Bios

Aliki Barnstone is a poet, translator, critic, editor, and visual artist. She is the author of eight books of poetry, the most recent of which include: Dear God Dear, Dr. Heartbreak: New and Selected Poems (Sheep Meadow, 2009), Bright Body (White Pine, 2011), and Dwelling (Sheep Meadow, 2016). She translated The Collected Poems of C.P. Cavafy (W.W. Norton, 2006). Her first book of poems, The Real Tin Flower (Crowell-Collier, 1968), was published when she was 12 years old, with a forward by Anne Sexton. In 2014, Carnegie-Mellon University Press reissued her book, Madly in Love, as a Carnegie-Mellon Classic Contemporary, a series dedicated to reprinting the work of America’s most important poets. She edited A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now (Schocken,1980; 2^nd edition, 1992), which remains the most comprehensive anthology of international poetry in English, and the Shambhala Anthology of Women’s Spiritual Poetry (Shambhala, 2002). Her literary critical work includes the introduction and readers’ notes for H.D.’s Trilogy, co-editing The Calvinist Roots of the Modern Era, and her study, Changing Rapture: The Development of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry (University Press of New England, 2007). Among her awards are a Senior Fulbright Fellowship in Greece, the Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and residencies at the Anderson Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is Professor of English at the University of Missouri and served as poet laureate of Missouri from 2016-2019.

Nancy Lael Braun is a life-long Midwesterner, currently splitting her time between Lone Tree and Sioux City, Iowa. Pushcart nominated for poetry in 2016, she has published in Aquifer: Florida Review Online, The Aurorean, Barbaric Yawp, Big Muddy, The Briar Cliff Review, Iowa City: Poetry in Public, Poetalk, Small Brushes, and TSR. She is a walker, reader, mother, grandmother, and Baha’i. She had the enormous pleasure of serving as Billy Collins’ assistant at the virtual Southampton Writers Conference this past summer.

Jacque Vaught Brogan is Professor Emerita of American and English Literature at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana. She has written widely on American poetry and language theory, as well as serving as Co-Editor with Cordelia Candelaria for Women Poets of the Americas. Best known for her critical interests in Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and Ernest Hemingway, she has also written on Alice Walker, Adrienne Rich, and Susan Power. A widely published poet, she has been the featured poet of Spring: The E.E. Cummings Journal, Boundary 2, and Poetry International. She has written three chapbooks, and published two books of poetry – Damage and the book-length experimental long poem, Ta(L)King Eyes. She is a member of the Founding Board of the American Literature Association and has been the recipient of many awards and grants, including an NEH.

Wendy Cleveland grew up in Pennsylvania and later earned degrees from Ithaca College and the University of New Hampshire. After teaching high school English for thirty years, she and her husband relocated to Auburn, Alabama, with its loblolly pines, dogtrot houses, and kudzu. She is a member of the Alabama Writers’ Forum and a graduate of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Cleveland's poems have appeared in Yankee, Red Rock Review, Persimmon Tree, and Glass Mountain, among other journals. Her first collection of poems, Blue Ford, was published in 2016.

Jeanne Emmons’s collections include: The Red Canoe (Finishing Line Press); The Glove of the World (Backwaters Press Reader's Choice Award); Baseball Nights and DDT (Pecan Grove Press); and Rootbound (New Rivers Press Minnesota Voices Award). Her poems have won the Comstock poetry prize, the South Coast Review Poetry Award, the James Hearst Poetry Award, and the Sow's Ear poetry award. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Scholar, Carolina Quarterly, Louisiana Literature, North American Review, River Styx, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review, and other journals. She is poetry editor of The Briar Cliff Review.

Ann Fisher-Wirth’s sixth book of poems is The Bones of Winter Birds. Mississippi, her fifth, is a poetry/photography collaboration with the photographer Maude Schuyler Clay. With Laura-Gray Street, Fisher-Wirth coedited The Ecopoetry Anthology. She is a senior fellow of The Black Earth Institute; has had residencies at The Mesa Refuge, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, and CAMAC, France; and has received numerous awards for her work. She was 2017 Poet in Residence at Randolph College and has had senior Fulbrights to Switzerland and Sweden. She is a professor of English and directs the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi.

Margaret Hasse lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Rocked by the Waters: poems of motherhood, co-edited by Margaret and Athena Kildegaard, was released in 2020, as was Hasse's sixth collection of poetry, Shelter. A collaboration with watercolor artist Sharon DeMark during the first months of the pandemic, Shelter is about places and experiences that provide refuge or comfort, such as house, art, tent, and hug. For more poems and information, visit https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/margaret-hasse

Pauletta Hansel’s eight poetry collections include Friend, Coal Town Photograph and Palindrome, winner of the 2017 Weatherford Award for best Appalachian poetry; her writing has been featured in Oxford American, Rattle, Appalachian Journal, Still: The Journal, American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily and Poetry Daily, among others. Her poem is from her forthcoming book I Tell You Now (Madville Publishing, 2022), a poetic exploration of the intersection of gender and place in Appalachia. Hansel was Cincinnati’s first Poet Laureate (2016-2018) and is past managing editor of Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, the literary publication of Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative.

Judith Sanders’ poems have appeared in journals such as Calyx and Light, on Vox Populi, and in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Her poems won the Hart Crane and Wergle Flomp Humor prizes. Her articles have appeared in journals such as The American Scholar and Independent Teacher, and on Full Grown People. She has a B.A. in literature from Yale, an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University, and a Ph.D. in English from Tufts. She taught English and writing at colleges in New England, in France on a Fulbright Fellowship, and at independent schools in Pittsburgh, where she now lives.

Annette Sisson teaches English at Belmont University in Nashville, TN. Her poetry has been published in Nashville Review, Typishly, One, River Heron Review, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM, Every Day, HeartWood Literary Magazine, and many others. She has also published a chapbook entitled A Casting Off (Finishing Line, May 2019). She was the winner of The Porch Writers’ Collective’s poetry prize, received Honorable Mention in Passager’s 2019 poetry prize, and was named a BOAAT Writing Fellow for 2020 (postponed until ‘21). She recently completed her first full-length poetry manuscript and is questing for a publisher.

Rebecca A. Spears, author of Brook the Divide (Unsolicited Press, 2020) and The Bright Obvious (Finishing Line Press, 2009), has her poems, essays, and reviews included in TriQuarterly, Calyx, Crazyhorse, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, Ars Medica, Field Notes, and other journals and anthologies. She has received awards from the Taos Writers Workshop, Vermont Studio Center, and Dairy Hollow House; she is also a Pushcart nominee.

Bonnie Larson Staiger is a North Dakota Associate Poet Laureate and ND Humanities Scholar. She is a recipient of the Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Prize from North Dakota State University Press for her debut chapbook, Destiny Manifested, which also received the Independent Press Award: Distinguished Favorite. She has recently received awards from Flying South Literary Magazine and The MacGuffin’s Best of the Year Anthology, and was a finalist for the Julia Darling Poetry Prize and the Great Midwest Poetry Prize. Her second book, a full collection titled In Plains Sight, is forthcoming from NDSU Press in 2021.

Dawn Terpstra lives in Iowa where she leads a member relations and communications team in the energy industry. She has spent a career in communications, including radio, politics, and corporate marketing. She earned two master’s degrees from Iowa State University, conducting her graduate fieldwork in Micronesia. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Briar Cliff Review, Citron Review, Remington Review, San Pedro River Review, SWWIM, Third Wednesday, Eastern Iowa Review, Raw Art Review, and Telepoem Booth, sponsored by Humanities Iowa. Her chapbook, Songs from the Summer Kitchen, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

LaWanda Walters is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Light Is the Odalisque (Silver Concho Series, Press 53, 2016). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Consequence, Georgia Review, Antioch Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Ploughshares, Shenandoah, Cincinnati Review, Laurel Review, and other periodicals. “Goodness in Mississippi,” a poem in the Golden Shovel form devised by Terrance Hayes, was chosen by Sherman Alexie for Best American Poetry 2015. She received a 2020 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley is the author of six books of poetry, including Praise Song for My Children: New and Selected Poems, When the Wanderers Come Home, Where the Road Turns, and The River is Rising. Her poems have been published or featured across the world and in the U.S. in magazines and anthologies, including Harvard Review, Transition, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times Magazine, and Black Renaissance Noire, and her poetry has been translated into Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, and Finnish. She is Professor of English, Creative Writing, and Literature at Penn State University. You can visit her blog: Poetryforpeace.wordpress.com