Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.
Jiordan Castle is the author of Disappearing Act, a memoir in verse (FSG, 2023). Her poems, essays, and stories have appeared in HuffPost, The New Yorker, The Rumpus, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a regular contributor to the LA-based food and culture magazine Compound Butter. Originally from New York, she received her BA in English from the University of San Francisco and her MFA in poetry from Hunter College. Jiordan currently lives in Philadelphia with her husband and their dog.
Sharon Dolin is the award-winning author of seven books of poetry, most recently Imperfect Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and Manual for Living (Pittsburgh, 2016). Her fourth book, Burn and Dodge (Pittsburgh, 2008) won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She is also the author of Hitchcock Blonde: A Cinematic Memoir (Terra Nova Press, 2020) and two books of translation: Book of Minutes (Oberlin College Press, 2019) and Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga (Saturnalia Books, 2021), winner of the Malinda A Markham Translation Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Griffin Poetry Prize. A 2021 NEA Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize Winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, Dolin lives in New York City, where she is Associate Editor of Barrow Street Press and teaches private poetry workshops.
Edgar Kunz is the author of Fixer (Ecco, 2023) and Tap Out (Ecco, 2019). He has been an NEA Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. New poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, APR, and Oxford American. He lives in Baltimore and teaches at Goucher College.
Airea D. Matthews’s first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. The collection explores longing, desire, and inheritance with power, insight, and intense emotion. New Yorker critic Dan Chiasson describes Matthews’s experimental forms as, “Fugues, text messages to the dead, imagined outtakes from Wittgenstein, tart mini-operas, fairy tales: Matthews is virtuosic, frantic, and darkly, very darkly, funny.” Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus (Scribner US and Picador UK, 2023), a memoir-in-verse that is a bold poetic reckoning with the realities of class and race and their intergenerational effects. For her writing, Matthews earned a 2020 Pew Fellowship as well as the 2017 Margaret Walker For My People award. In 2016, she received both the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper’s Bazaar, Poetry Ireland, The New York Times, Georgia Review, Callaloo, Gulf Coast, Best American Poetry, American Poet, The Rumpus, Tin House, Los Angeles Review of Books, Harvard Review, and elsewhere. Matthews holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania as well as an M.F.A. from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and an M.P.A. from the Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, both at the University of Michigan. In 2022, she was named Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an associate professor and co-directs the poetry program at Bryn Mawr College, where she was presented the Lindback Distinguished Teaching award.
Hosted by Nathan McClain, a poet, editor, and educator living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), and his poems and prose have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, The Critical Flame, and upstreet, among others. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review.