HEATHER CLARK is a biographer, literary critic, and novelist. She the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, one of the New York Times Ten Best Books of 2021, as well as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a “Book of the Year” in The Guardian, The Times, The Boston Globe, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. Her recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an NYPL Cullman Center Fellowship, the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize, an NEH Public Scholars Fellowship, and a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship. She is also the author of The Scrapbook: A Novel; Sylvia Plath: A Very Short Introduction; The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes; and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962–1972. Clark’s work has appeared in publications including The New York Times, Harvard Review, Time, Air Mail, Lit Hub, Poetry, and The Times Literary Supplement. She holds a doctorate in English literature from Oxford University and is Professor Emerita of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, UK.
FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she also served as the inaugural Chair of the African American and African Diaspora Studies. Professor Griffin received her B.A. in History & Literature from Harvard and her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale. She is the author or editor of eight books including Who Set You Flowin?: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001), and Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II (Basic Books, 2013). Griffin collaborated with composer, pianist, Geri Allen and director, actor S. Epatha Merkerson on two theatrical projects, for which she wrote the book: The first, “Geri Allen and Friends Celebrate the Great Jazz Women of the Apollo,” with Lizz Wright, Dianne Reeves, Teri Lyne Carrington and others, premiered on the main stage of the Apollo Theater in May of 2013. The second, “A Conversation with Mary Lou” featuring vocalist Carmen Lundy, premiered at Harlem Stage in March 2014 and was performed at The John F. Kennedy Center in May of 2016. Her most recent book, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature was published by W.W. Norton in September 2021. Griffin is a 2021-22 Guggenheim Fellow and Mellon Foundation Fellow in Residence.
ROBIN D.G. KELLEY is Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA. His books include the prize-winning Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009); Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002, new ed. 2022); Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (1990); Yo’ Mama’s Disfunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997); Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1994); Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012); with Howard Zinn and Dana Frank, Three Strikes: The Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century (2001). He is currently completing two books, Making a Killing: Cops, Capitalism, and the War on Black Life (forthcoming 2026) and The Education of Ms. Grace Halsell: An Intimate History of the American Century (in progress). His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, New York Review of Books, Hammer and Hope, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, Black Scholar, Dissent, Counterpunch, Social Text, Journal of American History, Journal of Palestine Studies, New Labor Forum, and The Boston Review, for which he also serves as Contributing Editor.
NATHAN KERNAN is a writer who lives in New York. He edited James Schuyler’s Diary which was published by Black Sparrow Press in 1997, and has published numerous art reviews, catalogue essays and monographs, as well as poetry. Poems, his collaboration with painter Joan Mitchell, was published by Tyler Graphics in 1992. A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler, published in 2025 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is his first biography. Kernan is also a co-founder and board president of the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, an exhibition space for painting in lower Manhattan.
EILEEN MYLES was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was educated at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. They moved to New York City in 1974 to be a poet, and subsequently a novelist, art journalist, and writer of libretti. They gravitated to the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, where they studied with Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley, Paul Violi, and Bill Zavatsky. From 1984 to 1986, Myles was the artistic director of St. Mark’s Poetry Project. They have published twenty volumes of poetry and fiction, including evolution (2018), Afterglow: A Dog Memoir (2017), I Must Be Living Twice: New and Selected Poems 1975-2014 (2015), Inferno: A Poet’s Novel (2010), The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art (2009), Sorry, Tree (2007), Skies (2001), Cool for You (2000), Chelsea Girls (1994), and Not Me (1991). Myles is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Andy Warhol/Creative Capital Arts Writers grant, four Lambda Book Awards, the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. In 2011, Myles was a featured writer on Harriet. In 2016, they received a Creative Capital grant and the Clark Prize for excellence in art writing. They have taught at New York University and Naropa University. Myles’s film, The Trip, can be seen on YouTube. They live in New York City and Marfa, Texas.
FRANCESCA WADE is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars (2020) and Gertrude Stein: an Afterlife (2025). She has held fellowships at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her writing has appeared in the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Paris Review, Granta and other places. See more at https://www.francescawade.com/about
Introductions
MELISSA BARTON is Curator of Drama and Prose for the Yale Collection of American Literature, which includes the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters, at Beinecke Library. At Beinecke, Melissa has curated exhibits including “Gather Out of Star-Dust: The Harlem Renaissance and The Beinecke Library,” “Brava! Women Make American Theater,” and “Frederick Douglass: Family and Legacy.” She is the author of Gather Out of Star-Dust: A Harlem Renaissance Album, co-published by Beinecke and Yale University Press. Melissa’s research focuses on histories of Black theater and performance and on Black writers in archives, as well as the changing stewardship, status, and conception of archives and “the archive.”
LANGDON HAMMER is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale University. His books include James Merrill: Life and Art (Knopf, 2015), which was a finalist for the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Prize and won the Lambda literary award for gay biography and A Whole World: Letters from James Merrill (Knopf, 2021), which he edited and annotated with Stephen Yenser, and Hart Crane and Allen Tate: Janus-Faced Modernism (Princeton, 1993) and a collection of Crane’s letters called O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane (1997). He edited the Library of America volumes of Hart Crane (2006) and May Swenson (2013). He writes about poetry for The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and The American Scholar, where he has served as poetry editor since 2004.
KARIN ROFFMAN is senior lecturer in Humanities and Associate Director of Public Humanities at Yale University. She published the first biography of John Ashbery, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (FSG), which was named one of the 100 notable books for 2017 by the New York Times. With the Yale Digital Humanities Lab, she created John Ashbery’s Nest, a virtual tour and website on the poet’s Hudson house (see http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/). Her articles on artists have appeared in Evergreen Review, Raritan, Artforum, The Yale Review and other places, and she recently wrote the introduction to the catalog for the Morgan Library’s 2026 exhibition on Ashbery’s art collection. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010), won the Elizabeth Agee Prize from the University of Alabama Press.
EVE SNEIDER is a writer and editor whose work has been published by the New York Review of Books, Literary Hub, and Wired, where she was previously an essays editor. In 2018, while studying at Yale, she was one of the first researchers to look at Janet Malcolm’s papers at the Beinecke Library, work which became the basis of an exhibit at Sterling Memorial Library and a thesis in American Studies for which she was awarded the University’s Henry H. Strong Prize in American Literature. Her critical biography of Janet Malcolm, supported by a fellowship from the Beinecke, is forthcoming from Norton.