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Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.
Richard Chess is the author of four books of poetry, most recently Love Nailed to the Doorpost (University of Tampa Press 2017). His work has been included in Best American Spiritual Writing 2005 and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary American Jewish Poetry. He is a regular contributor to “Close Reading,” the blog hosted by SLANT Books. His essays have appeared in Far From the Centers of Ambition, Starts Shall Bend Their Voices: Poets’ Favorite Hymns & Spiritual Songs, The Carolina Table, and 27 Views of Asheville. He serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center. He is professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where, for 30 years, he directed UNC Asheville’s Center for Jewish Studies.
Julie R. Enszer, PhD, is the author of five poetry collections, including The Pinko Commie Dyke with illustrations by Isabel Paul (Indolent Books, 2024), and editor of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems by Lynn Lonidier, The Complete Works of Pat Parker, and Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974-1989. Enszer publishes Sinister Wisdom, a multicultural lesbian literary and art journal.
Benjamin Garcia is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry. His first collection, Thrown in the Throat, was selected for the National Poetry Series, the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He worked for ten years as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. He is currently at work on a multimedia project exploring autism and ADHD. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/ AIDS.
John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Night Wing Over Metropolitan Area, Domestic Garden, Anticipate the Coming Reservoir, and Lives of Water, all with Carnegie Mellon UP. With Kazim, Ali, he has co-edited a volume of essays on the poetry of Jean Valentine, This-World Company (U of Michigan P). His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, New York Magazine, Southern Review, Poetry Northwest, The Literary Review, Blackbird, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals, anthologies, and textbooks. He served as Personal Assistant to Nobel Prize-winning writer Toni Morrison from December 1997-August 2006. His poetry has been praised by award-winning authors that include Natasha Trethewey, Campbell McGrath, Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash, Li-Young Lee, Dorianne Laux, David St. John, David Baker, and Michael Waters. Born and raised in New York, John is a Professor of English at East Carolina University and lives in Raleigh with his family.
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.