JMU - Collegiate Summit Participating Poets
Collegiate Summit Participating Poets
Claudia Emerson
Claudia Emerson is Virginia Poet Laureate and a 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for her book of poetry, Late Wife. She is also the author of three other books of poetry: Pharaoh, Pharaoh; Pinion: An Elegy and her latest work, Figure Studies. Emerson is Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She is a contributing editor of the Shenandoah Review.
Nikki Giovanni
Nikki Giovanni is the author of over thirty books for both children and adults; she has received countless notable awards; she has twenty-five honorary degrees, and she even holds the keys to more than two dozen cities. Her work as a poet, an educator, and an activist has made her a household name. Her most recent books include Hip Hop Speaks to Children and Bicycles: Love Poems. Her newest anthology, The One Hundred Best African American Poems is forthcoming in 2010. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg.
Major Jackson
The editor of Harvard Poetry Review, Major Jackson is the Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has served as both the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at the University of Massachusetts—Lowell and a creative arts fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Jackson is the author of Hoops, a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, and Leaving Saturn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. His third volume of poetry, Holding Company, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.
Quraysh Ali Lansana
Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of three books of poetry, a children’s book, and two poetry chapbooks. His titles include They Shall Run—Harriet Tubman Poems, southside rain, The Big World and cockroach children: corner poems and street psalms. In addition, Lansana has edited numerous literature anthologies and has received several awards. He currently directs the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Chicago State University.
Haki Madhubuti
Haki Madhubuti is the founder of Third World Press, one of the country’s oldest independent publishers of black literature, and he has authored over twenty books. An activist and educator, he co-founded the Institute of Positive Education/New Concept School, as well as the Betty Shabazz International Charter School, The International Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent, and the National Black Writers Retreat. Madhubuti is Founder and Director Emeritus of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Chicago State University.
Jon Pineda
Jon Pineda is the author of Birthmark, which won the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry, and The Translators’ Diary, which received the 2007 Green Rose Prize. His memoir, Sleep in Me, is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press. He has received a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship, has taught at the Kundiman Asian American Poets’ Retreat at the University of Virginia, and is currently on the faculty of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program in Creative Writing.
Lyrae Van-Clief Stefanon
Lyrae Van Clief Stefanon is the recipient of the 2001 Cave Canem Award for her first collection of poems, Black Swan. Her most recent collection, Open Interval, was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry. Ms. Van-Clief Stefanon’s poetry has appeared in anthologies, as well as in Callaloo, African American Review, Shenandoah, and other literary journals. She is an assistant professor at Cornell University.
Kevin Young
Kevin Young’s books of poetry include For the Confederate Dead, Black Maria, Jelly Roll: A Blues, and To Repel Ghosts. He has also edited three anthologies and poetry collections. His work has appeared in well-known publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, and Callaloo. The recipient of fellowships and awards from Stanford University, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the NEA, Young is the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University, as well as the curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.
