About the poets:
Poet, memoirist, and fiction writer Shonda Buchanan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Hampton University teaching creative writing, composition, essay writing, editing, and research. Author of Who’s Afraid of Black Indians?, which was nominated for the Literary of Virginia Literary Contest and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association Literary Awards, and editor of Voices from Leimert Park, Shonda is an award-winning poet whose expertise includes Narrative Nonfiction, Contemporary American, African American, American Indian and Women's Literature, and Comparative Literature, as well as canonical texts. A culture and literary arts ambassador, her presentations, workshops and lectures demonstrate her passion for exploring gender, ethnicity, family, heritage, landscape, environment and ancestry. For more information, visit: www.shondabuchanan.com.
Teri Youmans Grimm is the author of two poetry collections, Becoming Lyla Dore (Red Hen Press) and Dirt Eaters (University Press of Florida). Her writing has also appeared in Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Connecticut Review, South Dakota Review, Sugar House Review and Homegrown in Florida: An Anthology of Florida Childhoods, among other publications. She currently teaches in the low-res MFA program at the University of Nebraska. She lives in Jacksonville, Florida with her husband and two children where she sings in a cover band and hunts alligators. Visit her website at teriyoumansgrimm.com.
Randall Mann’s poems are often set within the landscape of Florida or California. Influenced by Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Bishop, and Donald Justice, Mann’s poetry—at once vulnerable, unflinching, and brave in its ambivalence—explores themes of loss, attraction, brutality, and expectation. Of his preference for working in form, Mann says, “Form helps me approach more comfortably the personal, helps me harden argument.” Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (2004), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; and Straight Razor (2013). He is co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (2007). In response to critics who have regarded the open portrayals of homosexuality in his work as radical, Mann responds, “If tenderness between two men is radical—and I suppose it is—then the shameful world needs a new radicalism.”
Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in physics from Harvard and worked on Wall Street for twenty years. His poetry collections include In Confidence (2011) and Cruising at Sixty to Seventy (2014), both from Red Hen Press. His short memoir, The Elegant Solution, has appeared as a Ploughshares Solo e-book, an audiobook through Audible.com, and in a Ploughshares print anthology. His poetry has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Southwest Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Poetry Daily and on the PBS News Hour’s art blog, among others, and has won Sycamore Review’s Wabash Prize for Poetry, as well as been nominated for four Pushcart Prizes.