Alexander, Elizabeth: Elizabeth Alexander is the author of five poetry collections and one memoir. These books include: Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990–2010 (Graywolf Press, 2010); American Sublime (Graywolf Press, 2005), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Antebellum Dream Book (Graywolf Press, 2001); Body of Life (Tia Chucha Press, 1996); The Venus Hottentot (University Press of Virginia, 1990); and her memoir, The Light of the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2015), which was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is currently the President of the Mellon Foundation in New York. Alexander has received the Jackson poetry Prize from poets and Writers, a Pushcart Prize, the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Chicago, the George Kent Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundations and National Endowment for the Arts.
Baraka, Amiri: Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) was a prolific writer of poetry, fiction, drama, essays, and music criticism. His first book of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note (1961), and his Obie Award–winning play Dutchman (1964) launched a five-decade career marked by sharp political and social critique on Black liberation, racism, and inequality. He founded Yugen magazine and Totem Press (1958), and later the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem (1965), helping to shape the Black Arts Movement. Author of more than 50 books, Baraka received honors from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the NEA, and awards including the PEN/Faulkner, the Langston Hughes Award, and two American Book Awards, including one for Digging: The Afro-American Soul of American Classical Music (2010). He taught at Columbia, Rutgers, and SUNY Stony Brook, where he was professor emeritus of Africana Studies. Baraka died in 2014.
Clark, Tiana: Tiana Clark is the author of I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood (2018) and Equilibrium (2016). Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, The Best American Poetry 2022, and more. She has received major honors including the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize (2017), Kate Tufts Discovery Award (2020), NEA Literature Fellowship (2019), Rattle Poetry Prize (2015), Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholarship (2021–22), and a Pushcart Prize (2019). Clark has held fellowships at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing, Bread Loaf, Sewanee, and Kenyon Review, and currently teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters and serves as Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College.
Codjoe, Ama: Ama Codjoe is an activist and poet. Her publications include Blood of the Air (Northwestern University Press, 2020), and Bluest Nude (Milkweed Editions, 2022). She has been awarded the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Whiting Award. She has also been honored with a Whiting Award, Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and numerous fellowships, including ones from the National Endowment for the Arts, Cave Canem, Robert Rauschenberg, Callaloo, Saltonstall, and other foundations. Codjoe was made the second Poet-in-Residence for the Guggenheim Museum in 2023.
Jackson, Major: Major Jackson is the author of six collections of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems (2023) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He is also the author of a collection of essays, talks, and reviews, A Beat Beyond: Selected Prose of Major Jackson (2022). Jackson is currently the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University and is poetry editor of the Harvard Review. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Jackson has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers' Award, and received honors from the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in partnership with the Library of Congress.
Major, Clarence: Clarence Major was an acclaimed author, painter, and poet whose works include Swallow the Lake (1970), Inside Diameter: The France Poems (1985), Configurations: New and Selected Poems 1958–1998 (1999), and Down and Up (2013). Over his career, he taught at thirteen universities and received numerous honors, including the Western States Book Award for Fiction, a Pushcart Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Council of the Arts Fellowship. After his passing, he was recognized with the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Georgia Writers Association and induction into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Walker, Frank X.: Frank X Walker, the first African American Kentucky Poet Laureate, is the author of 11 poetry collections, including Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (2013), winner of an NAACP Image Award, and Buffalo Dance: The Journey of York (2004), winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. His stage adaptation of Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride (2010) earned the Paul Green Foundation Playwrights Fellowship. Walker co-founded the Affrilachian Poets and founded pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. A professor at the University of Kentucky, his honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the Appalachian Heritage Award, and fellowships from Cave Canem, the NEH, and the Kentucky Arts Council.
Tallie, Mariahadessa Ekere: Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is the author of Strut (2018), Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation (2015), and Karma’s Footsteps (2011). Tallie is also the author of the award-winning children’s book, Layla’s Happiness (2019). Her work has appeared in anthologies such as Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry, The Golden Shovel Anthology, and Bum Rush The Page: A Def Poetry Jam, among others. Tallie is the recipient of a 2010 grant from the Queens Council on the Arts, and from 2013 to 2017 she served as the poetry editor of African Voices. She is also the subject of the short film, “I Leave My Colors Everywhere.” She is currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre Arts and Performance Studies at Brown University.
