Author Bios

Khadijah Queen is an American poet and playwright whose work spans multiple genres and modes — from lyric poetry to experimental theater, from documentary poetics to the book-length conceptual project — always driven by a commitment to exploring Black experience, femininity, and the conditions of visibility and erasure in contemporary America. Queen grew up in…

Rachel Zucker is an American poet, memoirist, and podcaster whose work occupies a singular place in contemporary literature for its radical honesty about the experiences of women — as mothers, as wives, as daughters, as writers, as people navigating the pressures of work, love, and creative life. Born in New York City to a family…

Donika Kelly is an American poet whose work draws on mythology, the natural world, and the psychic landscape of Black queer womanhood to create poems of extraordinary beauty, intellectual power, and emotional depth. Born in California and raised across multiple regions of the United States, Kelly brings to her poetry a sensibility shaped by displacement…

Barbara Ras is an American poet known for her luminous attention to the natural world, her warm and searching intelligence, and her ability to find in the ordinary textures of experience intimations of the transcendent. Her poetry moves with characteristic ease between the domestic and the cosmic, between close observation of the physical world and…

Traci Brimhall is an American poet of remarkable range, ambition, and lyric power whose work engages the mythic and the ecological, the erotic and the elegiac, with an intensity that has established her as one of the most compelling voices in contemporary American poetry. Born and raised in the Midwest, Brimhall brings to her poems…

Barbara Lydecker Crane is a contemporary American poet with a particular gift for formal verse and light verse — two modes that are often undervalued in contemporary poetry discourse but that require genuine mastery of prosody, wit, and the capacity for surprise. Crane works in the tradition of comic and occasional poetry, employing rhyme, meter,…

Liz Robbins is a contemporary American poet whose work moves between lyric attention and narrative momentum, exploring themes of girlhood, memory, desire, and the complicated terrain of becoming an adult woman in contemporary America. Her poems are marked by a lively intelligence, an ear for the music of everyday speech, and an ability to locate…

Kirsten Dierking is a Minnesota-based poet whose work is rooted in the landscapes, communities, and inner lives of the Upper Midwest. Her poetry is characterized by its clarity of observation, its emotional directness, and its attention to the natural world and to the lives of ordinary people — a sensibility that places her in the…

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) and Louis Ginsberg (1896–1976) represent one of the most remarkable father-son literary partnerships in American literary history — two poets whose very different aesthetics and sensibilities were nonetheless shaped by the same household, the same family stories, and a shared devotion to the art of poetry. Louis Ginsberg was a high school…

Carole Maso is an American novelist and experimental prose writer whose work occupies a singular position at the intersection of poetry, fiction, and literary theory. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, and educated at Vassar College, Maso has spent her career pushing against the conventions of the novel form, exploring what prose can do when it…