New York, NY (December 9, 2021)— The Academy of American Poets is pleased to announce twelve new Poem-a-Day guest editors who will each curate a month of poems in 2022. The guest editors are all award-winning poets who represent wide-ranging editorial perspectives and live in eight different states across the country. Poem-a-Day is the original and only digital series featuring new work by today's poets. Reaching more than 800,000 readers each morning on Poets.org, via email, and across social media, Poem-a-Day is one of the largest platforms for a poet to share new work. Subscribe to the free email version of the series at poets.org/poem-a-day.
“We’re grateful to the twelve new guest editors joining us in 2022 to curate Poem-a-Day and are looking forward to the poets they'll be introducing to our readers. We hope you'll sign-up for Poem-a-Day and read along with us,” said Jennifer Benka, executive director of the Academy of American Poets.
The twelve guest editors are:
January
Joseph O. Legaspi was born in the Philippines, where he lived before immigrating to Los Angeles with his family at age twelve. He received a BA from Loyola Marymount University and an MFA from New York University’s Creative Writing Program. A Fulbright scholar and two-time NYSCA/New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow, Legaspi is the author of Threshold (CavanKerry Press, 2017); Imago (CavanKerry Press, 2007), winner of a Global Filipino Literary Award; and the chapbooks Postcards (Ghost Bird Press), Aviary, Bestiary (Organic Weapon Arts) and Subways (Thrush Press). He is the recipient of two poetry fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and in 2004 he co-founded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving Asian American poetry. He works at Columbia University, teaches at New York University and Fordham University, and lives with his husband in Queens, New York.
February
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and the NAACP Image Award; and Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher Books, 2010), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award. The recipient of a Four Quartets Prize for his poem “A Refusal to Mourn the Deaths, by Gunfire, of Three Men in Brooklyn,” a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, two Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, among many other honors, Murillo is assistant professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University and lives in Brooklyn, New York.
March
Brenda Shaughnessy was born in Okinawa, Japan and grew up in Southern California. She is the author of The Octopus Museum (Alfred A. Knopf, 2019); So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016); Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press 2012), which was a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and the Kingsley Tufts Award; Human Dark with Sugar (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Interior with Sudden Joy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), which was nominated for the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, a Lambda Literary Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award. Shaughnessy is a 2013 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and a recipient of a Howard Foundation Fellowship from Brown University, a 2001 Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and a Japan/US Friendship Commission Artist Fellowship. She currently serves as an associate professor at Rutgers University–Newark.
April (National Poetry Month)
Naomi Shihab Nye is a Palestinian-American writer, editor, and educator who grew up in Ferguson, Missouri, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she continues to live. She is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Cast Away: Poems for Our Time (Greenwillow Books, 2020). Her other books of poetry include The Tiny Journalist (BOA Editions, 2019); Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (Greenwillow Books, 2018); Transfer (BOA Editions, 2011); You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award; and 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (Greenwillow Books, 2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East. She is also the author of several books of poetry and fiction for children, including Habibi (Simon Pulse, 1997), for which she received the Jane Addams Children's Book award in 1998. Nye’s honors include awards from the International Poetry Forum and the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award, and four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988, she received the Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award, judged by W. S. Merwin. She served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2010 to 2015, and is the Poetry Foundation's Young People's Poet Laureate.
May
Brandy Nālani McDougall is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Hawaiʻi, Maui, and Kauaʻi lineages) poet raised on the slopes of Haleakalā on Maui. Her book, ʻĀina Hānau, Birth Land, is forthcoming in 2022. She is an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
June
Jos Charles is the author of feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), a winner of the National Poetry Series and long-listed for the 2018 National Book Award; and A Year & Other Poems (Milkweed Editions, 2022). Charles has an MFA from the University of Arizona and is currently a PhD student in English at UC Irvine. She resides in Long Beach, California.
July
Erica Hunt is the author of Jump the Clock (Nightboat Books, 2020), Veronica: A Suite in X Parts (selva oscura press, 2019), Piece Logic (Carolina Wren Press, 2002), Arcade (Kelsey Street Press, 1996), and Local History (Roof Books, 1993). Hunt is the co-editor of Letters to the Future, Black Women/Radical Writing (Kore Press, 2018), alongside Dawn Lundy Martin. Known for her work in experimental poetics and critical race theory, Hunt has received grants and fellowships from the Center for Contemporary Arts, the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, among others. She has worked as a housing organizer, radio producer, and teacher, as well as for the Twenty-First Century Foundation, which supports organizations that address social injustice affecting the black community. She is the Bonderman Visiting Professor of the Practice in the Literary Arts department at Brown University.
August
Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf Press, 2021), Aviarium (fivehundred places, 2017), and Bestiary (Graywolf Press, 2016), winner of the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the 2017 Hurston/Wright Award for poetry, and the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. Bestiary was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in 2017 and long-listed for the National Book Award in 2016. A Cave Canem fellow graduate and founding member of the collective, Poets at the End of the World, she is an assistant professor in the English department at the University of Iowa and lives in Iowa City.
September
Cynthia Hogue is the author of nine poetry collections, including instead, it is dark (Red Hen Press, 2023); Contain (Tram Editions, 2022); Revenance (Red Hen Press, 2014); Or Consequence (Red Hen Press, 2010); The Incognito Body (Red Hen Press, 2006); and Flux (New Issues Press 2002). Hogue is the recipient of the 2013 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets for her co-translation of Virginie Lalucq and Jean-Luc Nancy’s Fortino Sámano (The Overflowing of the Poem) (Omnidawn, 2012). She has also translated Nicole Brossard’s Lointaines (Omnidawn, 2022). The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a MacDowell Colony residency, a Witter Bynner Translation Fellowship, and the H.D. Fellowship at Yale University, her other publications include four books of criticism and When the Water Came: Evacuees of Hurricane Katrina, with photographer Rebecca Ross (University of New Orleans Press, 2010). She lives in Tucson, Arizona.
October
Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir (Harper Collins, 2020); Cenzontle (BOA editions, 2018), which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Prize; and Dulce (Northwestern University Press, 2018), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. He is a founding member of the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S., and was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers award. He was the first undocumented student to graduate from the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and lives in Northern California where he serves as the Poet Laureate of Yuba and Sutter Counties. He currently teaches at St. Mary’s College of California and the Ashland University Low-Res MFA program.
November
Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Waters Edge. Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico, he holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. His debut collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers (Milkweed, 2019), was selected by Kathy Fagan for the 2018 National Poetry Series and received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Winner of the Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest, a 92Y Discovery Prize, a Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellowship, an American Book Award, and a 2020 Whiting Award, Skeets teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona, located in the Navajo Nation.
December
Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which received the 2019 National Book Award in poetry; Compass Rose (Copper Canyon Press, 2014); and The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). He is also a celebrated translator from the Chinese, and released The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon Press) in 2001. His honors include an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Western States Book Award for Translation, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and fellowships from the George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2013, he was awarded the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers magazine. Sze was elected to the American Academy of Arts And Sciences in 2017 and served as 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.
Read more about the 2022 Poem-a-Day guest editors.
Read about the 2021 Poem-a-Day guest editors.
About the Academy of American Poets
Founded in 1934, the Academy of American Poets is the nation’s leading champion of poets and poetry with supporters in all fifty states. The organization annually awards more funds to individual poets than any other organization through its prize program, giving a total of $1.25 million to more than 200 poets at various stages of their careers. The organization also produces Poets.org, the world’s largest publicly funded website for poets and poetry; organizes National Poetry Month; publishes the popular Poem-a-Day series and American Poets magazine; provides award-winning resources to K–12 educators, including the Teach This Poem series; hosts an annual series of poetry readings and special events; and coordinates a national Poetry Coalition working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture.