11th Annual PoetryFest

Tina Chang is the author of three poetry collections: Hybrida (Norton, May 2019), Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books, 2011), and Half-Lit Houses (Four Way Books, 2004), which was a finalist for the 2005 Asian American Literary Award.

She is the co-editor of the seminal anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008). Chang’s own work has been published in the New York Times and Ploughshares among others, and has been featured in the anthologies Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation and Identity Lessons: Contemporary Writing About Learning to Be American (Penguin Books).

Chang is the recipient of awards from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, and the Van Lier Foundation among others. In 2014, Brooklyn magazine named Chang one of the 100 Most Influential People in Brooklyn Culture. 

Along with Tracy K. Smith, Chang also co-founded an annual collaborative reading series between the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Cave Canem, which showcased both established and emerging Asian American and African American writers. Most recently, Chang co-organized along with NY State Poet Laureate Marie Howe the New York City Poetry Rally in response to racial injustice where poets publicly shared poems, which spoke to oppression and brutality as much as they did to unity and compassion.

Born in Oklahoma to Chinese immigrants, Chang was a year old when the family moved to New York City; not long after she and her brother were sent to live in Taiwan with relatives for two years. Tina Chang received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University. She teaches poetry at Sarah Lawrence College and lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Cathy Linh Che is the author of Split (Alice James Books), winner of the Kundiman Poetry Prize, the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America, and the Best Poetry Book Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. 

Her work has been published in POETRY, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Gulf Coast. She has received awards from Poets & Writers, the Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, Hedgebrook, Poets House, the Anderson Center, the Asian American Literary Review, the Center for Book Arts, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Residency, the Jerome Foundation, and Artist Trust. She has taught at the 92nd Street Y, New York University, Fordham University, Sierra Nevada College, and the Polytechnic University at NYU. She was Sierra Nevada College’s Distinguished Visiting Professor and writer in residence. She serves as executive director at Kundiman and lives in Brooklyn.

Photo credit: Jess X Snow

Jane Clarke's first collection The River was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. Her illustrated booklet of poems All the Way Home was published by Smith/Doorstop in April 2019 and her second book-length collection, When the Tree Falls, will be published by Bloodaxe in September 2019.

The River was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. In 2016 Jane won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland literary bursary in 2017.

Jane holds a BA in English and philosophy from Trinity College Dublin and an MPhil in writing from the University of South Wales, and also has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. She grew up on a farm in Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she works as creative writing tutor and group facilitator in addition to writing. Her website is www.janeclarkepoetry.ie.

Michael Dickman’s most recent book of poems is Days & Days (Knopf, 2019) which Booklist called “sharp” and “poignant.” His other books include Green Migraine (Copper Canyon, 2016); 50 American Plays (Copper Canyon, 2012), which is co-authored with his twin brother, the poet Matthew Dickman; Flies (Copper Canyon, 2011), winner of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets; and The End of the West (Copper Canyon, 2009). His many grants, fellowships, and residencies include honors from organizations such as the Michener Center for Writers, the Vermont Studio Center, the Fine Arts Work Center, and the Lannan Foundation. He was awarded the Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University for 2009-2010. In addition to writing, Dickman appeared in the 2002 film Minority Report with his brother. He earned a BA at the University of Oregon and an MFA at the University of Texas-Austin’s Michener Center for Writers. Born in Portland, Oregon, he is currently on the faculty at Princeton University and lives in New Jersey.

Photo credit: Michael Lionstar

Martina Evans is an Irish poet and novelist. She grew up in County Cork and worked for fifteen years as a radiographer before becoming a full time writer. The author of eleven books of poetry and prose, her latest book of poetry Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (2018) was a finalist for the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the Pigott Poetry Prize, and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. She is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow, reviews for the Irish Times, and lives in London with her daughter Líadáin. 

Born in County Tyrone in 1975, Nick Laird is a poet, novelist, screenwriter and former lawyer. He has published four poetry collections: To A Fault, On Purpose, Go Giants, and Feel Free, as well as three novels: Utterly Monkey, Glover’s Mistake, and Modern Gods. Awards for his writing include the Betty Trask Prize, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is on faculty at New York University, and Chair of Creative Writing in Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. 

Photo credit: Zadie Smith

Deborah Landau is the author of four collections of poetry, all Lannan Literary Selections from Copper Canyon Press: Soft Targets, The Uses of the Body, The Last Usable Hour, and Orchidelirium, which won the Robert Dana Anhinga Prize for Poetry. In 2016 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Uses of the Body was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and included on "Best of 2015" lists by the New Yorker, Vogue, BuzzFeed, and O, The Oprah Magazine. Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Best American Poetry. She currently directs the creative writing program at New York University, where she also teaches.

Julie Morrissy is an Irish poet, academic, critic, and activist. She is a recipient of the Next Generation Artist Award from the Arts Council. She holds a PhD in creative writing from Ulster University, and she is the current Newman Fellow in Creativity at University College Dublin. Morrissy has read her work internationally, including representing Ireland at O, Miami Festival, and Toronto International Festival of Authors. Her first collection Where, the Mile End (2019) is published by Book*hug (Canada) and tall-lighthouse (UK). Her website is www.juliemorrissy.com.

Photo credit: Siobhan Butler

Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951 and now lives in New York. A former radio and television producer for the BBC in Belfast, he has taught at Princeton University for more than thirty years. He is the author of thirteen collections of poetry including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, and Frolic and Detour (2019) as well as Selected Poems 1968-2014 (2016). Roger Rosenblatt, writing recently in the New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as “one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems—word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” 

Photo credit: Gary Doak

Katie Raissian is editor and publisher of Stonecutter Journal, a print magazine of art and literature which focuses on publishing international writers and artists alongside US-based ones. She is also an editor at Grove Atlantic where she edits literary fiction and nonfiction.

Writer Stephen Sexton lives in Belfast. His poems have appeared in Granta, POETRY, and Poetry Ireland Review. His pamphlet, Oils, was the Poetry Book Society’s Winter Pamphlet Choice. He was the winner of the 2016 National Poetry Competition, the recipient of an ACES award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and was awarded an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. His first book, If All the World and Love Were Young, was published by Penguin and won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection.

Kevin Young is the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, newly named a National Historic Landmark, and poetry editor of the New Yorker. He is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (2018), a New York Times Notable Book; Blue Laws: Selected & Uncollected Poems 1995-2015 (Knopf, 2016), longlisted for the National Book Award; and Book of Hours (Knopf, 2014), a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize for Poetry from the Academy of American Poets. His collection Jelly Roll: a blues (Knopf, 2003) was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Young’s nonfiction book, Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News (Graywolf Press, November 14, 2017), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in nonfiction, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and named a New York Times Notable Book, a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice” selection, and a "Best Book of 2017" by NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Smithsonian, Vogue, the Atlantic, Nylon, BuzzFeed, and Electric Literature. Young’s previous nonfiction book, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press, 2012), won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the PEN Open Book Award; it was also a New York Times Notable Book for 2012 and a finalist for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. 

Young is the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, 1965-2010 (BOA Editions, 2012) and The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food and Drink (Bloomsbury, 2012). Named University Distinguished Professor at Emory University, Young was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016.