Poets
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Luisa A. Igloria
Originally from Baguio, Philippines, Luisa A. Igloria is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Maps for Migrants and Ghosts (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020), co-winner of the 2019 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize, and the chapbook What is Left of Wings, I Ask, winner of the Center for the Book Arts Letterpress Poetry Chapbook Prize selected by Natasha Trethewey. In 2015, she was the inaugural winner of the Resurgence Prize (UK), the world’s first major award for ecopoetry. A Louis I. Jaffe Professor and University Professor of English and Creative Writing, she teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at Old Dominion University which she directed from 2009-2015. Igloria also leads workshops at The Muse Writers Center in Norfolk, and was appointed as the Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2020. In 2021, she received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.
Poet Laureate of Virginia
In 2021, Luisa A. Igloria was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Igloria plans to update and expand available public information on Virginian poets, in order to more accurately reflect the diversity of poets in this region, including youth poets, poets in the schools, poets in community-writing centers, immigrant poets, poets with disabilities, BIPOC, LGBTQIA poets, and poets in other (nonliterary) professions. The fellowship will also support a linked series of virtual poetry features and workshops on themes, including, but not limited to, civic engagement, social justice, mental health, community and care, climate change, and imagining the future. Finally, Igloria will launch a Young Poets in the Community program through which young poets in middle school and high school will propose poetry-focused programs or projects.