Participants

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A Michigan State University and Warren Wilson alum, Tommye Blount is the author of the chapbook What Are We Not For—published by Bull City Press in 2016. His debut full-length collection Fantasia for the Man in Blue, published by Four Way Books in 2020, was finalist for the National Book Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry, and others. Tommye has been the recipient of fellowships and grants from Kresge Arts, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Aninstantia Foundation, and Cave Canem. He has poems forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Massachusetts Review, and The Common. Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye now lives nearby in Novi, Michigan.

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Tom Bosworth '22 is a poet and printmaker from Fort Worth, Texas. 

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Melba Joyce Boyd, a native Detroiter, is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University in Detroit, and an Adjunct Professor in Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. An award-winning author of nine books of poetry, two biographies, editor of two poetry anthologies, and over 100 essays. She is producer of two documentary films. Boyd's poetry, essays and creative nonfiction have appeared in anthologies, academic journals, cultural periodicals and newspapers in the United States and Europe. Her latest collection, Death Dance of a Butterfly, received the 2013 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry.

She is the poet laureate of Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, and her poem, "This Museum Was Once a Dream," appears in bronze on the dedication plaque on the museum wall. "Maple Red," for Ed Clark, appears next the painting in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and lines from her poem, "We Want Our City Back," appear in the sculpture, Michigan's Tribute to Labor, in Hart Plaza, in downtown Detroit. Her book, Song for Maya, was translated into German, Lied fur Maya, and two collections, Thirteen Frozen Flamingos and Blues Music Sky of Mourning: The German Poems, contains poems in German and English. Currently, selected and new poems are being translated into French at the University of Bordeaux for a bilingual publication.

Roses and Revolutions: The Selected Writings of Dudley Randall received the 2010 Independent Publishers Award, the 2010 Library of Michigan Notable Books Award for Poetry, and was a Finalist for the NAACP Image Award for Poetry and the ForeWord Award for Poetry. Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press received the 2004 Honor for Nonfiction from The Black Caucus of the American Library Association. Her first book of poetry, Cat Eyes and Deadwood (1978) was awarded a publication grant from the National Endowment of the Arts. Boyd's critically acclaimed and widely reviewed, Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics in the Life of Frances E. W. Harper, 1825-1911, (1994).

She served at the assistant editor to Dudley Randall's Broadside Press (1972-76) and is the executor of the Dudley Randall Literary Estate. She is currently the editor of the African American Series at Wayne State University Press. She served on the Michigan Humanities Board, and as an advisor to the Charles H. Wright Museum and the Virgil Carr Center for African American Culture and the Arts in Detroit. She received awards for community service from the Wright Museum, the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and the Sojourner Truth Award from the National Association of Negro Women's Professional and Business Association.

She was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Bremen in Germany (1983-4), and a Visiting Professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, Republic of China (2009). She has held professorial positions at the University of Iowa, Ohio State University, and served at the Director of African American Studies Program at the University of Michigan—Flint; and was the Chair of the Department of African American Studies at Wayne State University for 16 years. She has a Doctor of Arts in English from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and a M.A. and a B.A. degree in English from Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo.

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My research and teaching gather at the intersection of African American/African diaspora literature and visual culture studies. In particular, I am interested in the relationship between visuality and black subjectivity. My first book, The Repeating Body: Slavery's Visual Resonance in the Contemporary (Duke University Press, 2015) examines slavery's profound ocular construction and the presence and absence of seeing in relation to the plantation space. I am currently at work on my second book, tentatively titled "Mortevivum: Photography and the Politics of the Visual." This project examines images of the dead in the New York Times in 1994 from four overlapping geographies: South Africa, Rwanda, Sudan and Haiti. "Mortevivum" explores the relationship between photography and histories of antiblackness on the cusp of the twenty-first century.

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Michael Collier has published eight poetry collections, most recently, The Missing Mountain: New and Selected Poems (2021) as well as a translation of Euripides's Medea and a volume of essays, Make Us Wave Back. With Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch, he edited A William Maxwell Portrait. The recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, he taught for many years at the University of Maryland and is a former director of the Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences.

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Nandi Comer was raised in Detroit, Michigan. She received a B.A. in English and in Spanish with an emphasis on Latin American Culture from the University of Michigan. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Callaloo, and a translation fellowship by US Poets in Mexico. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, Sycamore Review, and Third Coast. She is the author of American Family: Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Northwestern University Press), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. Her writing received the Vera Myer Strube Award in poetry, and she is the winner of Crab Orchard Review's 2014 Richard Peterson Poetry Prize. In 2016 she completed an M.A. in African American Literature from the Department African American and African Diaspora Studies and an M.F.A. in Poetry from the English Department at Indiana University. She is a 2019 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow.

Over the years, Nandi has been dedicated to youth development by serving as a writer-in-residence in Detroit Public Schools and community centers. She has also worked in collaboration with organizations including YArts and InsideOut Literary Arts Projects. She served as a curriculum developer and youth curriculum consultant for various arts organizations and in 2018 she received William Wiggins Award for Outstanding Teaching at the Indiana University.

In 2013 Comer debuted, "Pedestrians," a choreo-poem created in collaboration with Indiana University's African American dance company. She was awarded the 2014 Pioneer Award by the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies in recognition for her commitment to scholarship and production of the arts that explore African American traditions.

Her most recent poetry and performance project, Techno Poetics, was an interdisciplinary performance program that used poetry to tell the story of the origins of Techno and contemporary Detroit music. Informed by her experiences growing up in Detroit, Comer writes and performs literary pieces that incorporate the history of the city while also examining race, gender, sexuality, and class.

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Howard Dodson is Director Emeritus of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library. A specialist in African American and African Diasporan history and culture, he served as Director of the Schomburg from 1984-2011. During his tenure, Dodson increased the size of its collections from 5 million to more than 10 million items; raised more than $100 million to support its programs and services and increased its user base from 40,000 to over 125,000 annually. Through its education, research, exhibition and cultural programs, Dodson transformed the Schomburg into the premier center in the world dedicated to documenting and interpreting the Africana heritage. A leader in the fields of historical and cultural preservation, Dodson made the Center the the gold standard in its fields of specialization. Howard Dodson is the author or editor of more than twelve books and has curated over 25 exhibitions. A graduate of West Chester State College (B.S.) and Villanova University (M.A.), Dodson also earned an ABD in History at the University of California at Berkeley. The recipient of five honorary doctorates, he was designated a New York City "Living Landmark" in 2010. From 2011-2015, Dodson served as Director of Howard University Libraries and Director of Howard's Moorland- Spingarn Research Center.

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Aricka Foreman is an American poet and interdisciplinary writer from Detroit MI. Author of Dream with a Glass Chamber (2016), and Salt Body Shimmer (2020 on YesYes Books), winner of the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry. She has earned writing fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Millay Arts. Her poetry and essays have been featured in: Catapult, The Black Warrior Review, Teaching Black: The Craft of Teaching On Black Life and Literature, ed: Ana-Maurine Lara and Drea Brown; Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, ed: Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren Alleyne; The Academy of American Poets, amongst several publications. She lives, loves and builds in Chicago, IL.

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My primary interest is in poetics, particularly in how poetry is made and the value of such deliberate creative practice. I want to know how poetry serves us collectively and as individuals in ways that meet this era, this moment; however, in order to gain that understanding contexts cannot be ignored, nor can history be set aside. It is the intent of my instruction and an inherent objective of my own poetry to upturn how we think about poetry, its lineage, and the cultural impact of received aesthetics. I insist upon a reconsideration of the erroneous assumptions and common mythologies around poetry that allow only for the immediate and the intuitive as a measure of what is authentic. Instead I focus on the possibilities within work drawn from the counterintuitive, and how craft alongside context may underscore intent. Further, I seek to disclose how poetry acts as foundational art, both catalyst and girder for other genres of literature and the study of literature.

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francine j. harris' third collection, Here is the Sweet Hand from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts award and winner of the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award. Her second collection, play dead, was the winner of the Lambda Literary and Audre Lorde Awards and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her first collection, allegiance, was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery and PEN Open Book Awards. Originally from Detroit, she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. She is Professor of English at the University of Houston and serves as Consulting Faculty Editor at Gulf Coast.

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Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published ten books of poems, including Gabriel: A Poem and Stranger by Night. He has also published six prose books about poetry, most newly 100 Poems to Break Your Heart and The Heart of American Poetry. Both of these books include essays about Robert Hayden. His first teaching job was at Wayne State University in Detroit. His second was at the University of Houston. He now serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and lives in Brooklyn.

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Photo by Steven Varni

Poet, memoirist, and audio writer Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai'i and grew up there and in Los Angeles. He earned his BA from Pomona College and his MFA from the University of California-Irvine, where he studied with the poets C.K. Williams, Howard Moss, and Charles Wright. His poetry collections are Yellow Light (1982), The River of Heaven (1988), which received the Lamont Poetry Prize and was a Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Coral Road (2011). His most recent publication is The Perfect Sound: A Memoir in Stereo (2022). In other non-fiction, he has published The Mirror Diary (2017) and Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaiʻi (1995), perhaps his best known work. His work has been recognized with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This year, he was just given the Aiken Taylor Award for lifetime achievement in poetry. Current poems and essays appear in Harvard Review, Epiphany, SoundStage! Global!, Georgia Review, terrain.org, and Sewanee Review. He lives in Eugene where he is Distinguished Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Oregon.

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Perry Janes is a writer and filmmaker from Metro Detroit, Michigan. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, his written work has appeared in journals including POETRY, Zyzzyva, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Subtropics, West Branch, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, The Adroit Journal, The Cortland Review, Glimmer Train, The Missouri Review, and others. He earned his MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and his BA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he was a 5-time recipient of the Hopwood Award.

While pursuing his undergraduate degree, Perry shot his debut short film ZUG on location in Detroit, Michigan. The film subsequently went on to receive a 2013 Student Academy Award from the AMPAS. He has received residencies and scholarships from organizations that include Gotham (IFP), The Poetry Foundation, and The Vermont College of Fine Arts. In 2018 he was selected for Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's Imagine Impact Content Accelerator. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Read more about his recent feature film project on Deadline Hollywood.

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Tyehimba Jess is the author of two books of poetry, Leadbelly and Olio. Olio won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, The Midland Society Author's Award in Poetry, and received an Outstanding Contribution to Publishing Citation from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN Jean Stein Book Award, and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. Leadbelly was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the "Best Poetry Books of 2005."

Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU Alumni, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004–2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000–2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He presented his poetry at the 2011 TedX Nashville Conference and won a 2016 Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2018. Jess is a Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in many journals, as well as anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, and Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry.

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Airea D. Matthews' first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Simon and Schuster, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia's Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.

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Isaac Ginsberg Miller is a poet, scholar, and educator. Currently a PhD candidate in African American Studies at Northwestern University, Isaac is a member of the Poetry and Poetics Graduate Cluster, and was a 2020-2021 Mellon Dissertation Fellow for the Black Arts Archive Sawyer Seminar. Isaac received an MFA in poetry at NYU, where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Additionally, Isaac has received fellowships from the Blue Mountain Center, the Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop, Can Serrat, the Poetry Incubator, and the Ragdale Foundation. Isaac's chapbook Stopgap (2019) won The Sow's Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Contest, and their critical and creative writing appears in journals such as The American Poetry Review, Berkeley Journal of Sociology, Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters, Chicago Review, English Journal, Colorado Review, Salamander, and Zone 3, as well as the anthologies Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living and A People's Atlas of Detroit.

Rena J. Mosteirin

Rena J. Mosteirin's most recent book Experiment 116—out now from Counterpath press—is a book of experimental poetry that sets out an argument for a global refugee idiolect. She is the co-author of Moonbit (punctum books, 2019) an academic and poetic exploration of the Apollo 11 guidance computer code. Her novella Nick Trail's Thumb (Kore Press, 2008) won the Kore Press Short Fiction Award, judged by Lydia Davis. Her chapbook Half-Fabulous Whales (Little Dipper, 2019) explores Moby-Dick through erasure poetry. She teaches at Dartmouth College and owns Left Bank Books, a used bookstore in Hanover, NH.

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Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann's poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is an assistant professor at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

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Peter Orner, a two-time recipient of the Pushcart Prize, is the author of six books, including the novel LOVE AND SHAME AND LOVE and the collection ESTHER STORIES, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His memoir AM I ALONE HERE? was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Tin House and Granta, and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories. The recipient of the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Fullbright to Namibia, Orner holds the Dartmouth Professorship of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College.

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Carl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022). His honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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CHARLES HENRY ROWELL, poet, scholar and cultural critic, is a native of Alabama, where his parents, like the two generations that preceded them, were self-sufficient land-owning farmers, who stood their ground against multiple white racists to protect themselves and their families. After receiving his PhD in English from the Ohio State University, Dr. Rowell taught English at Southern University in Baton Rouge, LA, where, in 1976, he founded Callaloo, the first journal of its kind. Recognized as both a pioneer and visionary in black poetry, publication and critical studies, Rowell, noted that literary journals in the South were devoted exclusively to the publication of white writers. Callaloo was the first publication of its kind to serve Black South writers.  However, when Rowell discovered that the publication renaissance for black writers beyond the South was folding, he invited them to submit their work to Callaloo, thus making the journal available for Black writers nationwide.  A few years later Callaloo would become known as the literary and cultural journal that publishes work by creative writers and scholars from Africa to the Caribbean, South America to Europe, Mexico to Canada.  Callaloo consistently ranks in the top 20 literary journals in the US. Named for a stew of greens eaten in West Africa and in variations all over the Caribbean, in 50 years the journal Callaloo is now a global juggernaut, one of the world's premier literary homes for African diaspora culture, critique and accomplishment. Following the slave trade lines, Rowell intends to ensure publishing opportunities for African diaspora writers as well as those in conversation with the African diaspora. Callaloo hosts annual literary conferences within the US, but conferences have also been held in the UK, Peru and Ethiopia. Callaloo convenes creative writing workshops at University of the West Indies (Barbados), Oxford University (England), and at different institutions across the USA. Further, new creative writing workshops, such as The Watering Hole have been started by participants in the Callaloo workshops. Outside of the journal Rowell, is also the editor of Making Callaloo (2002), a critical anthology of modern black literature. It is no wonder, then, that Charles Henry Rowell—remembering the genius of Robert Hayden—would go on to edit a contemporary African American poetry anthology entitled Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of African American Poetry (Norton, 2012). Dr. Rowell lives in College Station, TX where he recently resigned from Texas A&M University. In 2018, Rowell received from the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation the Madam C.J. Walker Award Legacy Award for his dedication to supporting and sustaining black diaspora literature.  

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Derik Smith is an associate professor of literature at Claremont Mckenna College. He specializes in the study of 20th-century and contemporary African American literature and culture. His writing has appeared in journals like Callaloo, African American Review, and World Order.