Our award-winning faculty includes winners of the National Book Award, Pulitzer finalists, as well as recipients of Guggenheim fellowships, NEA grants, and the Wallace Stevens Award, among many other prizes. Our faculty is comprised of a diverse group of poets and poet-translators and they are the core of our program.
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Ross Gay
Ross Gay was born in 1974 in Youngstown, Ohio. His first book is Against Which (CavanKerry, 2006). His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Margie: The American Journal of Poetry, Alehouse, and elsewhere. He is a Cave Canem fellow and a recipient of a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts. In addition to being a book artist, a basketball coach and an editor with chapbook press Q Avenue, Ross teaches poetry at Indiana University in Bloomington and gives readings and workshops in various venues across the country.
Photo Credit: Rachel Eliza Griffiths
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Aracelis Girmay
Aracelis Girmay is the author of Teeth, published by Curbstone Press in 2007, for which she was awarded a GLCA New Writers Award & has been named a Pan African Literary Forum Fellow. Her poems have been published in Ploughshares, Bellevue Literary Review, Indiana Review, Callaloo, & MiPOesias, among other journals. Her collage-based book, changing, changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay has been awarded writing grants from the Watson Foundation & the Jerome Foundation. A Cave Canem graduate & Acentos board member, she is the 2008-2009 visiting writer at Queens College’s MFA program & facilitates arts/activism workshops with young people in the Bronx.
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Joan Larkin
Joan Larkin’s My Body: New and Selected Poems received the Publishing Triangle’s 2008 Audre Lorde Award.Previous books include Cold River, A Long Sound, Housework, and Sor Juana’s Love Poems, translated with Jaime Manrique.She edited the ground-breaking anthologies Amazon Poetry and Lesbian Poetry with Elly Bulkin and Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time with Carl Morse, served as poetry editor for the first three years of the queer literary journal Bloom, and co-edits the Living Out series at University of Wisconsin Press. Her anthology of coming-out stories, A Woman Like That, was nominated for Publishing Triangle and Lambda awards.
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Anne Marie Macari
Anne Marie Macari’s third book, She Heads Into The Wilderness, was published in 2008 with Autumn House Press. In 2000 she won the APR/Honickman first book prize for Ivory Cradle, chosen by Robert Creeley.She is also the author of Gloryland, published by Alice James Books.In 2005 Macari won the James Dickey Prize from Five Points Magazine and her poems have appeared in numerous other magazines such as: The Iowa Review, The American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, Field, and others.
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Alicia Ostriker
Alicia Ostriker has published eleven volumes of poetry, most recently The Volcano Sequence and No Heaven. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker,Poetry, American Poetry Review, The Atlantic, Paris Review, Yale Review, Ontario Review, The Nation, and many other journals and anthologies. Twice aNational Book Award finalist, she has also received awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Poetry Society of America, the San FranciscoPoetry Center, and the Paterson Poetry Center, among others.As a critic, she is the author ofStealing the language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America,and other books on poetry and on the bible.Her newest prose work is For the Love of God: the Bible as an Open Book.Ostriker lives in Princeton, NJ, and isProfessor Emerita ofEnglishat Rutgers University.
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Ira Sadoff
Ira Sadoff is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Barter and Grazing (Illinois), but also including Palm Reading in Winter and Emotional Traffic.His Ira Sadoff Reader compiled selected poems, published essays and short stories. His work is widely anthologized, including in the Scribner Series Best Poems of 2002 and 2008, Harper American Literature, St. Martin’s Introduction to Literature, The Bedford Introduction to Literature, The Body Electric, The Paris Review Anthology, and The Bread Loaf Anthology of Poetry.He is also the author of one novel, Uncoupling, and a forthcoming book on contemporary poetry, aesthetics and politics called History Matters (Iowa). Recipient of grants and Prizes from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NEA, and The Poetry Society of America, he currently holds the Jeremiah Roberts Chair in English at Colby College; he has also taught in the MFA programs at the Iowa Writers Workshop, the University of Virginia, Warren Wilson College, and at the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference.
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Gerald Stern
Gerald Stern was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1925 and was educated at the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University. He is the author of fifteen books of poetry including, This Time: New and Selected Poems, which won the National Book Award in 1998.A collection of personal essays titled What I Can’t Bear Losing: Notes From a Life was published in the fall of 2003 by W.W. Norton.He has taught at many universities including, the University of Pittsburgh, Columbia University, and for fifteen years was senior poet at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.He is the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, three National Endowment of the Arts Fellowships, the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts for the State of Pennsylvania, the Lamont Poetry Prize and the Ruth Lilly Prize. He was the first Poet Laureate of New Jersey, serving from 2000 to 2002 and was the recipient of both the 2005 Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry, and the 2005 National Jewish Book Award for poetry.In 2006 Stern was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.A new book of poems titled Save the Last Dance was released this spring from W. W. Norton.
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Jean Valentine
Jean Valentine is the current state poet of New York (2008–2010). She won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her tenth and most recent book of poetry is (Wesleyan, 2007). Her previous collection, Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003, was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. Her chapbook, , is just out from Sarabande Books.
Valentine has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the NEA, The Bunting Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, The New York Council for the Arts, and The New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as the Maurice English Prize, the Teasdale Poetry Prize, and The Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize, and the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the Graduate Writing Program of New York University, Columbia University, among many other places.
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Michael Waters
Michael Waters’ eight books of poetry include Darling Vulgarity (BOA, 2006-- finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize) and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems (BOA, 2001-- finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize). He has edited several volumes, including Contemporary American Poetry (Houghton Mifflin, 2006). The recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fulbright Foundation, as well as four Pushcart Prizes, Waters teaches at Monmouth University and in the Drew University Low-Residency MFA Program in Poetry.
Visiting Faculty
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Patrick Rosal
Patrick Rosal is the author of My American Kundiman, winner of the Association of Asian American Studies Book Award, and Uprock Headspin Scramble and Dive, winner of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Members’ Choice Award. His poems and essays have been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Harvard Review, American Poetry Review, Ninth Letter, Brevity, and Language for a New Century. In 2009, he was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholar Research Grant. The son of immigrants from the Ilocos region of the Philippines, he was born and raised in New Jersey.
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Ellen Doré Watson
Ellen Doré Watson is Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and poetry and translation editor of The Massachusetts Review. She is the author of three books of poems, We Live in Bodies, Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York award from Alice James Books, and This Sharpening, from Tupelo Press. Individual poems have appeared widely in literary journals, including The American Poetry Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. Among her honors are a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant, a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship. Watson has translated a dozen books from Brazilian Portuguese, including a selected poems of Adélia Prado, and has co-translated contemporary Arabic poetry with Saadi Simawe. Watson lives in western Massachusetts, where she also leads generative writing workshops and teaches at the Colrain Manuscript Workshop.
