Poetry: Allison Joseph, Brendan Constantine, erica lewis, and Stephen S. Mills

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

Allison Joseph lives in Carbondale, Illinois, where she is on the faculty at Southern Illinois University. Her most recent collections of poems are Lexicon (Red Hen Press, 2021, PBTS Best Book Award winner), Any Proper Weave (Kelsay Books, 2022), Speak and Spell (Glass Lyre Press, 2022), and Confessions of a Barefaced Woman (Red Hen Press, 2018), which  won the 2019 Feathered Quill Book Award and was a finalist for the 2019 NAACP Image Award. She was named Illinois Author of the Year for 2022 by the Illinois Association of Teachers of English. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times and in the Best American Poetry Series. She is the widow of beloved poet and editor Jon Tribble.

Brendan Constantine is a poet based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in many standards, including Poetry, The Nation, Best American Poetry, and Poem-a-Day.  A popular performer, Brendan has presented his work to audiences throughout the U.S. and Europe, also appearing on NPR's All Things Considered, TED-Ed, numerous podcasts, and YouTube. He currently teaches at the Windward School, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Midnight Mission. Since 2017 he has been developing workshops for writers living with aphasia and traumatic brain injuries. His fifth collection, The Opposites Game, is available now from Red Hen Press.

erica lewis lives in San Francisco. Her books include the precipice of jupiter and camera obscura (both with artist Mark Stephen Finein); murmur in the inventory; and the box set trilogy: daryl hall is my boyfriend, mary wants to be a superwoman, and mahogany. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Stephen S. Mills (he/they) is the author of the Lambda Award-winning book He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices (2012) as well as A History of the Unmarried (2014) and Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution (2018), all from Sibling Rivalry Press. His work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Fourteen Poems, The Los Angeles Review, and others. Two of his books were placed on the “Over the Rainbow Book List” compiled yearly by the American Library Association. He is also the author of the plays Waiting for Manilow and Is That All There Is? His fourth book Final Slash Boy is now available from Broken Sleep Books. He lives in New York City.