Alice Friman
Alice Friman’s last two books (both LSU) are Vinculum, which won a 2012 Georgia Author of the Year Award, and The View from Saturn, 2014. Other books include Inverted Fire and The Book of the Rotten Daughter (both BkMk), and Zoo (Arkansas), which won the Sheila Margaret Motton Prize and the Ezra Pound Poetry Award. Among other awards are a Pushcart Prize, appearance in The Best American Poetry 2009, and three prizes from Poetry Society of America: the Consuelo Ford, the Cecil Hemley, and the Lucille Medwick Awards. From The New England Poetry Club, the Gretchen Warren and Firman Houghton Awards, and, twice, the Erika Mumford Prize. She also received the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry (Shenandoah) and the Ekphrasis Prize for Poetry (Ekphrasis). Friman has fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Arts Council of Indianapolis, MacDowell, Yaddo, Millay, VCCA, and the Bernheim Foundation. Her poems are in Poetry, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Southern Review, etc. Her essays/reviews appear in The Movable Nest (Helicon Nine) and Sleeping with One Eye Open (Georgia) and in Prairie Schooner, New Letters, and Georgia Review. Professor Emerita at U of Indianapolis, Friman now is Poet-in-Residence at Georgia College. Her podcast series, Ask Alice, is on YouTube.
Dolores Hayden
Dolores Hayden, professor of American studies and architecture at Yale University, is an architect, urban landscape historian, and poet who explores place and history in her work. Exuberance, a narrative sequence set in the early years of aviation, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press. Her award-winning non-fiction books include The Grand Domestic Revolution, The Power of Place, and A Field Guide to Sprawl, a dictionary of bad building patterns with aerial photographs by Jim Wark. Her poetry collections are American Yard and Nymph, Dun, and Spinner. Recent poems appear in Poetry, The Common, Shenandoah, Raritan, Southwest Review, Mezzo Cammin, Architrave, Poetry Porch, Ecotone, and Yale Review, as well as Best American Poetry, Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. An alumna of Mount Holyoke College, Cambridge University, and Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Hayden has been a Radcliffe Institute, Guggenheim, and NEA fellow, and held residencies at Djerassi, Noepe, and VCCA. She received The Writer/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, as well as the Firman Houghton Award, the Boyle/Farber Award for a poem in form (three times), and the Barbara Bradley Award from the New England Poetry Club. In 2008 she delivered the Phi Beta Kappa Poem at Yale University. Her web site is www.DoloresHayden.com
Tyehimba Jess
Tyehimba Jess is the author of Leadbelly, and Olio. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Olio,, published in 2016, has been called “Encyclopedic, ingenious, and abundant…” by Publisher’s Weekly‘s starred review, and was selected as one of the five best poetry books of 2016. Library Journal, calls Olio a “daring collection, which blends forthright, musically acute language with portraiture.”Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000-2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference. Jess is Poetry and Fiction Editor of African American Review, and Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.Jess’ fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago’s Guild Complex, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.
John Poch
John Poch is the author of
four poetry collections, most recently Fix
Quiet (St. Augustine’s Press) which won the
2014 New Criterion Poetry
Prize. He teaches
in the creative writing program at Texas Tech
University. His book, Between Two Rivers (a
collaboration with the
photographer, Jerod
Foster) is forthcoming in Fall 2017.