January
Dante Micheaux is the author of Circus (Indolent Books, 2018), which won the Four Quartets Prize from the Poetry Society of America and the T. S. Eliot Foundation, and Amorous Shepherd (Syracuse University Press, 2010). Micheaux’s other honors include the 2020 Ambit Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Cave Canem Foundation and the New York Times Foundation.
February
Honorée Fanonne Jeffers is the author of one novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021), winner of the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and five poetry collections, including The Age of Phillis: Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and recipient of the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry. She has won additional awards and fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation. In 2020, she was inducted into the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame. Jeffers is a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, where she holds the Paul and Carol Daube Sutton Chair in English.
March
Kendra DeColo is the author of I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers From the World (BOA Editions, 2021); My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016); and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. She is also the coauthor of Low Budget Movie (Diode, 2021), a collaborative chapbook written with Tyler Mills. DeColo has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Millay Arts, Split This Rock, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She has performed her work in comedy clubs and music venues, including the Newport Folk Festival, and has taught at both Sarah Lawrence College and Vanderbilt University.
April (National Poetry Month)
Cyrus Cassells is the author of numerous books, including Is There Room for Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch? (Four Way Books, 2024), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, and The World That the Shooter Left Us (Four Way Books, 2022), a Housatonic Book Award finalist. His collection Soul Make a Path Through Shouting (Copper Canyon Press, 1994) was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Cassells is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize, the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award, and Texas University’s Presidential Award for Excellence in Scholarly and Creative Activities, as well as fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. In 2021, Cassells was appointed Texas poet laureate and received a 2022 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Austin and teaches at Texas State University, where he is a Regents’ Professor and a University Distinguished Professor of English.
May
Noʻu Revilla is an ʻŌiwi (Hawaiian) poet and educator. Born and raised on Maui, her debut book, Ask the Brindled (Milkweed Editions, 2022), was a winner of the 2021 National Poetry Series. Revilla teaches creative writing at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
June
Rosamond S. King’s books include All the Rage (Nightboat, 2021) and Rock | Salt | Stone (Nightboat Books, 2017), winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry, as well as the award-winning monograph Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University of Florida, 2015). King has received numerous fellowships and residencies and has performed around the world. She is the Carol L. Zicklin Honors Academy Chair and Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, on Canarsee and Nyack Lenape territory, near an African burial ground.
July
torrin a. greathouse is the author of the collections DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024) and Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), winner of the Ballard Spahr Prize for Poetry and the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, as well as two chapbooks, boy/girl/ghost (TAR Chapbook Series, 2018) and There Is a Case That I Am (Damaged Goods Press, 2017). greathouse is the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Effing Foundation for Sex-Positivity, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation. She teaches in the Rainier Writing Workshop, Pacific Lutheran University’s low-residency MFA program, and lives in Minneapolis.
August
Danez Smith is the author of Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024); Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020); Don’t Call Us Dead (Graywolf Press, 2017), short-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry; and [insert] boy (YesYes Books, 2014), winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. They are the winner of a Pushcart Prize and the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.
September (National Translation Month)
Sawako Nakayasu works with language, performance, and translation. Her poetry collections include Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2022); Some Girls Walk Into The Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020); and Hurry Home Honey: Love Poems, 1994–2004 (Burning Deck, 2009), as well as prose works and literary nonfiction, including Say Translation Is Art (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020). She is the translator of The Collected Poems of Chika Sagawa (Modern Library, 2020 reprint) and Mouth: Eats Color—Sagawa Chika Translations, Anti-translations & Originals (Rogue Factorial, 2011), a multilingual work of original and translated poetry. She is the coeditor of A TransPacific Poetics (Litmus Press, 2017), a gathering of poetry and poetics that engages TransPacific imaginaries, as well as a forthcoming anthology of twentieth-century Japanese poetry. Nakayasu is an assistant professor of literary arts at Brown University.
October
Sarah Gambito is the author of three collections, most recently Loves You (Persea Books, 2019). She is the recipient of a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Wai Look Award for Outstanding Service to the Arts from the Asian American Arts Alliance. Gambito is a cofounder of Kundiman, a nonprofit organization serving writers and readers of Asian American literature. She is the director of creative writing and a professor of English at Fordham University, and lives in New York City.
November
Laura Tohe is Diné, and of the Sleepy Rock People clan and born for the Bitter Water clan. A poet and librettist, Tohe is the author of many books, including Tséyí’ / Deep in the Rock (University of Arizona Press, 2005), which received the Arizona Book Association’s Glyph Award for Best Poetry and Best Book; No Parole Today (West End Press, 1999), which was named the 1999 Poetry Book of the Year by the Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers; and Making Friends with Water (Nosila Press, 1986). She is the recipient of the Dan Schilling Public Scholar Award for the Arizona Humanities, the Faculty Exemplar Award from Arizona State University, the 2019 American Indian Festival of Words Writers Award, and a 2020 Poet Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. Tohe serves on the board of directors of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) and the Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po). She is a professor emerita of English at Arizona State University and the current poet laureate of the Navajo Nation.
December
Victor Hernández Cruz is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, including Guayacán (Ishmael Reed Publishing, 2022); Beneath the Spanish (Coffee House Press, 2017); and In the Shadow of Al-Andalus (Coffee House Press, 2011). His book Maraca: New and Selected Poems 1965–2000 (Coffee House Press, 2001) was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Hernández Cruz is also the editor of the anthology Paper Dance: 55 Latino Poets (Persea, 2000), and his poems have been translated into ten languages. His other honors include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Hernández Cruz is a cofounder of the East Harlem Gut Theater in New York and the Before Columbus Foundation. He is also a former editor of Umbra magazine. He served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2008 to 2013. He lives in Morocco.
