Poetry: A Celebration of Sonnets with Dora Malech and Phillis Levin

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

Enjoy a celebration of sonnets with Dora Malech and Phillis Levin, hosted by Jason Schneiderman.

Dora Malech’s most recent book of poetry is Trying × Trying, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in 2025. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. With Laura T. Smith, she edited The American Sonnet: An Anthology of Poems and Essays, published by the University of Iowa Press in 2023. With Gabriella Fee, she translated Italian poet Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto’s debut collection, Dolore Minimo, which won the Malinda A. Markham Translation Prize and was published by Saturnalia Books in 2022. Malech has been the recipient of an Amy Clampitt Residency Award, a Mary Sawyers Baker Prize, a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, and a Writing Residency Fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, among other honors. She is the Elliott Coleman Professor and department chair in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, where she also leads the Office of the Arts and serves as editor in chief of The Hopkins Review.

Phillis Levin is the author of six poetry collections, including An Anthology of Rain (Barrow Street Press, 2025) and Mr. Memory & Other Poems (Penguin, 2016), a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize; she is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet (2001). Honors include the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar Award to Slovenia, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Trust of Amy Lowell. Her poems appear in AGNI, The Atlantic, The Best American Poetry, The Common, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker, Paris Review, Poetry London, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. An editor of Boulevard from 1985 to 1997, Levin has taught at the University of Maryland and in the MFA program at New York University and is Professor of English Emerita at Hofstra University.

Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024), as well as a book of essays Nothingism: Poetry at the End of Print Culture (University of Michigan Poets on Poetry, 2025), and the craft book Teaching Writing Through Poetry: Teaching Writing Through Poetry: Understanding Poetic Form and Its Power to Unleash Creative Expression (Bloomsbury, 2025). He is Professor of English at CUNY’s BMCC and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.