2026 Poetry & the Creative Mind

Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five poetry collections, including Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf, 2021), which was awarded the 2022 New England Book Award in Poetry, and Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Smith is also the author of the memoirs To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul (Alfred A. Knopf, 2023) and Ordinary Light (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015), and editor of the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time (Graywolf, 2018). Smith served as the twenty-second poet laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. Her awards and honors include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University, a 2004 Rona Jaffe Writers Award, a 2005 Whiting Award, a 2008 Essence Literary Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the 2014 Academy of American Poets Fellowship. She was the Poem-a-Day Guest Editor for April 2019 and 2018, respectively. In 2021, Smith was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She is a professor of English and of African and African American studies at Harvard University, as well as the interim director of creative writing.

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Sidney Clifton

Sidney Clifton is an Emmy Award–nominated producer who has served as an executive producer, producer, director, and creative executive in animated and live-action content across multiple platforms. She serves as Jim Henson Company’s Senior Vice President of Animation and Mixed Media, and as Senior Consultant with Black Women Animate Studios. Clifton has worked with esteemed creators including Stan Lee, Dr. Maya Angelou, Ringo Starr, B. B. King, Tyler Perry, and Harry Connick Jr. Her producing credits include Harriet the Spy, Celebration Table with Maya Angelou, Me, Eloise, and BET’s animated series Marvel’s Black Panther. In her role as mentor and recruiter, she has been a featured presenter and guest at colleges and universities across North America, including California Institute of the Arts, Pratt Institute, Maryland Institute of Arts, NYU–Tisch, Savannah College Art and Design, and George Mason University. She was honored to give commencement addresses at Idylwild Arts Academy and Ringling College of Art and Design. She is the founder of The Clifton House, a workshop and retreat space for emerging writers and artists at the Baltimore home she grew up in with her siblings and parents—educator and activist Fred J. Clifton and National Book Award–winning poet and Academy Chancellor Lucille Clifton.

Evan Wang

Evan Wang (王潇) is the ninth National Youth Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of Slow Burn (Northwestern University Press, 2026). He is the youngest winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Wang’s work appears in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Journal, and elsewhere. He has been featured at and recognized by The White House, the United Nations, and the Smithsonian Institution. Wang is a first-year student at Harvard College.

Maria Shriver

Maria Shriver is a Peabody and Emmy Award–winning journalist and producer. She is the author of eight New York Times–bestselling books, the former first lady of California, founder of Shriver Media and The Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement, cofounder of the Cleveland Clinic Women’s Comprehensive Health and Research Center, cofounder of the brain health brand MOSH, and publisher of the imprint The Open Field at Penguin Random House.

Dwight Garner

Dwight Garner has been a book critic for the New York Times since 2008. His own most recent book is The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023).

Coco Fusco

Coco Fusco is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. She is a member of the Academy of Arts and Letters and a professor of art at Cooper Union. Fusco is a recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship and a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. Fusco’s performances and videos have been presented in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th Venice Biennale, Frieze Special Projects, Art Basel’s Unlimited, and three Whitney Biennials (2022, 2008, and 1993). Her works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, Walker Art Center, Centre Pompidou, the Imperial War Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona. Fusco is the author of Dangerous Moves: Performance and Politics in Cuba (Tate Publishing, 2015); A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Seven Stories Press, 2008); The Bodies that Were Not Ours (Routledge, 2001); and English Is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas (The New Press, 1995).

Nick Offerman

Nick Offerman is an actor, author, humorist, and woodworker whose credits include the Emmy Award–winning role of Bill in The Last of Us (HBO), Ron Swanson on NBC’s Parks and Recreation, Forest in Devs (FX), and Karl Weathers in the FX series Fargo. He has written six New York Times–bestselling books, including his latest, Little Woodchucks: Offerman Woodshop’s Guide to Tools and Tomfoolery (Dutton, 2025). Recent big screen projects include The Pout-Pout Fish (2026), Mission: Impossible–The Final Reckoning (2025), Smurfs (2025), Civil War (2024), and Origin (2023). For Netflix, Offerman has appeared in Voicemails for Isabelle (2026) and the miniseries Death by Lightning (2025). He is the cohost and executive producer of NBC’s Making It. He is the voice of Beef Tobin in the FOX animated series The Great North and the audiobook narrator for Wendell Berry’s The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (Shoemaker & Company, 2022). In 2026, Offerman will costar in the new musical Iceboy! opposite his wife Megan Mullally at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago.

Christian McBride

Eleven-time Grammy Award–winning jazz bassist Christian McBride will be releasing his album Without Further Ado, Vol. 1, featuring Dianne Reeves and Sting, among other contributors. McBride also leads the musical groups Inside Straight, The Christian McBride Big Band, Ursa Major, Christian McBride’s New Jawn, The Christian McBride Trio, and A Christian McBride Situation. His diverse career includes serving as host of NPR’s public radio program Jazz Night in America as well as The Lowdown: Conversations with Christian on SiriusXM. McBride holds artistic director titles at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem, the TD James Moody Jazz Festival, New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC), and Jazz House Kids.

Maggie Rogers

Multi-platinum, Grammy Award–nominated producer, songwriter and performer Maggie Rogers released her breakthrough EP Now that the Light Is Fading in 2017. Widely hailed as an artist to watch, Rogers shared her critically acclaimed debut album Heard It in a Past Life in 2019 and immediately found tremendous success, debuting at #2 on the Billboard 200. Heard It in a Past Life also landed Rogers a Best New Artist nomination at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards. In 2022, Rogers released her follow-up album, Surrender, to widespread acclaim and embarked on two sold-out headline tours across Europe and North America. Rogers’s 2024 album Don’t Forget Me saw similar praise and a sold-out global tour. In early 2026, Rogers launched The Maggie Rogers Foundation, a philanthropic platform dedicated to bringing arts and music education to students of all backgrounds. The foundation will also continue Rogers’s ongoing effort to support the health and well-being of women of all identities in communities across the United States. Its first initiative is The Maggie Rogers Endowed Scholarship Fund at Rogers’s alma mater, New York University, which will offer financial aid to students pursuing degrees in music production.

John Rothman

John Rothman’s career has spanned half a century. He has acted in around one hundred films, including The Devil Wears Prada (2006), United 93 (2006), Prime (2005), Copycat (1995), Big (1988), Heartburn (1986), Ghostbusters (1984), and Sophie’s Choice (1982). Rothman worked on Broadway in Mike Nichols’s Social Security and Richard Nelson’s Some Americans Abroad. Rothman’s many Off-Broadway credits include The Impossible H. L. Mencken, which he wrote. He was Flavius in Simon Godwin’s Timon of Athens and King Simonides in Trevor Nunn’s Pericles. On television, he starred as Tig Notaro’s father in One Mississippi and was a series regular on Birdland. Rothman is a lifetime member of The Actors Studio, the Ensemble Studio Theater, and The Actors Center.

Tess O’Dwyer

Tess O’Dwyer serves as chair of the board of directors for the Academy of American Poets. She provides strategic planning and fundraising counsel to leaders of the nonprofit sector. Her client roster includes cultural museums, performing arts companies, social justice agencies, schools, and universities. Prior to her consultancy, O’Dwyer served as Vice President for Cultural Affairs at the Americas Society, Director of Development at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and Associate Director of Individual Giving at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. She is an award-winning translator of Latin American and Puerto Rican poetry and fiction. Her books in translation include the social-realist novel Martin Rivas (Oxford University Press, 2000) by Alberto Blest Gana as well as the postmodern classics Yo-Yo Boing! (AmazonCrossing, 2011) by Giannina Braschi and Empire of Dreams (Yale University Press, 1994). O’Dwyer coedited Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas (Taylor & Francis) and Poets, Philosophers, Lovers: On the Writings of Giannina Braschi (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Winner of the Columbia University Translation Center Award, she has served as a Board member of Harvard University’s Cultural Agents Initiative, The Evergreen Review, and PEN America.

Arthur Sze

Arthur Sze is the author of a dozen books, including Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) and Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which received the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. He is also a celebrated translator from the Chinese and released The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese in 2001 and The Silk Dragon II: Translations from the Chinese in 2024, both published by Copper Canyon Press. Sze’s additional honors include an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the fifty-fourth Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Sze has served as Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University and a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College. He has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. Sze was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017 and served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and was the first poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives. In December 2022, Sze served as Guest Editor of the Poem-a-Day series. In 2025, he was appointed the twenty-fifth United States poet laureate.

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Erdrich lives in Minnesota, where she is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore in Minneapolis.

Chloé Zhao

Chloé Zhao is a Beijing-born writer, director, editor, and producer. Her previous films include Eternals (2021) and Nomadland (2020), which won three Oscars. Most recently, she directed, cowrote, and coedited Hamnet (2025), which received eight Oscar nominations and one win. Zhao launched the production company Book of Shadows in 2023 and Kodansha Studios in 2025.

Julia Bullock

Grammy Award–winning classical singer Julia Bullock has headlined productions and concerts at preeminent arts institutions around the world. She has held positions as artist in residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the San Francisco Symphony. This season, she premieres Matthew Aucoin’s Song of the Reappeared with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and a new Tania León commission on a U.S. solo recital tour. Recent operatic highlights include headlining John Adams’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Metropolitan Opera. In concert, Bullock has performed with various ensembles, including both the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Past solo highlights include tours with the American Modern Opera Company, of which she is a founding core member. Her multimedia ensemble program “History’s Persistent Voice” addresses the transatlantic slave trade through spirituals, visual art, poetry, and new music by Black female composers. Bullock’s solo album debut, Walking in the Dark, won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal. Her discography also includes Grammy Award–nominated recordings of West Side Story.

Special Thanks

Readers

Julia Bullock
Louise Erdrich
Coco Fusco
Dwight Garner
Christian McBride
Nick Offerman
Maggie Rogers
John Rothman
Maria Shriver
Tracy K. Smith
Artur Sze
Evan Wang
Chloé Zhao

Executive Producers

Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation
Patricia H. Grodd
Alexandra Jackson
Susan & John Jackson / The Liana Foundation
Anouk Markovits & Larry Berger
Katherine Wagner

Producers

Anonymous
Andrew Schiff & Alexandra Wolfe Schiff
Cynthia J. Schumacher
Elizabeth Sobol

Associate Producers

Elisa C.
Carolyn Forché
Linda Nemec Foster
Ruth H. Marcon
Jessica James Ward

Supporters

Ellen Adler
Michael A. Boyd
Robert Casper & Matthea Harvey
Margaret H. Douglas-Hamilton
Helen Houghton
Camille Lannan
Gabriella Page-Fort

Contributors

Virginia Anderson
Jennifer Flynn Brewer
Sidney Clifton
Georgia Court & Bookstore1sarasota
Patricia Fontaine
Tracie D. Hall
Gwenna A. Nusbaum

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expedition.press, Fortier Public Relations, Greenwillow Books, Harper Kids, Penguin Random House, Poetry Foundation, T. S. Eliot Foundation, W. W. Norton & Company, and WNYC.