Kazim Ali ('98): Kazim Ali's books of poetry include The Far Mosque, The Fortieth Day, and a cross-genre memoir Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He is also the author of two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth. In 2010, his Orange Alert: Essays on Poetry, Art and the Architecture of Silence was published by the University of Michigan Press in their Poets on Poetry Series. Forthcoming in 2011: Fasting for Ramadan: Notes from a Spiritual Practice, a book of essays being published by Tupelo Press and a translation of Water's Footfall by Sohrab Sepehri. In addition to his work as a yoga teacher and political organizer, Kazim teaches at Oberlin College and in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program. Kazim co-founded Nightboat Books in 2004 with fellow Squaw Valley alum Jennifer Chapis in 2004.

Dan Bellm (‘92/’95/’97/’03): Dan Bellm has published three books of poetry, most recently Practice (Sixteen Rivers Press), winner of a 2009 California Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Poetry Books of 2008 by the Virginia Quarterly Review. His first, One Hand on the Wheel, launched the California Poetry Series from Roundhouse Press; his second, Buried Treasure, won the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay DiCastagnola Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Prize. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, Best American Spiritual Writing, and Word of Mouth: An Anthology of Gay American Poetry. He is also a widely published translator of poetry and fiction from Spanish and French, and currently teaches Literary Translation for the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Antioch University, Los Angeles, and for the New York University School of Continuing and Professional Studies.He lives in San Francisco. www.danbellm.com

Michelle Bitting (’05): Michelle Bitting’s book Good Friday Kiss won the DeNovo First Book Award, chosen by Thomas Lux and published by C & R Press in 2008. She has poems published in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Narrative, River Styx, Crab Orchard Review, Passages North, diode, and others. Poems have appeared on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Recently, she was a finalist for the Poets & Writers California Exchange contest and Rona Jaffe Foundation Awards. Michelle has taught poetry in the U.C.L.A. Extension Writer’s Program and Twin Towers prison with a grant from Poets & Writers Magazine She is an active California Poet in the Schools and holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University, Oregon. www.michellebitting.com

Laurel Ann BogenPhoto Credit:
Richard Beban

Laurel Ann Bogen ('80): Laurel Ann Bogen is the author of ten books of poetry and short fiction, including Washing a Language; Fission; The Last Girl in the Land of the Butterflies and Rag Tag We Kiss. From 1996 to 2002 Bogen was literary curator at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and, since 1990 has been an instructor of poetry and performance for the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, where she received the Outstanding Instructor of the Year award in 2008. Bogen was selected “Best Female Poet/ Performer” by L.A. Weekly and has read her work at Cornell University, The Savannah College of Art and Design, The Knitting Factory (NYC), The L.A. Metropolitan Transit Authority, MOCA and LACE. Bogen is a recipient of the Pacificus Foundation’s Curtis Zahn Poetry Prize and of two Academy of American Poets awards, and her work has appeared in over 100 literary magazines and anthologies.

Bruce Bond ('97): Bruce Bond’s collections of poetry include The Visible (LSU, forthcoming), Peal (Etruscan Press, 2009), Blind Rain (Finalist, The Poets’ Prize; Finalist, TIL Best Book of Poetry Prize, LSU, 2008), Cinder (Finalist, TIL Best Book of Poetry Prize, Etruscan Press, 2003), The Throats of Narcissus (University of Arkansas, 2001), Radiography (TIL Best Book of Poetry Award, BOA Editions, 1997), The Anteroom of Paradise (Colladay Award, QRL, 1991), and Independence Days (R. Gross Award, Woodley Press, 1990). His poetry has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Yale Review, The Georgia Review, Raritan, The New Republic, The Virginia Quarterly, Poetry, and many other journals, and he has received numerous honors including the Kesterson Teaching Award and fellowships from the NEA, Texas Commission on the Arts, the Institute for the Advancement of the Arts, and other organizations. Presently he is Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas and Poetry Editor for American Literary Review.

Susan Browne
Photo Credit:
Tina Humphreys

Susan Browne (‘88/’10): Susan Browne’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Mississippi Review, Subtropics, American Life in Poetry, Writer’s Almanac, and 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Everyday. Her first book, Buddha’s Dogs, won the Four Way Books Intro Prize. Her second collection, Zephyr, won the Editor’s Prize at Steel Toe Books. She teaches at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California. She also teaches poetry writing workshops online. susanmariebrowne.com

Ewa Chrusciel
Photo Credit:
Andrea Baccarelli

Ewa Chrusciel (‘08/’10): Ewa Chrusciel writes both in Polish and English. In 2003 Studium published her first book in Polish. Her second book in Polish: Sopilki came out in 2009. Her collection in English, Strata, which was published in the U.S. by Emergency Press in March 2011, was the winner of the 2009 international book contest. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals such as Macmillan Cancer Support Anthology, Boston Review (poet’s sampler), Colorado Review, Aufgabe, Spoon River Review, Omnidawn publishing blog, Process, Lana Turner, hot metal bridge, Mandorla, Canary, Rhino, American Letters and Commentary, Poetry Wales, Aesthetica (GB), Anthology 99 (Poland). Her translations of poetry appeared in numerous journals and two anthologies of Polish poetry in English translations: Carnivorous Boy, Carnivorous Bird and Six Polish Poets. She is a Professor of Humanities at Colby-Sawyer College. www.echrusciel.net/strata.htm

Shira Dentz (’05): Shira Dentz is the author of a book of poems, black seeds on a white dish (Shearsman Books), whichwas included in Poets & Writers' sixth annual feature of debut poetry books. She is also the author ofa chapbook, Leaf Weather (Tilt Press), and another full-length collection, door of thin skins (CavanKerry Press), that is forthcoming. Her poems and stories have appeared in many journals including The American Poetry Review, The Iowa Review, jubilat, and New American Writing, and have featured on NPR, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She is a recipient of an Academy of American Poets’ Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Memorial Awards, Electronic Poetry Review’s Discovery Award, and Painted Bride Quarterly’s Poetry Prize.Shira first came to Squaw Valley as a fellowship student in 2007,and has taught creative writing at the University of Iowa and the University of Utah. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she is currently Poetry Co-Editor of Quarterly West, finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Utah, and a Fellow at the Tanner Center for the Humanities in Salt Lake City. Before leaving for Iowa City and Salt Lake City, she lived in Brooklyn, NY, and worked for many years as a graphic artist in an advertising agency and taught English as a NYC Teaching Fellow in a Brooklyn public high school.

Charles Douthat
Photo Credit:
Ingbet Gruttner

Charles Douthat (‘04/’09): Charles Douthat’s first book of poetry, Blue for Oceans, was published by NHR Books in 2010. It won the 2011 L.L.Winship/PEN New England Award for the best book of poetry by a New England author.Charles, who started reading andwriting poems during a long mid-life illness, first came to Squaw Valley in 2004 and returned in 2009 Charles was born and raised in California and graduated from Stanford University. For the last 30 years he's lived in Connecticut where he still
practices law.. www.charlesdouthat.com.

Thomas Sayers Ellis ('90,'91): Thomas Sayers Ellis co-founded The Dark Room Collective (in Cambridge, Massachusetts); and received his M.F.A. from Brown University. He is the author of The Maverick Room (2005), which won the John C. Zacharis First Book Award, and a recipient of a Mrs. Giles Whiting Writers’ Award. His poems and photographs have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo, Best American Poetry (1997, 2001 and 2010), Grand Street, The Baffler, Jubilat, Tin House, Poetry, and The Nation. He is also an Assistant Professor of Writing at Sarah Lawrence College, a faculty member of the Lesley University low-residency M.F.A Program and a Cave Canem faculty member. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and is currently working on The Go-Go Book: People in the Pocket in Washington, D.C. A new collection of poetry, Skin, Inc., has just appeared from Graywolf Press. www.tsellis.com

Ann Fisher-Wirth (‘92/’00/’09): Ann Fisher-Wirth is the author of three books of poems—Blue Window, Five Terraces, and Carta Marina—and three chapbooks—The Trinket Poems, Walking Wu-Wei’s Scroll, and Slide Shows. Her fourth book of poems, Dream Cabinet, will appear from Wings Press (which also published Carta Marina) in 2012. Ann is also coeditor of Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, forthcoming from Trinity University Press in 2012. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, online, and in anthologies, and have received numerous awards including the Rita Dove Poetry Prize, a Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, two Mississippi Arts Commission Fellowships, and eleven Pushcart nominations. She has received a senior Fulbright to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, and has held the Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. She teaches at the University of Mississippi, where she also directs the Environmental Studies minor; she also teaches in the Low Residency MFA program at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, and at Southern Star Yoga Studio in Oxford, Mississippi. Ann and her husband, Peter Wirth, have lived in the South for nearly thirty years. Between them, they have five grown children. www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/pages/fisherwirth_a.html

Donna Henderson (‘88/‘89/’92/’94/’02/’09): Donna Henderson is the author of three collections of poems, including most recently The Eddy Fence, which was published in 2009 by Airlie Press, and which is currently a finalist for the Oregon Book Award in poetry. Her poems, essays and reviews have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, performance venues and art installations, and her work has received two Pushcart Prize nominations. She is a founding member of the piano and poetry performance trio Tonepoem, and is currently collaborating on a song cycle with composer and pianist, Cassio Vianna, as well as completing a new collection of poems. A licensed clinical social worker, Donna maintains a psychotherapy practice in Monmouth, and alternates between teaching creative writing at Willamette University and counseling at Western Oregon University. She lives with her husband, Rich Sutliff, on their 20 acres south of Monmouth, where they are working to replant their wetlands in native plants, and to restore its indigenous oak savannah. Donna first participated in a SVCW summer poetry workshop in 1989, and has attended 5 times subsequently, most recently in 2009.

Patricia
Spears Jones
Photo Credit: Fay Chiang

Patricia Spears Jones ('91/'92/'94): Patricia Spears Jones is the author of three poetry collections Painkiller (2010) and Femme du Monde (2006) from Tia Chucha Press and The Weather That Kills (1994) from Coffee House Press and two chapbooks Mythologizing Always and Repuestas! Her poetry is anthologized in Starting Today: 100 Poems for Obama’s First 100 Days; Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry; Bowery Women: Poems; broken land: Poems of Brooklyn; Poetry After 911; Blood & Tears: Poems for Matthew Shepard; Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology; Sisterfire; and Best American Poetry, 2000. She has written plays with music commissioned and produced by Mabou Mines: ‘Mother’ in 1994 and Song for New York: What Women Do When Men Sit Knitting in 2007. She edited and contributed to Think: Poems for Aretha Franklin’s Inauguration Day Hat and co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Ordinary Women: Poetry by New York City Women (1978). Her poems, interviews, reviews and commentary can be found in Bomb; Tuesday; An Art Project, www.kwelijournal.com, downtown Brooklyn, Fifth Wednesday, Barrow Street, The Oxford American, The Poetry Project Newsletter, African Voices, PMS#8; Black Renaissance Noire, Court Green, Callaloo, nocturne, Agni, Black Issues Book Review, Essence, The Brooklyn Rail, The Southampton Review; TriQuarterly, Ploughshares and www.tribes.org. Has a MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College. She has taught at Poets House, St. Mark’s Poetry Project, Cave Canem’s New York City Workshop, Parsons School of Design, Sarah Lawrence College, and summer courses at Naropa University, Pine Manor College, University of Rhode Island, and is scheduled for Manhattanville College, summer 2011. Her website is www.psjones.com.

Marilyn Kallet ('96/'98/'05): Marilyn Kallet is the author of 14 books, including Packing Light: New and Selected Poems, Black Widow Press, 2009. She also translated Paul Eluard's Last Love Poems for Black Widow Press; in 2011, they will publish her translations of Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret's volume, The Big Game. In 2010, former Poet Laureate Robert Hass selected her poem "Fireflies" for American Life in Poetry (Column 280). Her children's book, Jack the Healing Cat, just came out in French from Celtic Cat Publishing (Jacques le chat guérisseur). She is the director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Tennessee, where she also holds a Lindsay Young Professorship in English. She teaches poetry workshops for the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts each May or June in Auvillar, France. She has been awarded the Tennessee Arts Commission Literary Fellowship in Poetry, and was inducted into the East Tennessee Literary Hall of Fame in Poetry, in 2005. In 2000, the Knoxville YWCA named her Outstanding Woman in the Arts. Kallet directs the Young Writers' Workshop at the University of Tennessee, offering free creative writing workshops in every genre for high school students and their teachers, ongoing since 1994. www.redroom.com/author/marilyn-kallet/http://marilynkallet.com/

Keetje Kuipers ('05): Keetje Kuipers is a native of the Northwest. She earned her B.A. at Swarthmore College and her M.F.A. at the University of Oregon. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Oregon Literary Arts, and Soapstone. In 2007 she completed her tenure as the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, which provided her with seven months of solitude in Oregon's Rogue River Valley. She used her time there to complete work on her book, Beautiful in the Mouth, which was awarded the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published in March 2010 by BOA Editions. It contains poems previously published in Prairie Schooner, West Branch, Willow Springs, and AGNI, among others. You can also listen to her read her work—which has been nominated five years in a row for the Pushcart Prize—at the online audio archive From the Fishouse. Keetje has taught writing at the University of Montana and is currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She divides her time between San Francisco and Missoula, Montana. www.keetjekuipers.com

Fred Marchant (’92): Marchant’s most recent book of poetry, The Looking House (Graywolf Press, 2009) was named by Barnes and Noble Review as one of the five best books of poetry in 2009, and The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the ten best. Marchant is also the author of Tipping Point, winner of the 1993 Washington Prize in poetry, and Full Moon Boat (Graywolf Press, 2000). A new and selected volume, House on Water, House in Air, was published by Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland, in 2002. He poems and reviews have appeared in such journals as AGNI, The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Salamander. Marchant has co-translated (with Nguyen Ba Chung) From a Corner of My Yard, poetry by the Vietnamese poet Tran Dang Khoa, published in 2006, in Ha Noi, Viet Nam. He is also the editor of Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford, 1937-1947 (Graywolf Press, 2008. Professor of English and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Suffolk University in Boston, he has taught workshops at various sites across the country. In 2009 Marchant was co-winner of the May Sarton Award from the New England Poetry Club, given to poets whose “work is an inspiration to other poets.”

Diane Kirsten Martin (‘88/’92/’94/’02): Diane Kirsten Martin’s work has appeared in or is forthcoming in Field, New England Review, Poetry Daily, Crazyhorse, Harvard Review, and Narrative, among others. She was awarded second place in the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize competition, judged by B.H. Fairchild, in 2004, and was included in Best New Poets 2005. She has received a Pushcart Special Mention and won the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her first collection, Conjugated Visits, was published in May 2010 by Dream Horse Press.
www.13ways.org/poets/Diane/diane.htmlwww.dianekmartin.blogspot.com/

Norman Minnick
Photo Credit:
Janice Applegate

Norman Minnick (’06): Norman Minnick’s collection of poems, To Taste the Water, (Mid-List Press, 2007) won the First Series Award. He is the editor of Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press, 2010). He has been a featured reader at Poets House, RopeWalk, Block Island Poetry Project, Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference, and various universities and other venues. His recent poems appear inThe Oxford American, 5 AM, Poetry East, Notre Dame Review,Zone 3,Pilgrimage, and Isotope. He has essays in The Writer’s Chronicle and The Worcester Review. He teaches writing at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.
http://www.normanminnick.com

Rusty Morrison (‘95/’96): Rusty Morrison's After Urgency won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize (forthcoming in 2012). Her book the true keeps calm biding its story won Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, and the Alice Fay DiCastagnola Awards from Poetry Society of America for a manuscript-in-progress. Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. Her chapbook, The Book of the Given, will be published by Noemi Press this year. She has received the George Bogin, Cecil Hemley, and Robert H. Winner Memorial Awards from Poetry Society of America. Morrison has also won the Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank, the University of Montana's literary magazine. Her poems have been published in periodicals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Gulf Coast, Lana Turner, New American Writing, Pleiades, Verse, VOLT.Her critical writings &/or her creative nonfictions have been published in journals includingChicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Flash, Verse, and in the anthologyOne Word: Contemporary Writers on the Words They Love or Loathe(Sarabande 2010).She is Omnidawn’s co-publisher (www.omnidawn.com).

Berwyn Moore ('90/'92): Berwyn Moore is the author of two collections of poetry, O Body Swayed (Cherry Grove Collections, 2009) and Dissolution of Ghosts (Cherry Grove Collections, 2005), which was runner-up for the Lyre Prize in Poetry. She is editor of the anthology Dwelling in Possibility: Voices of Erie County (Gannon University Press, 2010). She served as the inaugural Poet Laureate of Erie County, PA from 2009 to 2010. Her work won First Place in the 2007 Magliocco Prize for Poetry from the Bellevue Literary Review, and Second Place in the 2009 poetry contest from The Pinch and was recently nominated for a Pushcart Priz. Her poem won Second Place in the 2010 Tom Howard Poetry Contest. Her work has also won awards from Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Negative Capability Press, and the Chester H. Jones Foundation. Her poems have appeared widely in national journals, including The Southern Review, Shenandoah, Poetry Northwest, Nimrod, Journal of the American Medical Association, Kansas Quarterly, Runes, Alehouse Review, Cimarron Review and others and in the anthologies, Common Wealth: Poets on Pennsylvania, Only Morning in Her Shoes, and Life on the Line. She has poems posted on The Best American Poetry and An American Life in Poetry web sites. Her articles have been published in Public Health Reports, The World and I, and the Foreign Service Journal. She is an associate professor of English at Gannon University in Erie, PA, where she teaches courses in creative writing, literature, and medical humanities and advises the award-winning literary-art magazine, Totem.

Richard O. Moore ('96/'97: Richard O. Moore was born in Alliance, Ohio, February 26, 1920. He is currently a resident at The Redwoods in Mill Valley, California. He began writing poetry in his early teens, but is better known as a pioneer in non-commercial broadcasting: first, as a co-founder of KPFA and later as a documentary filmmaker for KQED and PBS. While a student at UC Berkeley he became part of the group of poets gathered around Kenneth Rexroth. This was a core group of poets later celebrated as The San Francisco Renaissance and included such diverse poets as William Everson, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Tom Parkinson,Madeline Gleason, and Philip Lamantia. During the 1940’s Moore’s poems were published in various literary magazines such as Circle, Poetry (Chicago), and The Ark. The prevailing political view of Rexroth, Duncan, Everson and others, including Moore, has been described as anarcho-pacifist. Moore’s involvement with Lewis Hill and Eleanor McKinney shifted his attention to public broadcasting. This left little time to pursue publication, although he continued to write poetry over the next sixty years. This changed when, following his wife’s (Ruth) death in 1997, he attended writers conferences in Squaw Valley and Napa where his poems attracted the attention of Brenda Hillman. The result is Writing the Silences, edited by Brenda Hillman and Paul Ebenkamp, with a foreward by Brenda Hillman, and published in 2010 by The University of California Press, and has been nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Moore continues, at 91, to write poetry and also to deliver lectures on current political events to The Mill Valley Seniors for Peace.

Collier Nogues

Collier Nogues (’06): Collier Nogues grew up in Texas and Okinawa, and has since lived in New York, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. She has been the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell Colony, the Ucross Foundation, and Fishtrap, Inc., in Enterprise, Oregon. She lives in Long Beach, California, with her husband, and teaches at the University of California, Irvine, and Laguna College of Art and Design.Four Way Books Press, has published her book, On the Other Side, Blue.

Elizabeth Rosner
Photo credit:
Marion Ettlinger

Elizabeth Rosner ('99): Elizabeth Rosner is an award- winning novelist, poet and essayist now living in Berkeley, California. Her first novel, The Speed of Light, was published by Ballantine Books in 2001. Winner of several literary prizes, including Hadassah's Ribalow Prize, the Great Lakes Colleges Association award for Fiction, and the Prix France Bleu Gironde, the book was a national best seller, and was translated into nine foreign languages. It was optioned for film, by actress Gillian Anderson, who plans to make the film her directorial debut. Her second novel, Blue Nude, was published by Ballantine Books in May 2006. It was named one of the Best Books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle and was also a bestseller. The paperback edition was issued by Gallery Books, (Simon and Schuster) in September 2010. Her poetry collection, Gravity was published as one of the Select Poets Series by Small Poetry Press, it is currently in its 14th printing. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Elle magazine, The Forward, and several anthologies. She attended the Community of Writers in Poetry in 1999, and in Fiction several times in the 1980s before returning in 2006 as a staff member. www.elizabethrosner.com

Marjorie Saiser (’00): Marjorie Saiser's most recent book isBeside You at the Stoplight (The Backwaters Press, 2010), winner of the Little Bluestem Award. Shereceived a merit award from the Nebraska Arts Council as well as the Leo Love Award from the Taos Summer Writers Conference. Her poems have been published in Cream City Review, Field, Crab Orchard Review, Dos Passos Review, Smartish Pace, Prairie Schooner, and other journals. www.poetmarge.com.

Anne Shaw

Anne Shaw ('10): Anne Shaw is the author of Undertow, winner of the 2007 Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize. Her work has appearedand is forthcoming in numerous journals, including New American Writing, Verse, Beloit Poetry Journal, Gulf Coast, Black Warrior Review, and Green Mountains Review.She has also been featured on Poetry Daily and From the Fishouse. A graduate of Yale and George Mason University, Shaw currently lives in Providence, Rhode Island. http://www.anneshaw.org

Evie Shockley ('99): Evie Shockley is a poet and literary scholar. Her poetry collections include a half-red sea (Carolina Wren Press) and two chapbooks: 31 words * prose poems (Belladonna* Books) and The Gorgon Goddess. Her poems also appear widely in journals and anthologies. Currently, she co-edits jubilat and, in 2007, guest- edited QUEST, a special issue of MiPOesias featuring the work of con- temporary African American poets. Her literary criticism has appeared in African American Review, Center, Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry, Talisman, and elsewhere. Her second poetry book, the new black, was just released from Wesleyan University Press in March 2011. She also has a book of poetry criticism, Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, forthcoming in the University of Iowa Press’s Contemporary North American Poetry Series later in the year She is on the faculty of Rutgers University, New Brunswick, where she teaches African American literature and creative writing. www.redroom.com/author/evie-shockley

Scot Siegel
Photo Credit:
Dennis Schmidling

Scot Siegel (’07): His most recent book of poems is Thousands Flee California Wildflowers (County Clare, Ireland: Salmon Poetry 2012). His other volumes include Some Weather, and two chapbooks: Untitled Country, and Skeleton Says. Siegel’s poems are anthologized in the Aesthetica Creative Works Annual (UK), Open Spaces: Voices from the Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press 2011), Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (County Clare, Ireland: Salmon Poetry 2010), and Before We Have Nowhere to Stand (Sandpoint, ID: Lost Horse Press 2012), among others. He has been awarded a residency with Playa, and has received awards and commendations from Aesthetica Magazine, Nimrod, and the Oregon Poetry Association. Siegel edits the online poetry journal Untitled Country Review. www.redroom.com/author/scot-siegel/

Melissa Stein (’99): Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Best New Poets 2009, Harvard Review, New England Review, North American Review, Indiana Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, and her work has won awards from Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis, and is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco. http://melissastein.com

Judith Taylor (’93): Judith Taylor is the author of two collections of poetry, Selected Dreams from the Animal Kingdom (Zoo Press, 2003), and Curios (Sarabande Books, 2000), as well as a chapbook, Burning, for which she received the Portlandia Prize. Her poetry has been published in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Fence, Boston Review, The Antioch Review, Prairie Schooner, and many anthologies. She co-edited Air Fare: Stories, Essays and Poems on Flying (Sarabande Books, 2004). Taylor is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize. The artist colonies of MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerrasi, Ucross and VCCA have awarded Taylor residencies. She currently teaches literature and writing classes in Los Angeles, and is the editor of POOL: A Journal of Poetry.

Sally Van Doren
Photo Credit:
Sarah Carmody

Sally Van Doren ('01/'03/'06): Sally Van Doren’s book, Sex at Noon Taxes, (LSU Press 2008) won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her second collection, Possessive, is forthcoming in 2012, also from LSU Press. Her poems have appeared recently in American Letters and Commentary, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Cimarron Review, Lumina, Margie, The New Republic, No Tell Motel, River Styx, Southwest Review, 2River, UCity Review and Verse Daily. Her poem, “Preposition,” is featured as an animated film in the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Everywhere.

Bill Yake
Photo Credit:
Jeannette Barreca

Bill Yake (’95):For years Bill Yake directed investigations into the toxic contamination of water, fish, and sediment for the Washington State Department of Ecology while writing poetry on the sly. Now his hidden life and perceptions have been revealed in two collections of poetry; This Old Riddle: Cormorants and Rain (2003) and Unfurl, Kite, and Veer (2010) both from Radiolarian Press, Astoria OR. His poems have been published widely in magazines and anthologies serving the environmental and literary communities – from Wilderness Magazine to Anthropology and Humanism, from Open Spaces Quarterly to Fine Madness, from Rattle to ISLE – Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. Recently two of his tree-inspired poems were featured in Between Earth and Sky, a book by the instigator of forest canopy research, Nalini Nadkarni. Bill’s poetry has also won the Alligator Juniper Award (2003) and the James M. Snydal Prize (2004), and his poem “The Lowly, Exalted” was featured in an exhibition celebrating invertebrates in art.

Gary Young (’74): Gary Young is a poet and artist whose honors include grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vogelstein Foundation, the California Arts Council, and two fellowship grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. He has received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands, Days, Braver Deeds, which won the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize, No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America, and Pleasure. Even So: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming from White Pine Press. He is the co-editor of The Geography of Home: California’s Poetry of Place, and Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems and Poetics from California. Since 1975 he has designed, illustrated, and printed limited edition books and broadsides at his Greenhouse Review Press. His print work is represented in numerous collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Getty Center for the Arts, and special collection libraries throughout the country. In 2009 he received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing, and directs the Cowell Press at the University of California, Santa Cruz.