Yanyi is the author of Dream of the Divided Field (One World 2022) and The Year of Blue Water (Yale 2019), winner of the 2018 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His work has been featured in or at NPR’s All Things Considered, New York Public Library, New England Review, Granta, and West Branch. The recipient of fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Poets House, he holds an MFA in Poetry from New York University. From 2016-2021, he was the poetry editor at Foundry. Most recently, he is the recipient of a 2023 Vermont Arts Council Grant and a 2022 Tanne Foundation Award. He gives creative writing advice at his newsletter, The Reading, and is the founder of the Asian American Literary Archive.
Rita Banerjee is the author of the poetry collections Echo in Four Beats, which was named one of Book Riot’s “Must-Read Poetic Voices of Split This Rock 2018,” and Cracklers at Night. She is also editor of CREDO: An Anthology of Manifestos and Sourcebook for Creative Writing, and author of the novella “A Night with Kali” in Approaching Footsteps. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and has taught creative writing, pedagogy, publishing, foreign language, and literature courses at Harvard, UC Berkeley, LMU Munich, Vermont College of Fine Arts, and elsewhere. She received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard University and is a recipient of the Tom and Laurel Nebel Fellowship, South Asia Initiative Grants, and Tata Grants among other awards. She serves as Editor-at-Large of the South Asian Avant-Garde and Executive Creative Director of the Cambridge Writers’ Workshop. Her work appears in Academy of American Poets, Poets & Writers, PANK, Nat. Brut., Hunger Mountain, Tupelo Quarterly, Isele Magazine, Los Angeles Review of Books, VIDA, Vermont Public Radio, and elsewhere. She is the co-writer and co-director of Burning Down the Louvre, a forthcoming documentary film about race, intimacy, and tribalism in the United States and in France. She received a 2021-2022 Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council for her new memoir and manifesto Merchants of Cool: How Female Cool Could Not Be Sold, and one of the opening chapters of this memoir, “Birth of Cool” was a Notable Essay in the 2020 Best American Essays. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and Director of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Oliver Baez Bendorf forthcoming book of poems is Consider the Rooster (Nightboat Books, September 10, 2024), which Brian Teare called a “visionary book of queer ecological thought.” He is the author of two previous books of poetry: Advantages of Being Evergreen and The Spectral Wilderness, and a chapbook The Gospel According to X, selected for the Rane Arroyo Chapbook Series. His work has been recognized with a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Publishing Triangle Award, and fellowships from CantoMundo, Vermont Studio Center, Lambda Literary, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. His poems have been featured in publications like American Poetry Review, BOMB, The Nation, and Orion, and across various anthologies including Best American Poetry, Latino Poetry: A New Anthology, and Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics. Since 2011, he has taught poetry writing to people of all ages, including at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Kalamazoo College, and through workshops across the country. He received an MFA in poetry from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a BA from University of Iowa. Born and raised in Iowa City, Iowa, he now lives along the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado.
CM Burroughs is associate professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago and author of The Vital System (Tupelo, 2012) and Master Suffering (Tupelo, 2021), which was longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the Lambda Book Award and L.A. Times Book Award. Burroughs’ poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including Poetry, Ploughshares, Cave Canem’s Gathering Ground, and Best American Experimental Writing. Burroughs has been awarded fellowships and grants from Yaddo, MacDowell, Djerassi Foundation, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Cave Canem Foundation.
Christine Kitano is the author of the poetry collections Birds of Paradise (Lynx House Press) and Sky Country (BOA Editions), which won the Central New York Book Award and was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Dumb Luck & other poems (Texas Review Press) won the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize. She is co-editor of They Rise Like a Wave (Blue Oak Press), an anthology of Asian American women and nonbinary poets. She is an associate professor in the Lichtenstein Center at Stony Brook University.
Alan Williamson recently retired from the University of California at Davis. He has also taught at Harvard, the University of Virginia, and Brandeis. His books of poems are Presence, The Muse of Distance, Love and the Soul, Res Publica, The Pattern More Complicated: New and Selected Poems and Franciscan Notes. He has also published five critical books: Introspection and Contemporary Poetry; Pity the Monsters: The Political Vision of Robert Lowell; Eloquence and Mere Life; Almost a Girl: Male Writers and Female Identification, and Westernness: A Meditation. He has done a number of translations from the Italian, including The Living Theatre: Selected Poems of Bianca Tarozzi, co-translated with Jeanne Foster. He has received grants from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation.
C. Dale Young received his BS in Molecular Biology and English from Boston College and both his MFA and MD from the University of Florida. He completed his medical residency in Radiation Oncology at the University of California San Francisco. He currently administers his own medical practice, practices medicine full-time, and serves as President and Chief of Sequoia Hospital’s Medical Staff. A recipient of the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Literary Editing in 2014, he edited poetry for New England Review from 1995-2014. In 2017, he was awarded the Hanes Award in Poetry by the Fellowship of Southern Writers. He is the author of a novel and five collections of poetry, the most recent being Prometeo (2021). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, his work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including several volumes of The Best American Poetry, Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Poetry.
Sally Ball is the author of three collections of poems, Hold Sway, Wreck Me and Annus Mirabilis. She has published essays and reviews in Lithub, NOR, Pleiades, The Volta, and elsewhere. Her poems have appeared in APR, Bennington, Boston, and Harvard Reviews, Ploughshares, Tin House, Yale Review, and other magazines, as well as in The Best American Poetry anthology. Professor of English and director of creative writing at Arizona State University, Ball is also the associate director of Four Way Books. Her long poem “HOLD” has been made into a large-format artist’s book by the Czech printmaker Jan Vičar (2018).
Jason Schneiderman is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Hold Me Tight (Red Hen, 2020), and including the forthcoming Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire (Red Hen, 2024). He edited the anthology Queer: A Reader for Writers (Oxford UP 2016). His poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. His awards include the Emily Dickinson Award, the Shestack Award and a Fulbright Fellowship. He is longtime co-host of the podcast Painted Bride Quarterly Slush Pile and a guest host for The Slowdown. He is Professor of English at the Borough of Manhattan Community College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Matthew Olzmann is the author of three collections of poems, Mezzanines, which was selected for the Kundiman Prize, Contradictions in the Design, and Constellation Route, all from Alice James Books. He’s received fellowships from Kundiman and the Kresge Arts Foundation. His writing appears or is forthcoming in Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Brevity, Southern Review and elsewhere. Previously, he’s taught in the undergraduate writing program at Warren Wilson College and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He lives in New Hampshire and teaches at Dartmouth College.
The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College
701 Warren Wilson Rd. Swannanoa, NC 28778
[email protected] (828) 771-3715