Quan Barry

Quan Barry is the author of eight books of fiction and poetry, including We Ride Upon Sticks (2020), She Weeps Each Time You’re Born (2015), Loose Strife (2015), Water Puppets (2011), Controvertibles (2004), and Asylum (2001). Her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Southeast Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Ploughshares, among others. She is the recipient of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry, and an Alex Award. A Dramatists Guild member and Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing fellowship recipient, Barry is one of the few writers who have received NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction. She is currently a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor 

Cheryl Boyce-Taylor is a poet, author, and curator. Her collections of poetry include Raw Air (2000), Night When Moon Follows (2000), Convincing the Body (2005), and Arrival (2017), which was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. The founder and curator of Calypso Muse and the Glitter Pomegranate Performance Series, Boyce-Taylor is also a poetry judge for the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice. She has led workshops for Cave Canem, Poets & Writers, and the Caribbean Literary and Cultural Center. Her poetry has been commissioned by The Joyce Theater and the National Endowment for the Arts for Ronald K. Brown’s Evidence, A Dance Company. Boyce-Taylor received the 2015 Barnes Noble Writers for Writers Award and a VONA fellow. Her life papers and portfolio are stored at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City.

Kamau Brathwaite

Kamau Brathwaite is a poet and scholar who has authored numerous collections of poetry, including Elegguas (2010), the Griffin International Poetry Prize Winner Slow Horses (2005), Ancestors (2001), Middle Passages (1992), and Black + Blues (1976). His first three collections, Rights of Passage (1967), Masks (1968), and Islands (1969), have been gathered into The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy (1973). Co-founder of the Caribbean Artists Movement, Brathwaite’s honors include the Casa de las Americas Prize for Literary Criticism, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and several others. He has also received fellowships from the Fulbright, Ford, and Guggenheim Foundations. Brathwaite has worked in Ghana’s Ministry of Education, and has taught at Harvard, the University of the West Indies, and New York University. He lived in Barbados and New York City before his death in early 2020.

Tiana Clark

Tiana Clark is the author of the poetry collections I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (2018) and Equilibrium (2016). Her writing has been featured or forthcoming in various publications, including The New Yorker, Poetry Magazine, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Virginia Quarterly Review, Tin House Online, Kenyon Review, BuzzFeed News, American Poetry Review, Oxford American, and The Best American Poetry 2022. Clark has received several awards and honors for her work, including the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, 2020 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, 2015 Rattle Poetry Prize, 2021-2022 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship, and 2019 Pushcart Prize. She has held appointments at several institutions, including the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Sewanee Writers' Conference, and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and she is currently a professor at the Sewanee School of Letters and the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.

Ama Codjoe

Ama Codjoe is an educator, writer, and dance artist. She is the author of Bluest Nude (2022), winner of the 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a 2023 Whiting Award, and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award for outstanding poetry, and her poems have been published in the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, Best American Poetry, and other outlets. She has won a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, a creative writing fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a NYSCA/NYFA artist fellowship, a BRIO Award from the Bronx Council on the Arts, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and an Amy Clampitt Residency, among other honors. Codjoe has been supported by Cave Canem and the Robert Rauschenberg and Saltonstall Foundations as well as Callaloo, Hawthornden, Hedgebrook, Yaddo, and MacDowell. In 2023 Cudjoe was appointed as the second poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum. 

Toi Dericotte

Toi Derricotte is the author of six collections of poetry, including her most recent collection, I: New and Selected Poems (2019), a National Book Awards Finalist. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, received the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. Derricotte is the recipient of numerous honors for her contributions to literature, including the Academy of American Poets' Wallace Stevens Award, the Poetry Society of America's Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, three Pushcart Prizes, the Paterson Poetry Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim. In 1996, she co-founded the Cave Canem with poet Cornelius Eady to cultivate artistic and professional opportunities for Black poets. She has been a supporter of Furious Flower since the first conference, held in 1994. Dericotte is a professor emerita at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Ayokunle Falomo

Ayokunle Falomo is a poet, storyteller, and public speaker whose poetry has been self-published in his collection's kin.DREAD: poems & thoughts (2017), thread, this word weaver must! (2014), and Africanamerican’t (2022). His work has been featured in the New York Times, Houston Chronicle, Hive Society, Squawk Back, and Glass Mountain, among other platforms both in print and online. Falomo is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and his poems have reached finalist or winner status for Fourteen Hill Press’ Stacy Doric Memorial Award, Flypaper Magazine’s Music Poetry Contest, The Off Beat’s Poetry Contest, and Nimrod Journal’s The Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. 

Ross Gay

Ross Gay has authored four poetry collections, Against Which (2006), Bring the Shovel Down (2011), Be Holding (2020), and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015). Additionally, he has released three essay collections: The Book of Delights (2019), a New York Times bestseller, Inciting Joy (2022), and his most recent collection, The Book of (More) Delights (2023). Gay has won the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award, the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award, and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his work. In 2019, he released the spoken word vinyl “Dilate Your Heart” in collaboration with the label Jagjaguwar.

Marcus Jackson

Marcus Jackson is the author of the poetry collections Pardon My Heart (2018), Neighborhood Register (2011), and the chapbook Rundown (2009). Jackson's poems have appeared in various publications, including The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Magazine. He has received several awards for his work, including the 2019 Ohioana Book Award, the Cave Canem fellowship, and the Ohioana Poetry Book Award for Pardon My Heart. He currently teaches in the MFA program at Ohio State University and Queens University of Charlotte.

Tsitsi Jaji

Tsitsi Jaji is a Zimbabwean poet an American academic. Her chapbook Carnaval (2014) appeared in the first New-Generation African Poets Box Set, and after receiving an honorable mention for the 2015 Sillerman Prize, Jaji published Beating the Graves (2017) as part of the African Poetry Book Series at the University of Nebraska Press. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as Bitter Oleander, Prairie Schooner, Black Renaissance Noire, Madison Review, and elsewhere. She has done readings of her work at the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, the Poetry Foundation, and has taught writing workshops in Zimbabwe, her home country. Jaji has held fellowships with the National Humanities Center, the Schomburg Center, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, and at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell. She works as an associate professor at Duke University, specializing in African and African American literary and cultural studies.  

Safia Jama

Safia Jama is the author of Notes on Resilience (2020), part of the New-Generation African Poets Chapbook Box Set and has since published a full-length poetry collection titled Crowded House (2023). Her poetry has been published in Ploughshares, Bodega Magazine, Boston Review, World Literature Today, Spoken Black Girl, and Poem-a-Day, and has also been featured on WNYC’s Morning Edition and CUNY TV’s Shades of Us series. Jama was a semi-finalist in the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry and her work has earned her a Pushcart nomination. She is currently a Cave Canem graduate fellow and now teaches creative writing at Baruch College.

Jacqueline Johnson

Jacqueline Johnson is a multidisciplinary artist who works in poetry, fiction, and fiber arts. She is the author of A Woman’s Season (2015) and A Gathering of Mother Tongues, winner of the Third Annual White Pine Press Poetry Prize. A Cave Canem fellow and recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Middle Atlantic Writers Association, Johnson has taught poetry at Pine Manor College, the City University of New York, Poets House, Very Special Arts, Imani House, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, and African Voices. Her writing has recently been published in volumes including Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks and Speculating Futures: Black Imagination and the Arts. “Somekindaway” appears in the Brooklyn Poets Anthology, released last spring.

Yusef Komunyakaa

Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet, professor, and the recipient of the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His collection Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems 1977-1989 (1993) earned him the Pulitzer and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Throughout his seventeen acclaimed collections, Komunyakaa suffuses jazz, rhythm, and blues to blend history, myth, and lived experience. His honors are distinguished and many, including the Ruth Lily Prize, the Wallace Stevens Award, the William Faulkner Prize, and many others. He has co-translated poetry collections, published many of his own, as well as his essays, plays, and performance art, and edited anthologies such as The Jazz Poetry Anthology (1991) and The Best of American Poetry 2003. As a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he has taught in New Orleans, Indiana, and Princeton. Komunyakaa currently teaches as the Distinguished Senior Poet in NYU’s graduate creative writing program.

Trapeta B. Mayson

Trapeta B. Mayson authored and self-published her first poetry collection, Mocha Melodies (1998) and her chapbook She Was Once Herself (2012). Mayson also released the music and poetry projects SCAT and “This Is How We Get Through,” in collaboration with jazz guitarist Monnette Sudler. A Cave Canem, Pew, and Aspen Words fellow, she was awarded a Leeway Transformation Award and is a Pennsylvanian Council on the Arts grantee. Mayson is a licensed clinical social worker and Chief Operating Officer at a community mental health agency in Philadelphia. She is a member of the Greene Street Artist Cooperative in Germantown and was the 2020-2021 City of Philadelphia Poet Laureate. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. 

Marilyn Nelson

Marilyn Nelson is a poet, translator and biographer who has authored or translated more than twenty books and five chapbooks of poetry for adults and children and a verse memoir, named one of NPR's Best Books of 2014, titled How I Discovered Poetry. Some of her most notable works include The Homeplace (1990), which won the 1992 Annisfield-Wolf Award; The Fields of Praise: New and Selected Poems (1997) received the 1998 Poets' Prize, the PEN Winship Award, and the Lenore Marshall Prize; and Faster Than Light (2012), earned the 2013 Milton Kessler Poetry Award. A three-time finalist for the National Book Award, Marilyn has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She also received two NEA creative writing fellowships, including the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. She is a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut and the former Poet Laureate of Connecticut. Nelson also founded and directed the Soul Mountain Retreat, a writers' colony focused on shared ethnic backgrounds, from 2004 to 2010.

Ntozake Shange

Poet and playwright, Ntozake Shange (1948-2018) is primarily known for her play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf (1975), which received an Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award, as well as Tony, Grammy, and Emmy Award nominations. Her other works include novels such as Sassafras, Cypress, and Indigo (1982) and Betsey Brown (1985), and poetry collections such as Wild Beauty: New and Selected Poems (2017) and I Live in Music (1994). Shange taught at numerous universities throughout her career and was the recipient of honors and awards for her academic and creative work, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize before her passing in late 2018.

Patricia Spears Jones

Patricia Spears Jones is a poet, playwright, educator, activist. She has authored several poetry collections and chapbooks including her most recent, The Beloved Community (2023). She was a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the Paterson Prize from Passaic County Community College, and her work is widely anthologized and featured in places like Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, BAX: Best American Experimental Writing 2016, Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, and Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry. Jones has received grants and awards from the NEA, NYFA, and a Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Award in 2015, and she has had fellowships at Virginia Center for Creative Arts, Yaddo, the Millay Colony. In 2018 she was granted Rauschenberg Residency in Captiva, Florida and an international residency via The Bau Institute at Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France.

Phillip B. Williams

Phillip B. Williams is the author of the debut novel Ours (2024), and the collections Mutiny (2021), winner of the 2022 American Book Award, and Thief in the Interior (2016), which was the winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He is also the author of the chapbooks Bruised Gospels (2011) and Burn (2013). Williams’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, among others. He received a 2020 creative writing grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a 2017 Whiting Award, and a 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. He serves as a faculty member at Randolph College’s low-res MFA.