Catherine Barnett: is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space (selected by Publishers Weekly as a “Best Books 2024” and included in NPR’s “2024: Books We Love”); Human Hours (Believer Book Award, New York Times “Best Poetry of 2018” selection); The Game of Boxes (James Laughlin Award); and Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced (Beatrice Hawley Award). A Guggenheim and Civitella Ranieri fellow, she received a 2022 Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Whiting Award, among other recognitions. Her work has been published in the New Yorker, The NY Review of Books, The Yale Review, The Nation, Harper’s, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in NYU’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and works as an independent editor.
Charles Bernstein: Poet, essayist, theorist, and scholar Charles Bernstein was born in New York City in 1950. He is a foundational member and leading practitioner of Language poetry. Bernstein was educated at the Bronx High School of Science and at Harvard University, where he studied philosophy with Stanley Cavell and wrote his final thesis on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the mid-1970s Bernstein became active in the experimental poetry scenes in New York and San Francisco, not only as a poet, but also as an editor, publisher, and theorist. With visual artist and wife Susan Bee, Bernstein published several now well-known poets whose work is associated with Language writing. Between 1978-1981, with fellow poet Bruce Andrews, he published L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine, which became a forum for writing that blurred, confused, and denied the boundary between poetry and critical writing about poetry. Bernstein’s own poetic work explores the wide-ranging uses of language within diverse social contexts. His poetry combines the language of politics, popular culture, advertising, literary jargon, corporate-speak, and myriad others to show the ways in which language and culture are mutually constructive and interdependent. Since the 1970s Bernstein has published dozens of books, including poetry and essay collections, pamphlets, translations, collaborations, and libretti. His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated, and it has appeared in over 500 magazines and periodicals. In addition to his work as a poet, Bernstein is a leading scholar and educator of poetry. From 1990 to 2003, he was David Gray Professor of Poetry and Letters at the State University of New York at Buffalo and Director of the Poetics Program, which he co-founded with Robert Creeley. At SUNY Buffalo, he co-founded the Electronic Poetry Center with Loss Glazier (epc.buffalo.edu), and in 2002, he was appointed SUNY Distinguished Professor, the university’s highest rank. Bernstein is currently Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University Pennsylvania. With Al Filreis, he is the co-founder and co-editor of PENNsound (writing.upenn.edu/pennsound), an extensive archive of recorded poetry. Bernstein was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2006. Other awards and honors include The 1999 Roy Harvy Pearce / Archive for New Poetry Prize of the University of California, San Diego; the University of Pennsylvania Dean’s Award for Innovative Teaching; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship; and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge: was born in Beijing in 1947 and grew up in Massachusetts. Her books include The Heat Bird (Burning Deck), Empathy (Station Hill), Sphericity and Four Year Old Girl (Kelsey Street). Her collaborations include artist books with Richard Tuttle and Kiki Smith, and theatre works with Frank Chin, Blondell Cummings, Tan Dun, Shi Zhen Chen and Alvin Lucier. She has received two NEA Fellowships, two American Book Awards, and book awards this year from the Asian-American Writers Workshop and the Western States Art Foundation. She has been a contributing editor of Conjunctions Magazine since 1978, and has taught at Brown University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. Having lived in rural New Mexico for twenty-five years, she now also lives in New York City, with artist Richard Tuttle and their daughter.
Lucasen Brown: is former owner of Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York. He had a longstanding personal and professional relationship with John Ashbery and presented the first exhibition of Ashbery collages in 2008. He will graduate from Yale Divinity School with a Master of Sacred Theology in May 2025.
Richard Deming: is an award-winning poet and critic, whose work explores the intersections of literature, philosophy, and visual culture. He is the author of six books, including This Exquisite Loneliness (Viking, 2023), Day for Night (Shearsman, 2016); Touch of Evil (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Art of the Ordinary (Stanford UP, 2018). He is a Senior Lecturer in English at Yale and serves as the Director of Creative Writing.
Natalie Diaz: was born on the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe (Akimel O’odham). Diaz is the author of Postcolonial Love Poem, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, finalist for the National Book Award, Forward Prize in Poetry, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and winner of a Publishing Triangle Award. Her first book, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was winner of an American Book Award. She is a MacArthur Foundation Fellow, a Lannan Literary Foundation Fellow, a Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellow, and a former Princeton University Hodder Fellow. She was awarded the Princeton Holmes National Poetry Prize and is a member of the Board of Trustees for the United States Artists, where she is an alumnus of the Ford Fellowship. Diaz is Founding Director of the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands and the Maxine and Jonathan Marshall Chair in Modern and Contemporary Poetry at Arizona State University, where she is a Professor in the English MFA program. In 2021, Diaz was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Diaz resides in Phoenix, Arizona, where she continues the life-long work of documenting Native and Indigenous languages. She a Mellon Foundation Research Residency Fellowship, an inaugural Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, and a Senior Fellow at The New School Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy. She is the 2024 Yale Rosenkranz Writer in Residence.
Langdon Hammer: is the Niel Gray Jr. Professor of English at Yale University. He studies the cultural history of poetry, and has a keen interest in poet’s lives. He is also the poetry editor of ‘American Scholar’, and has been the English Department chair at Yale University three times since joining the department in 1987. He is the author of James Merrill: Life and Art and has written about poets and poetry for the New York Times, New York Review of Books and many other magazines. Currently, Langdon is working on a critical biography of Elizabeth Bishop, and is editing several volumes of American Poetry.
Susan Howe: was born in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts. She is the author of several books of poems and two volumes of criticism. Her poetry collections include: The Midnight (2003), Kidnapped (2002), The Europe of Trusts (2002), Pierce-Arrow (1999), Frame Structures: Early Poems 1974-1979 (1996), The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993), The Europe of Trusts: Selected Poems (1990), and Singularities (1990). Since 1989 she has been a professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is currently the Samuel P. Capen Chair of Poetry and the Humanities. She was elected a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets in 2000. Susan Howe lives in Guilford, Connecticut.
Sam Huber: is a senior editor at The Yale Review and lecturer in English at Yale. Their essays and reviews have appeared in American Literature, Bookforum, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, and elsewhere. They are writing a biography of Kate Millett.
Nancy Kuhl: Curator of poetry for the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, Kuhl earned an MA in English literature from Ohio University, a MFA in poetry from Ohio State University, and an MLS from SUNY Buffalo in 2000. She is author of the collections The Wife of the Left Hand (2007) and Suspend (2010), as well as the chapbooks In the Arbor (1997), winner of the Tom Wick Poetry Chapbook Prize, and The Nocturnal Factory (2008). Her most recent work includes On Hysteria (Shearsman Books, 2022) and Granite (A Published Event, 2021). Kuhl is coeditor, with her husband, Richard Deming, of Phylum Press, which publishes pamphlets and chapbooks of poetry.
Ann Lauterbach: Poet Ann Lauterbach’s work has been compared to the poetry of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest. She has published several volumes of poetry, including Many Times, but Then (1979), Before Recollection (1987), Clamor (1991), And for Example (1994), On a Stair (1997), If in Time (2001), Hum (2005) and Or to Begin Again (2009), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. If in Time, a volume of her selected poetry, demonstrates the transformation of her style over three decades, an evolution described by Thomas Fink in the Boston Review: “Lauterbach has found new forms for expressing the continuousness of change: its ways of summoning and disrupting intimacy, of evoking and subverting the position of perceptions and the framing and decentering play of language itself.” Lauterbach was born in New York City, the daughter of a war correspondent for Life and Time magazines in Moscow who was also the head of the Moscow Bureau of Time during World War II. Lauterbach’s father died in 1950, when Ann was still a child; this absence and his absences while traveling would later feature in her poetry. As a child, Lauterbach studied painting and became especially interested in abstract expressionism. After receiving a BA in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1964, she attended Columbia University for one year on a Woodrow Wilson graduate fellowship. At the completion of her studies, Lauterbach moved to London, England, where she edited books and taught literature. In 1974 she returned to the United States and immersed herself in the art world, working as an art consultant and an assistant director to various art galleries. Lauterbach’s linguistically complex, senstive work has been compared to the poetry of John Ashbery and Barbara Guest.“Suffice it to say that she evidently wants us to experience her work form-first, to sense its shapes before shaping a sense,” noted critic Andrew Osborn of the poems in On a Stair. Lauterbach seems to concur with this assessment. In a Rain Taxi interview, she declared, “I’m much more interested in a more difficult kind of sense-making, and I mean difficult in the sense of complexity, and obscurity, but not willful obscurity, just the fact that there are certain things we cannot penetrate and do not know, we can’t know, we may never know.” In an essay for the Poetry Society of America, she further discussed the disjunctions in her work: “I began to give up the use of classical syntax, the logic of cause and effect, of an assumed relation between subject and object, after my sister died. The narrative as story had been ruptured once and for all; I wanted the gaps to show.” In Or to Begin Again Lauterbach continues to investigate the potential of narrative and rupture, as well as the differences between spoken and written language; taking its title from a sixteen-poem elegy, the book also contains the long poem “Alice in the Wasteland,” which uses the work of both Lewis Carroll and T.S. Eliot to explore language, reading, and consciousness. In addition to poetry, Lauterbach has published a book of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (2005). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. For over 15 years, she has taught at Bard College and co-directed the Writing Division of the MFA program. She has also taught at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, Columbia University, Princeton University, and the University of Iowa. (From the Poetry Foundation website)
Maggie Millner: is the author of Couplets, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, one of The Atlantic’s ten best books of 2023, and a finalist for the LA Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lambda Literary Award for lesbian poetry. Couplets has been (or will be) translated into six languages and published in seven countries. Maggie’s poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, POETRY, Kenyon Review, BOMB, The Nation, and elsewhere. She is a Lecturer at Yale and a Senior Editor at The Yale Review. Maggie was the 2020–’21 Olive B. O’Connor Fellow in Poetry at Colgate University, the 2019–’20 Stadler Fellow at Bucknell University, and the 2016–’18 Jan Gabrial Fellow at NYU, where they received their MFA. They are also the recipient of fellowships from Poets & Writers, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Community of Writers, the Disquiet Literary Program, and the Fine Arts Work Center.
Geoffrey G. O’Brien: is the author of Experience in Groups (Wave Books, 2018), People on Sunday (Wave Books, 2013), Metropole (University of California Press, 2011), Green and Gray (University of California Press, 2007), and The Guns and Flags Project (University of California Press, 2002). He teaches English at the University of California, Berkeley and San Quentin State Prison and lives in Berkeley, California.
Monica Ong: is a visual poet and the author of Silent Anatomies (Kore Press, 2015). A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong brings a designer’s eye to experimental writing with her hybrid image-poems and installations that surface hidden narratives of women and diaspora. Her poetry can be found in Scientific American, ctrl+v, and Poetry Magazine, and in the anthology A Mouth Holds Many Things: A De-Canon Hybrid-Literary Collection (Fonograf Editions, 2024). Ong’s most recent series of astronomy-inspired visual poetry was exhibited at the Poetry Foundation and is the basis of her new book Planetaria (Proxima Vera, 2025). You can find her fine press visual poetry editions and literary art objects in over fifty distinguished institutional collections worldwide. In 2024, Ong was named a United States Artists Fellow.
Meghan O’Rourke: is a writer, poet, and editor. She is the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (2022); the bestselling memoir The Long Goodbye (2011); and the poetry collections Sun In Days (2017), which was named a New York Times Best Poetry Book of the Year; Once (2011); and Halflife (2007), which was a finalist for the Patterson Poetry Prize and Britain’s Forward First Book Prize. O’Rourke is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Radcliffe Fellowship, a Whiting Nonfiction Award, the May Sarton Poetry Prize, the Union League Prize for Poetry from the Poetry Foundation, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, and two Pushcart Prizes. She began her career as a fiction and nonfiction editor at The New Yorker. Since then, she has served as culture editor and literary critic for Slate as well as poetry editor and advisory editor for The Paris Review. Her essays, criticism, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Slate, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry, among others. A graduate of Yale University, O’Rourke is the editor of The Yale Review, and teaches classes on the art of editing and public writing.
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, 2017), named one of the 100 notable books for 2017 by the New York Times and is currently finishing a full biography, a project which began when she discovered Ashbery’s juvenilia, childhood diaries and other papers while doing research in his Hudson house. A biography of the American painter Jane Freilicher will follow. In 2019, in collaboration with the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, she created John Ashbery’s Nest, a virtual tour and website on John Ashbery’s Hudson house (see http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/). Her research has been supported by two ACLS fellowships (2011-12, 2017-18), the Howard Foundation (2011-12), an NEH summer stipend (2009) and an NEH Fellowship (2025), as well as grants from the Houghton Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the American Philosophical Society. She has published articles on writers and painters in Raritan, Modern Fiction Studies, Artforum, Rain Taxi, Yale Review, Chicago Review, Wallace Stevens Journal and others. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010), won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize.
Daniel Swain: is a doctoral student in English Literature and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale. His chapbook is called You Deserve Every Happiness, But I Deserve More.
Montana James Thomas: lives and works in New York City. His poetry can be found in publications such as Forever Magazine, Dreamboy Book Club, Maudlin House, Pan-pan Press, and Blush Lit Journal, among others. He hosts a monthly poetry reading series called Vile Beasts and co-hosts a podcast about smell and culture called Top Notes. Concerning the Dinner, his first full-length book, was published with Everybody Press in June 2024
Richard Thomas: is best known for his starring role as “John-Boy Walton” in the iconic television drama “The Waltons”, for which he won an Emmy Award and received multiple Golden Globe Award nominations. He is most recognizable to contemporary television audiences for his role as “Nathan Davis” in the series “Ozark”, as well as “FBI Special Agent Frank Gaad” in the series “The Americans” and his performance as “Sanford Bensinger” in the series Billions. He was also been seen recently on television in the limited series Tell Me Your Secrets and on film opposite Sandra Bullock and Viola Davis in The Unforgivable. His feature film performances include Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, Tim Blake Nelson’s Anesthesia, and Ang Lee’s TAKING WOODSTOCK. Thomas received a Tony Award nomination for his performance in the recent Broadway revival of The Little Foxes. He has been seen in acclaimed performances on stage including The Great Society, You Can’t Take It With You, Race, Democracy, Incident At Vichy (Drama Desk Award nomination), The Stendhal Syndrome (Lucille Lortel Award nomination, Outer Critics Circle Award nomination), A Naked Girl On The Appian Way, An Enemy Of The People, Tiny Alice, The Front Page, The Fifth Of July, innumerable Shakespeare productions, and his professional debut at 7 years old in Sunrise At Campobello. He has starred in the national tours of the award-winning productions of The Humans (Elliot Norton Award) and Twelve Angry Men. Thomas starred as Atticus Finch in the national tour of To Kill A Mockingbird and recently as Mr. Webb in Broadway’s Our Town.