetry, translation, memoir, and criticism. His many awards include the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1960. His Selected Translations (1998) was awarded the Academy of American Poets' Harold Morton Landon Translation Award. His most recent book is Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems. (Photo of Merrill Leffler © Kathryn Harris. Photo of W.D. Snodgrass © Kathleen Snodgrass. Reprinted with permission.)

Andrea Hollander Budy and Sarah Maclay
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:59 minutes)

Andrea Hollander Budy is the editor of When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women (Autumn House Press, 2008) and the author of three full-length poetry collections, including Woman in the Painting (Autumn House Press, 2006), The Other Life (Story Line Press, 2001), and House Without a Dreamer (Story Line Press, 1993), which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. Other honors include the D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, two poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two from the Arkansas Arts Council. Budy lives in the Arkansas Ozark Mountains near Mountain View, where she and her husband and son ran a bed-and-breakfast inn for fifteen years. Since 1991 she has been the Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College, where she was awarded the Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Photo courtesy of Marcus Cafagña.

Sarah Maclay is the author of The White Bride (University of Tampa Press, 2008) and Whore (Tampa Review Prize for Poetry), as well as three limited edition chapbooks. Her poems, essays and reviews have been published in APR, FIELD, Ploughshares, The Writers’ Chronicle, VerseDaily, The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 to the Present (Scribner, 2008) and numerous other spots including Poetry International, where she currently serves as book review editor. A multiple Pushcart nominee, she is the recipient of a Special Mention in The Pushcart Prize XXXI. She is now a member of the English faculty at Loyola Marymount University, where she teaches creative writing and literature. She is the artistic director of The Third Area: Poetry at Pharmaka, a collective-run art gallery in downtown LA. She lives in Venice, California where she conducts workshops privately and, periodically, at Beyond Baroque. Photo courtesy of Mark Lipson.

Kenneth Carroll
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Kenneth Carroll's poetry, short stories, essays, and plays have appeared in numerous publications earning him a Pushcart Prize nomination. He's published in Literary magazines and anthologies: In Search of Color everywhere, Bum Rush The Page, Potomac Review, Worcester Review, the Washington Post, Indiana Review among others. Kenneth's first collection of poems is entitled So What! He's performed at the Kennedy Center, Nuyorican Caf, Beyond Baroque, and the Library of Congress. As Director of DC WritersCorps, he's been cited for community service numerous times, and was recognized by The Clinton White House for his achievements. He teaches at Duke Ellington High School for the Arts, and the Writer's Center. Mr. Carroll is married and has a daughter and two sons.

Michael Collier
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:21 minutes)

Michael Collier is the author of four books of poems, The Clasp and Other Poems, The Folded Heart, The Neighbor, and, most recently, The Ledge which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He has received Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and Thomas Watson fellowships and a "Discovery"/The Nation Award among others. Michael Collier is currently a professor of English at the University of Maryland and serves as the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Middlebury College. He is a former Poet Laureate of Maryland.

Billy Collins
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Billy Collins was the Library's Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2001-2002. His books of poetry include Sailing Alone Around the Room (Random House, 2001); Picnic, Lightning (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998); The Art of Drowning (1995), which was a Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize finalist; Questions About Angels (1991), a National Poetry Series selection by Edward Hirsch; The Apple That Astonished Paris (1988); Video Poems (1980); and Pokerface (1977).

Kyle Dargan & Sandra Beasley
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Kyle Dargan is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at American University and the founding editor of POST NO ILLS magazine. His debut collection of poems, The Listening, won the 2003 Cave Canem Prize, and his second collection, Bouquet of Hungers, was nominated for the 2008 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in poetry. His poems and non-fiction have appeared in publications such as Callaloo, Denver Quarterly, The Newark Star-Ledger, Ploughshares, The Root, and Shenandoah. He has received fellowships to attend the Bucknell Seminar for Younger Poets the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Fine Arts Work Center. Photo courtesy of Marlene Hawthrone Thomas.

Sandra Beasley won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize for Theories of Falling, selected by Marie Howe. Her poems have been featured in Verse Daily, Best New Poets, Slate, The Believer, AGNI online, 32 Poems, Blackbird, and Black Warrior Review. Awards for her work include the 2008 Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize, and fellowships to Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Millay Colony, and VCCA. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she is an editor for The American Scholar and a Board Member for the Writer’s Center.

Tory Dent
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Tory Dent is the author of HIV, Mon Amour (1999), which won the 1999 James Laughlin Award. She is also the author of What Silence Equals (1993) and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Photo by Arne Svenson.

Rita Dove
Listen to Audio Webcast (54:35 minutes)

Rita Dove was the Library's seventh Poet Laureate (1993-1995). She was the first woman, and first African American, appointed to the post since "Poet Laureate" was added in 1985 to the title "Consultant in Poetry." She was the youngest Poet Laureate in the Library's history. Her books include The Yellow House on the Corner (1980); Museum (1983); Thomas and Beulah, which won Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987); Grace Notes (1989); Selected Poems (1993); Mother Love (1995); On the Bus With Rosa Parks (1999); as well as short stories, plays, essays, and a novel. Her latest book is American Smooth (2004). Born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952, Ms. Dove has used family history and social history in much of her writing. She is the Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Rita Dove holds the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the National Humanities Medal. Among other honors she was awarded the Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award. Rita Dove is married to the German novelist Fred Viebahn; their daughter, Aviva, is an art historian.

Rita Dove and Henry Taylor
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Rita Dove and Henry Taylor are Pulitzer Prize winning authors. Rita Dove served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995 and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She has numerous literary and academic honors, among them the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, the 2003 Emily Couric Leadership Award, the 2001 Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the 1996 National Humanities Medal. In 2006, she received the Common Wealth Award of Distinguished Service. Henry Taylor is Professor Emeritus of Literature at American University, where he taught from 1971 until 2003. His books of poems are The Horse Show at Midnight (1966), An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards (1975), The Flying Change (1985; Pulitzer Prize), Understanding Fiction: Poems 1986-1996 (1996), Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews (2000), and Crooked Run (2006). He has received Fellowships in Creative Writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, awards from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry.

Cornelius Eady
Listen to Audio Webcast (57:06 minutes)

Poet/Playwright Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, New York. He is presently Associate Professor in Literature at American University, in Washington DC. He is author of six books of poetry, including Brutal Imagination (G.P. Putnam, 2001.) With poet Toi Derricote, he co-founded Cave Canam, a summer workshop/retreat for African American poets. Cornelius Eady's awards include the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award; and fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations. Among other honors, he was a Pulitzer Prize nominee for his book Boom Boom Boom; and he holds the Lamont Poetry Award from the Academy of American Poets for Victims of the Latest Dance Craze.

Claudia Emerson
Listen to Audio Webcast (58:13 minutes)

Claudia Emerson is the winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her third collection, "Late Wife." This prize-winning book is a series of poems telling of the journey from a failed marriage to a solitary life, finally bridging to a new marriage. Her previous books are "Pinion," "An Elegy" (2002,), and "Pharaoh, Pharaoh" (1997); all three are from Southern Messenger Poets, Louisiana State University Press. She has published dozens of poems in literary journals and anthologies and has authored essays as well as short fiction. Emerson received her undergraduate degree from the University of Virginia and her master's (summa cum laude) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She taught at Washington and Lee University and is presently associate professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va. Emerson was appointed a Witter Bynner Fellow at the Library of Congress in 2005 by Poet Laureate Ted Kooser.

Daniel Mark Epstein
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Daniel Mark Epstein is the author of Lincoln and Whitman as well as biographies of Aimee Semple McPherson, Nat King Cole, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, among other national publications. He has authored verse plays and translations and eight volumes of poetry, the latest The Traveler's Calendar. Among other honors, he holds the Prix de Rome Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Judith Farr and Myra Sklarew
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Judith Farr, Professor Emerita of English and American Literature, Georgetown University, is a poet, novelist and critic. Poet Marianne Moore awarded Judith's first poetry prize at age 16. Her critical books include The Life and Art of Elinor Wylie (LSU Press,1983); The Passion of Emily Dickinson (Harvard Univ. Press, 1992); and The Gardens of Emily Dickinson (Harvard Univ. Press, 2004). This last book was awarded the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize of the Keats & Shelley Memorial Trust of the British Academy in 2005, as the best book written in English by a woman on a literary topic that year. Her novel, I Never Came To You in White (Houghton Mifflin, 1996), was a finalist for the Pen Hemingway Prize. Myra Sklarew is former president of the artist community Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. She is Professor Emerita of Literature, American University, and recipient of the 1998 University Scholar/Teacher Award. She has authored three chapbooks and six collections of poetry, most recently Lithuania: New & Selected Poems, and The Witness Trees. She has also written a collection of short fiction (Like a Field Riddled by Ants) and essays (Over the Rooftops of Time). She was educated at Tufts University as a biologist, studying bacterial genetics and bacterial viruses, and then in the Writing Seminars with Elliott Coleman at The Johns Hopkins University. She has also worked in the Department of Neurophysiology at Yale University School of Medicine.

Emily Ferrara and Sabine Pascarelli
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Emily Ferrara, winner of the Bordighera Poetry Prize, is an assistant professor of family medicine and community health at University of Massachusetts Medical School, where she teaches and has developed curricula in creative writing, and cultural competence in medicine. She earned a BS in Communications from Boston University, and a Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies from Lesley University. Her poems have recently appeared in Lumina, The Worcester Review, VIA, and Ballard Street Poetry Journal. The Alchemy of Grief is her first full length book. Sabine Pascarelli grew up in Germany where she earned a degree in literature at Dortmund University. She is an author of children's literature. Her most recent book, published in Germany, is Glenscheck & Co. She has won fiction awards, from La Spezia, Italy and the most recent, Mirabilia, in 2006.Recent poems were in English journals Only the Sea Keeps and Arabesque. She works as a translator of English, Italian, and German. Pascarelli lives in Tuscany with her husband Salvatore and their two sons, Marco and Claudio.

F. Ethan Fischer and Ed Zahniser
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Ethan Fischer writes mystery plays for radio and poems for children and grownups. He helped found and still produces the long-running Rumsey Radio Hour. He is a translator of Goethe, Trakl, and Rilke. His illustrated book of poetry is Beached in the Hourglass (The Bunny and the Crocodile Press, 2005). Ethan Fischer is senior editor of Antietam Review. He was a visiting poet at Marshall University and Bluefield College and broadcasts news over WRNR in Berkeley County, West Virginia, and beyond. He holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Michigan Law School. Ethan Fischer teaches English and Creative Writing at Shepherd University in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.

Ed Zahniser serves as poetry editor of the quarterly Good News Paper, which he co-founded in 1979. Ed’s poems have appeared in over 80 U.S. and U.K. magazines and seven anthologies. His books of poetry are The Way to Heron Mountain (Night Tree Press, 1986), A Calendar of Worship and Other Poems (Plane Buckt Press, 1994), and Mall-hopping with the Great I AM (Somondoco Press, 2006). Ed frequently speaks on wilderness preservation topics across the United States and has lectured at West Virginia University, Shepherd University, Cornell University, and Vassar College. He edited his father’s writings, Where Wilderness Preservation Began: Adirondack Writings of Howard Zahniser (North Country Books, 1992). Ed is the senior writer and editor for the publications group of the National Park Service, located in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia.

Nick Flynn
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Nick Flynn is a member of Columbia University's Writing Project, in which he serves as an educator and consultant in New York City public schools. He has won the 1999 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry and a 1999 "Discovery"/The Nation Award. Mr. Flynn has received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts and from the MacDowell and Millay Colonies. He is the author of Some Ether. Photo by Matt Valentine.

Sunil Freeman and Maria Van Beuren
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Sunil Freeman is author of two books of poems, That Would Explain the Violinist (Gut Punch Press) and Surreal Freedom Blues (Argonne Hotel Press).  He is assistant director of the Writer's Center, and has been a managing editor of Poet Lore, the nation's oldest continuously publishing poetry journal. He is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, and his political prose can be seen on their website.  His poems have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including Gargoyle Bogg, Abbey, Minimus, Wordwrights, The Delaware Poetry Review, Beltway, and Kiss the Sky: Fiction and Poetry Starring Jimi Hendrix.

Maria van Beuren is a graduate of St. John’s College in Annapolis, the city where she has lived for the past 30 years. She is president and CEO of Coughlin Indexing Services, Inc., a company with 5 full-time book/serial indexers. In her non-indexer life, she runs an annual writers’ and artists’ retreat at Toad Hall, her New Hampshire home. She is a published poet and essayist, and has a novel in progress. Maria van Beuren has embarked on a publishing venture, Toad Hall Press, which will concentrate on publishing poetry–its first book forthcoming in Spring 2009.

David Gewanter
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David Gewanter's book In the Belly (University of Chicago Press, 1997), won Ploughshares' John Zacharis First Book Award. His latest book, The Sleep of Reason (University of Chicago Press, 2003) was a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize. He is co-editor, with Frank Bidart, of Robert Lowell: Collected Poems (FSG, 2003). The recipient of a Witter Bynner fellowship and Whiting Writer's Award, he teaches at Georgetown University. Photo by Joy Young.

Maria M. Gillan
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Maria Mazziotti Gillan holds the May Sarton Award in Poetry. She has eight collections of poetry to her credit, including The Weather of Old Seasons (Cross-Cultural Communications, 1988), Where I Come From (l995) and Things My Mother Told Me (Guernica Editions, I998). Her latest book is Italian Women in Black Dresses. Maria is co-editor of three anthologies published by Penguin/Putnam: Unsettling America, Identity Lessons, and Growing up Ethnic in America. She directs the Poetry Center at Passaic Community College in Paterson, NJ; and is Director of the Creative Writing Program, Binghamton-State University of New York. Photo by Ellen Denuto.

Brian Gilmore and Brandon D. Johnson
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Brian Gilmore and Brandon D. Johnson are poets trained in the Law. Brian Gilmore is a public interest lawyer, and writer and the author of two collections of poetry, Elvis Presley is alive and well and living in Harlem, and Jungle Nights and Soda Fountain Rags: Poem for Duke Ellington. He is a columnist with the Progressive Media Project and a contributing writer to Jazz Times Magazine. Brandon D. Johnson is author of Love's Skin, Man Burns Ant, The Strangers Between, and co-author of The Black Rooster Social Inn: This Is The Place. He is a Cave Canem Graduate Fellow. Born in Gary, Indiana, he received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Wabash College and his Juris Doctorate from Antioch School of Law.

Daniela Gioseffi
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Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of 13 books of poetry and prose. Her first book of poems, Eggs in the Lake (Boa Editions, Ltd., 1979) contained work that won a New York State Council for the Arts grant award. Women on War: International Writings from Antiquity to the Present, (The Feminist Press, 2003) and On Prejudice: A Global Perspective (Anchor/Doubleday, 1993) won award grants from The Ploughshares Foundation for Peace. Her latest book of new and selected poems, in bilingual edition, is Blood Autumn (Autunno di sangue).  She has had plays produced off Broadway and won a PEN Short Fiction Award in 1995.

Michael S. Glaser
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Michael S. Glaser was named Poet Laureate of Maryland in August, 2004. Dr. Glaser is a professor of English at St. Mary's College of Maryland, where he co-founded and directs the bi-annual Literary Festival and the annual Voices reading series. He is a recipient of the Homer Dodge Endowed Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the Columbia Merit Award from the Poetry Committee of the Greater Washington, D.C. area for his service to poetry. Glaser has served as a Maryland State Arts Council poet-in-the-schools for over 20 years and also makes presentations for the Maryland Humanities Council. Over 400 of his poems have been published in literary journals, newspapers and anthologies. His works include A Lover's Eye (The Bunny & Crocodile Press), In the Men's Room and Other Poems, which was the winner of the 1996 Painted Bride Quarterly chapbook competition, and Being a Father, which was published in July 2004. His poetry has been described as "coaxing the profound from the seemingly ordinary . . . in the particular he finds the universal, and from the metered rhythm of his words, we experience the delight of recognition. We see ourselves anew." Glaser has also edited two anthologies of Maryland poets, The Cooke Book (1989) and Weavings 2000: The Maryland Millennial Anthology. He is married to the educator, Kathleen W. Glaser, and is the proud father of five grown children.

Louise Glück
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Louise Glück has authored 11 books of poetry. Her seventh book, The Wild Iris, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1993. She has been named winner of the New Yorker magazine's Book Award in poetry. She is recipient of the National Book Circle Award, the Academy of American Poets Prize, several Guggenheim fellowships, the William Carlos Williams Award, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award, and the Boston Globe Literary Press Award. Glück's book of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994), won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award. In 2001 Glück received the Bollingen Prize. She was named judge for the Yale Series of Younger poets (through 2007) and has taught at Williams College, Columbia, the University of Iowa, the University of California-Berkeley, Brandeis, Harvard, and Yale University. Glück was the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 2003-2004.

Patricia Gray
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Patricia Gray's book, Rupture, was chosen by the Montserrat Review as one of the best books of poetry for 2005. In September, she was a featured writer/panelist at the Southern Women Writer's Conference in Georgia, and in February 2006 she was a featured writer and panelist at the 10th annual South Carolina Book Festival. Also in 2006, she was awarded an Artist Fellowship for poetry from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Since 1994, Gray has coordinated the Poetry at Noon reading series at the Library of Congress. And in 2005, she served on the 10-member coordinating committee for "DC Celebrates Whitman: 150 Years of Leaves of Grass." She lives and works on Capitol Hill.

Donald Hall
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Donald Hall is the 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. He has published 15 books of poetry, beginning with Exiles and Marriages in 1955. In 2006 he published White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946–2006 (Houghton Mifflin), a volume of his essential life's work. Among his books for children, Ox-Cart Man won the Caldecott Medal. His 20 books of prose include Willow Temple: New and Selected Stories (2003), The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon (2005), and a collection of his essays about poetry, Breakfast Served Any Time All Day (2003). He has written extensively about life in New Hampshire ― Seasons at Eagle Pond (1987) and Here at Eagle Pond (2000). He is currently working on a third volume, Eagle Pond, scheduled for publication in 2007. For his poetry, Donald Hall received the Marshall/Nation Award in 1987 for his The Happy Man; both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 1988 for The One Day; the Lily Prize for Poetry in 1994; and two Guggenheim Fellowships. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Judith Harris and Miles David Moore
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Judith Harris is the author of the poetry collections The Bad Secret and Atonement, and the critical work Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing. She has had essays appear in American Women in Psychology, College English, and Tikkun. She led the annual Frost Place Seminar in Franconia, N.H., in 2006.  She teaches creative writing, literature, and psychoanalytic theory at George Mason University. Miles David Moore is a Washington reporter for Crain Communications Inc. He is a member of the board of directors of The Word Works and producer/host of the monthly Iota Poetry Series readings in Arlington, Va. He is the author of three books of poetry: The Bears of Paris (Word Works, 1995); Buddha Isn't Laughing (Argonne House Press, 1999); and Rollercoaster (Word Works, 2004). Both Miles David Moore and Judith Harris have published poems in notable American literary journals.

Robert Hass
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Robert Hass has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo and St. Mary's College (California). He became a permanent faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1989. In addition to his own books of poetry, Hass has written essays on poetry and is known for four books of translations of Polish Nobel Prize poet Czeslaw Milosz. He has produced extensive work on the haiku form, publishing The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. Robert Hass won the Yale Series of Younger poets Award in 1972, launching his first volume of poetry. Since that time he has received the William Carlos Williams Award, a Guggenheim, the Danforth Fellowship, the MacArthur "Genius" Award, and twice the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress from 1995-1997. He founded River of Words, an organization promoting arts education and environmental awareness issues. His dedication to concerns linking art and nature led to his selection as 1997 "Educator of the Year" by the North American Association of Environmental Education.

Terrance Hayes
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Terrance Hayes is the author of Wind In A Box (Penguin 2006), which was listed as one of the best books of 2006 by Publishers Weekly and was a finalist for the Hurston Wright Poetry Prize. Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), his second collection of poems, was a National Poetry Series selection, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. His first book, Muscular Music, garnered a Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Other honors include a Profile on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His new poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, and The American Poetry Review. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University and lives with his family in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His fourth book, currently titled Scorched Headplate, will be released with Penguin in 2010.

Jane Hirshfield
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Jane Hirshfield is the author of six books of poetry, most recently After, named a best book of 2006 by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and (London's) The Financial Times. She is also the author of a now classic book of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, and three books collecting the work of women writers from the past. Her honors include finalist status for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England's T.S. Eliot Prize, the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and major fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, NEA, and Academy of American Poets. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and multiple editions of The Best American Poetry and Pushcart Prize anthologies.

Major Jackson
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Major Jackson is originally from Philadelphia, Pa. He now teaches at the University of Vermont as Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Major Jackson is recipient of fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, Cave Canem, The MacDowell Colony, among others. He was a 2003-2004 Witter Bynner Fellow at the Library of Congress, and a finalist for the National Book Critics' Award in 2002 for Leaving Saturn (Univ. of Georgia Press). He was recently honored as one of ten poets in America to win the 2003 Whitting Writer's Award.

Reuben Jackson
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Reuben Jackson lives in Washington, DC, where he works as an archivist with The Smithsonian Institution's Duke Ellington Collection. His poems have been published in 21 anthologies, journals such as Chelsea, Gargoyle, Callaloo and The Indiana Review, and a volume of verse entitled fingering the keys, which won the 1992 Columbia Book Award. Reuben has also written music reviews for The Washington Post, Washington City Paper, Jazz Times and Jazziz magazines, and for National Public Radio's All Things Considered. He is a poetry instructor at The Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland.

Rod Jellema & Cathy Eisenhower
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Rod Jellema is Professor Emeritus of English and former Director of Creative Writing at the University of Maryland, College Park. His last book, A Slender Grace, won the Towson University Prize for Literature. He has new poems forthcoming in Image and in International Poetry Review, and is currently gathering his Collected Poems, scheduled for publication.

Cathy Eisenhower lives and works as a librarian in Washington, DC. She runs the interrupting cow, a chapbook press. Her first collection, clearing without reversal, is forthcoming from Edge Books, and her second book will follow shortly from Roof Books. Her first chapbook, Language of the Dog-Heads, was selected for inclusion in the 2002 Bookmobile Project touring exhibition.

Katia Kapovich
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A Russian poet and former literary dissident now living in the Cambridge, MA, Ms. Kapovich was selected in 2001 by Poet Laureate Billy Collins to receive a Witter Bynner fellowship. She writes in English as well as in Russian and co-edits the English-language poetry magazine, Fulcrum. Her poems have appeared in the London Review of Books, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and in many other literary journals.

Dolores Kendrick
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Dolores Kendrick was appointed Poet Laureate of Washington D.C. in 1999. She is the author of the award-winning book The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women (1989). Adapted into a play and performed in Cleveland and D.C.'s Kennedy Center, the piece won the New York New Playwright's Award. Kendrick's other books are Through the Ceiling, Now Is the Thing to Praise and Why the Woman is Singing on the Corner. Kendrick is the Heinz Professor Emerita at Phillips Exeter Academy. She has been honored with the Anisfield-Wolf Award, a Fulbright fellowship and an NEA award among many others. She has been inducted into the International Literary Hall of Fame for writers of African American descent, sponsored by the Gwendolyn Brooks Center. Kendrick was one of the original designers and teachers at the School Without Walls, a high school in Washington D.C. She holds an honorary doctorate from St. Bonaventure University, N.Y.

Myong-Hee Kim, Barbara Goldberg, Sibbie O'Sullivan, and Kathi Wolfe
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Born in Seoul, Korea, Myong-Hee Kim studied philosophy at Korea University. After moving to the United States, she studied creative writing and psychology at George Washington University. Her poems, in English and Korean, have been published various places, including the Christian Science Monitor and Korean language newspapers. In 2002 her translation of the Korean poet Lee Sang, Crow's Eye View, was published by The Word Works. She writes a weekly column for DC's Korean newspaper Joongang Daily. Barbara Goldberg is the author of six books of poetry. She recently received the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize for The Royal Baker's Daughter, forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in 2008. She is the translator, along with Israeli poet Moshe Dor, of The Fire Stays in Red: Poems by Ronny Someck (University of Wisconsin/Dryad Press) and After the First Rain: Israeli Poems on War and Peace (University of Syracuse Press). Sibbie O'Sullivan's poems have appeared in many publications, among them West Branch; The Laurel Review; Nimrod; Gargoyle; Dreamworks; South Florida Poetry Review; New Delta Review; Poet and Critic; Calapooya Collage; Westminster Review; Poets On; Apalachee Quarterly; Sou'Wester; Hubbub; Zone 3, and WordWrights. Her awards in poetry include the Mademoiselle College Poetry Prize; the Judith Siegal Pearson Poetry Prize, and the Billee Murray Denny Poetry Prize. Kathi Wolfe is a poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Gargoyle and other publications. She has read at many poetry series, including the Library of Congress Poetry at Noon series. In 2006, Wolfe received a Puffin Foundation grant for her work on her chapbook of poems on Helen Keller.

Amy King
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Amy King lives in Brooklyn, NY, and is the author of the poetry collections, I'm the Man Who Loves You (BlazeVOX Books, 2007), Antidotes for an Alibi (BlazeVOX Books, 2005), and The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press, 2003). She teaches Creative Writing and English at SUNY Nassau Community College and has also taught a workshop of her own design, "Making the Urban Poetic" at Poets House in Manhattan. Ms. King is the editor-in-chief for the literary arts journal, MiPOesias, and an interview correspondent for miPOradio. She is the List Editor for the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania). Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry.

Ted Kooser
Listen to Audio Webcast (5/5/05 | 57:10 minutes)
Listen to Audio Webcast (10/8/04 | 57:39 minutes)

Current Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry Ted Kooser, who was born in Ames, Iowa, received his bachelor's degree from Iowa State and his master's in English from the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the author of 10 collections of poetry, including "Delights & Shadows," which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. His other honors include two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, a Pushcart Prize and the Stanley Kunitz Prize from Columbia. He is a professor in the English department at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Stanley Kunitz
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Stanley Kunitz was born in Worchester, Massachusetts in 1905 and educated at Harvard University. He was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, 1974-76 before the title was changed to Poet Laureate in 1985. He was next appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2000-2001.His honors include the National Medal of the Arts, presented by President Clinton in 1993 and the Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America. As editor of the Yale Series of Younger Poets (1969-1977) he encouraged young writers in their careers. Poets who are prominent figures in American culture acknowledge Stanley Kunitz. A founder of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Poets House in New York City, he also taught for many years in the graduate writing program at Columbia University. His honors include the Bollingen Prize, Harvard's Centennial Medal, The Levinson Prize, The Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, The Shelley Memorial Award, a senior fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He was designated State Poet of New York and a Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. He lived with his wife, the artist Elise Asher, in New York City and in Provincetown, where he cultivates a celebrated seaside garden. Stanley Kunitz has authored ten books and welcomed his 100th year with an eleventh publication (with Genine Lentine,) The Wild Braid: A Poet Reflects on a Century in the Garden. Selected poetry collections by Stanley Kunitz: Collected Poems (W.W. Norton, 2000;) Passing Through: The Later Poems, New and Selected (1995;) Next-to-Last Things: New Poems and Essays (1985;) The Poems of Stanley Kunitz, 1928-1978; The Testing Tree (1971;) and, Intellectual Things (1930).

Laurie Lamon
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Laurie Lamon was chosen by U.S. Poet Laureate Donald Hall as a 2007 Witter Bynner Fellow. She teaches poetry workshops and literature seminars at Whitworth College in Spokane, Washington, where she is associate professor of English. She received her doctorate from the University of Utah and her M.F.A. from the University of Montana. Her poems have appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Poetry Northwest. She is the recipient of a Washington State Artist Trust Award in 2005, a Graves Award in 2002, and a Pushcart Prize in 2001 for the poem "Pain Thinks of the Beautiful Table." Her work is included in 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Ordinary Days, edited by Billy Collins, and is forthcoming in the second Poetry Daily anthology. Her first collection of poems, The Fork Without Hunger, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2005.

Merill Leffler
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Merrill Leffler has published two collections of poetry, Partly Pandemonium, Partly Love and Take Hold, and was the guest editor for The Changing Orders: Poetry from Israel for Poet Lore. Forthcoming in 2007 is a collection of poems, Mark the Music and, with Moshe Dor, A Guest in Your Own Body, translations of poems by the late Israeli poet Eytan Eytan. Leffler has taught literature at the University of Maryland and U.S. Naval Academy and was a senior science writer at the University of Maryland Sea Grant Program. He is the publisher of Dryad Press and lives in Takoma Park with his wife, the poet Ann Slayton. (Photo of Merrill Leffler © Michael Fincham. Reprinted with permission.)

Herbert Woodward Martin
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Herbert Woodward Martin has published seven volumes of poems. His latest volume Escape to the Promised Land (Bottom Dog Press) is a finalist in The Ohioana Awards presented by The Ohioana Library. His selected poems, Inscribing My Name, was published Kent State University Press in 2007. Martin was given an Ohio Governors Award for Individual Artist in Poetry in 2001 by the Ohio Arts Council, and in 2004 The Ohio Arts Council Awarded him an individual grant to write poetry. Martin has been closely associated with the nineteenth-century African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who achieved national and international recognition near the end of that century. His association has allowed him to produce the scholarly works Paul Laurence Dunbar: A Singer of Songs, Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Eyes of The Poet, In His Own Voice: The Uncollected Works of Paul Laurence Dunbar and The Selected Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Martin is the author of two opera libretti, Paul Laurence Dunbar: Common Ground and It Pays to Advertise. He also has to his credit the texts for a new Magnificat and the cantata, Crispus Attucks: American Patriot. He is presently at work on a new opera with the working title The Last Czar. His poems have appeared in a variety of American and British journals.

Laini Mataka and Ann Slayton
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Laini Mataka was born and raised in Baltimore. Her first album, Black Ivory, was recorded in 1971. She hosted a radio show, Still Black After All These Years, at Morgan University's station. Her book titles for Black Classic Press are Never as Strangers, Restoring The Queen, and Bein' A Strong Black Woman Can Get U Killed!! Mataka has been an educator since 1996. Ann Slayton's poems have appeared in Poetry Now, Pembroke Magazine, Southern Poetry Review, Poet Lore and Washington Review; and the anthologies Rye Bread, City Celebration, and Takoma Park Writers. Two book publications are: The Music Beginning Here (Sibyl-Child Press) and Catching the Light (Dryad Press). She was co-founder of the Washington Women's Arts Center, and worked for 30 years as a writer, editor, and speechwriter. She lives in Maryland with her husband Merrill Leffler.

Hope Maxwell-Snyder and Rob Carney
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Hope Maxwell-Snyder and Rob Carney currently reside in West Virginia and Utah, respectively. Hope Snyder is originally from Colombia, South America. She received an MA in Spanish from George Washington University, another Master's in Spanish and Latin American Literature from Johns Hopkins University and a Ph.D. in Spanish Medieval Literature from the University of Manchester in England. She is the author of two plays, The Backroom and Lullaby for George; a novel, Orange Wine; and two collections of poetry, Chains and Strings of Broken Hearts. She is the founder and producer of the Sotto Voce Poetry Festival in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Rob Carney is originally from Washington state and earned his BA from Pacific Lutheran University, his MFA from Eastern Washington University, and his Ph.D from the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. He is the author of New Fables, Old Songs; Boasts, Toasts, and Ghosts; and Weather Report. His collection This Is One Sexy Planet won the 2005 Frank Cat Press Annual Poetry Contest. He is a professor at Utah Valley State.

Richard McCann and Reb Livingston
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Richard McCann is the author of Mother of Sorrows, a work of fiction, and Ghost Letters, a collection of poems (1994 Beatrice Hawley Award, 1993 Capricorn Poetry Award). He is also the editor (with Michael Klein) of Things Shaped in Passing: More 'Poets for Life' Writing from the AIDS Pandemic. His fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in such magazines as The Atlantic, Ms., Esquire, Ploughshares, Tin House, and the Washington Post Magazine, and numerous anthologies, including The O. Henry Prize Stories 2007 and Best American Essays 2000. He is currently working on a memoir, The Resurrectionist, which explores the experience and meanings of his experience as a liver transplant recipient. He now lives in Washington, DC, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University. Photo by Sigrid Estrada.

Reb Livingston is the author of Your Ten Favorite Words (Coconut Books, 2007) and Pterodactyls Soar Again (Whole Coconut Chapbook  Series, 2006). Her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review,  Coconut, MiPOesias, and other literary magazine. One of her poems was chosen by Billy Collins for The Best American Poetry 2006 (Scribner).  She is the editor of No Tell Motel, publisher of No Tell Books, and co-editor of  the No Tell Motel anthology series.  She has creative writing degrees from Bennington (MFA) and Carnegie Mellon (BA). She lives in Virginia with her husband and son. Photo by Rachel Beamer.

Campbell McGrath
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Campbell McGrath is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Pax Atomica (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2004) and Heart of Anthracite (Stride Books, UK, 2005). Among his awards are the Kingsley Tufts Prize, a WItter-Bynner Fellowhip in association with the Library of Congress, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. Mr. McGrath teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.

Heather McHugh
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Heather McHugh's latest book of poems is EYESHOT (Wesleyan University Press 2003). She makes her home in Maine and teaches, at various times, at the University of Washington in Seattle, and in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College in Asheville NC. Ms. McHugh has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, PEN (Voelcker Poetry Award), Wellesley College (Sara Teasdale Award), and, together with her husband, translator Nikolai Popov, the 2001 Griffin Prize for Poetry in the International Category.

W.S. Merwin
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William Stanley Merwin currently lives and works in Hawaii. Merwin has won several awards, including the 1971 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He has also won a Ford Foundation Grant (1964), National Endowment for the Arts Grant (1968), PEN Translation Prize (1969), Guggenheim Fellowship (1973), Tanning Poetry Prize for Career Achievement (1994), and the Lenore Marshall/Nation Poetry Prize (1993). His more than twenty-two volumes of work include A Mask for Janus (1952), The Moving Target (1963), Lice (1967), The Carrier of Ladders (1970; won the Pulitzer Prize), Opening the Hand (1983), Selected Poems (1988), Travels (1993), The River Sound (1999), The Pupil (2002), and Migration (2005). Merwin is also well-known for his translations, among them The Cid (1959) and The Life of Lazarillo de Tormes (1962). W.S. Merwin was a special Bicentennial Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2000.

E. Ethelbert Miller
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Born in New York City, the award-winning poet E. Ethelbert Miller received the B.A. from Howard University. He is director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, a position he has held since 1974. He has published numerous poetry collections, including Whispers, Secrets, and Promises (Black Classic Press, 1998) and First Light: New and Selected Poems (1994).

Daniel Thomas Moran
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Daniel Thomas Moran was Poet Laureate of Suffolk County, New York, from 2005 to 2007. He is the author of six collections of poetry, the most recent being Looking for the Uncertain Past (Poetry Salzburg, 2006). He is past Vice-President of The Walt Whitman Birthplace Association, past Literary Correspondent to Long Island Public Radio and a member of PEN American. His collected papers are being archived by Stony Brook University. He holds a Doctorate in Dental Surgery from Howard University. He lives with his wife Karen on Shelter Island in New York.

Yvette Neisser Moreno and Teri Ellen Cross
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Yvette Neisser Moreno is a poet and translator whose work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including The International Poetry Review, The Potomac Review, Tar River Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has translated from Spanish Luis Alberto Ambroggio's Difficult Beauty: Selected Poems. Teri Ellen Cross holds an MFA in poetry from American University.  She was a Cave Canem fellow and her poems can be found in many anthologies, including Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam and Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem's First Decade, and online in Beltway Quarterly and Torch.