2024 CONFERENCE Spotlight Readers

Teri Ellen Cross Davis

Teri Ellen Cross Davis is the author of a more perfect Union, awarded the 2019 Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and Haint, awarded the 2017 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. She is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2020 Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. Her work has appeared in print, online, in journals and anthologies includingAcademy of American Poets, Harvard Review, PANKPoetry Ireland Review, and Kenyon Review. She’s the O.B. Hardison Poetry Series Curator and Poetry Programs manager for the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. Follow her on Twitter at @cross_davis, Instagram at  @haint_poet, and online at www.poetsandparents.com.

January Gill O’neil

January Gill O’Neil is an associate professor at Salem State University and the author ofGlitter Road (February 2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), andUnderlife (2009), all published by CavanKerry Press. From 2012 to 2018, she served as the executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival. Her poems and articles have appeared inThe New York Times Magazine, the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day series,American Poetry ReviewPoetry, and Sierra magazine, among others. Her poem “At the Rededication of the Emmett Till Memorial” was a co-winner of the 2022 Allen Ginsberg Poetry award from the Poetry Center at Passaic County Community College. The recipient of fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Cave Canem, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, O’Neil was the 2019-2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, Oxford. She currently serves as the 2022-2024 board chair of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).