Poetry: Arden Levine, Chet'la Sebree, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and Monica Ferrell

Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.

Arden Levine is the author of Spoke (The Word Works’ Hilary Tham Capital Collection, 2026), and Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in AGNI, Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, RHINO and elsewhere, and have been featured by Poetry Society of America, Poetry Foundation, and WNYC's Radiolab. Arden is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, was a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, and serves on the boards of Beloit Poetry Journal and No, Dear. She lives in New York City where her daily work as a municipal public servant focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development.

An essayist and poet from the Mid-Atlantic, Chet'la Sebree is the author of the debut essay collection TURN (W)HERE: A Geography of Home as well the poetry collections Blue Opening, longlisted for PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry and a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry; Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and Mistress, nominated for an NAACP Image Award. She’s an assistant professor at the George Washington University and serves as a faculty mentor in Randolph College’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

Darrel Alejandro Holnes is an Afro-Panamanian American poet whose work centers Afro-diasporic experience and migration. He is the author of Stepmotherland (Notre Dame Press), winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize and the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award, and Migrant Psalms (Northwestern University Press), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, AGNI, Callaloo, and other major venues, and are anthologized in the Library of America's Latino Poetry and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, with residencies from MacDowell, Camargo, and Ucross. His poems have been published in more than forty peer-reviewed journals and eight anthologies, and he has presented his work at over sixty institutions, including the United Nations and the Smithsonian.

Monica Ferrell is the author of a novel and three books of poetry, including the forthcoming The Future (2026); You Darling Thing (2018), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Believer Book Award in Poetry; and Beasts for the Chase (2008), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize and a finalist for the Asian American Writers Workshop Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, American Poetry Review, A Public Space, Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Baffler, The Yale Review, and Poem-a-Day, and have been widely anthologized, most recently in A Century of Poetry in the New Yorker and The Penguin Book of Indian Poets. Born in New Delhi, she lives in Vermont.