SMU presents the Dallas Literary Festival as a way to showcase and encourage conversations about contemporary literature, both on campus and in the larger community.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of two poetry collections, Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf 2018) and Seam (SIU 2014). In 2016, Tarfia was recognized by Harvard Law School as one of 50 Women Inspiring Change. Tarfia is a 2019 United States Artists Fellow, and lives in Dallas, TX.
Joy Priest is the author of Horsepower (Pitt Poetry Series, 2020), which won the Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of the Stanley Kunitz Prize from the American Poetry Review and her poetry has appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, The Atlantic, and Virginia Quarterly Review, among others. In February, her poetry will launch a two-year initiative at The Atlantic called Inheritance, a project about American history, Black life, and the resilience of memory. Her essays have appeared in The Bitter Southerner, Poets & Writers, and ESPN.
Vievee Francis is the author of three books of poetry: Blue-Tail Fly, Horse in the Dark (winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Poetry Prize for a second collection), and Forest Primeval (winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the 2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award). Her work has appeared in numerous print and online journals, textbooks, and anthologies, including POETRY, Best American Poetry 2010, 2014, 2017, 2019, and Angels of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Her new collection, The Shared World, is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press.
francine j. harris’ most recent book of poetry is Here is the Sweet Hand (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020.) Publisher’s Weekly, in a starred review, said “no list of topics or themes can capture the erotic heat, imaginative breadth, and syntactical daring of this poet's voice.” Harris was writer in residence at Washington University in St. Louis. She’s taught creative writing at University of Michigan and Centre College in Danville, Kentucky and is currently associate professor of English at the University of Houston.
Mag Gabbert holds a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University and an MFA from UC Riverside. Gabbert’s essays and poems can be found in 32 Poems, Pleiades, The Rumpus, Hobart, Waxwing, Birmingham Poetry Review, and many other journals. Her chapbook Minml Poems was published by Cooper Dillon Books in 2020. She has received fellowships from Idyllwild Arts and Poetry at Round Top, and she currently teaches creative writing at Southern Methodist University.