Featured Poets

Cornelius Eady is the author of eight books of poetry, including the critically acclaimed Brutal Imagination, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. With poet Toi Derricote, Eady is cofounder of Cave Canem, a thriving national network of black poets, as well as an institution offering regional workshops, readings, a first book prize, and the summer retreat. In January 2026, Cave Canem was a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship. Read more about Eady here.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music, which was the winner of a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster. She received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Read more about Antigua here.

JeFF Stumpo’s prose poems describing his lucid dreams, as well as rendering the hopes and fears of people he cares about into dreamscapes, have appeared or are forthcoming in places such as Prairie Schooner, The Journal, Salt Hill Journal, DMQ Review, Subnivean, and Voicemail Poems. He’s author of five chapbooks of poetry (most through Seven Kitchens Press), a survivor of psychosis and PTSD, husband to a PhD chemist, and father to an amazing trans son. You can find his literary updates at www.JeFFStumpo.com.

Porsha Olayiwola is an individual world poetry slam champion and the author of the collection i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola served as the third poet laureate for the City of Boston. She is a 2020 Academy of American Poets poet laureate fellow. Olayiwola is the assistant professor of poetry at Emerson College. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from with Triquarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, Split this Rock, the NBA, the Academy of American Poets, Netflix, the Rumpus, Wilderness Press, the Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere. Read more about Olayiwola on her website.

Three-time Boston Music Award-winning Spoken Word artist Amanda Shea is a Black, queer creative at the intersection of poetry, music, social justice, and culture. WBUR lauds her EP, God, Again, as “bridging the gap between poetry and music,” seamlessly blending spoken word with genres such as hip-hop, rap, rock, opera, jazz, R&B, and contemporary sounds. With work featured in the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, The Boston Globe, TEDx, Netflix, Prime Video, BBC News, and GBH, Shea’s voice honors African and Puerto Rican oral traditions, while pushing the boundaries of what poetry can be. Read more about Shea here.

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including Animal Days, The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks, The Inside of an Apple, Take It, Shake, Your Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew Rohrer: Nice Hat. Thanks. and Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty. He is editor-in-chief at Wave Books and has translated numerous works of poetry and prose, including Micrograms, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, 5 Meters of Poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010) by Carlos Oquendo de Amat, Tomaž, and Poker (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004) by Tomaž Šalamun, which was a finalist for the PEN America Poetry in Translation Award. He also co-edited Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. Read more about Beckman and his work here.

Colin Channer was born in Jamaica and educated there, and in New York. His most recent book is Console (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which was listed for the PEN/Voelcker Award in addition to being a Finalist for the New England Book Award and a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. His poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The Poetry Review and other venues. The State Poet of Rhode Island, Colin has received honors from the Academy of American Poets, The Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, The Amy Clampitt Residency and Brown University, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literary Arts. You can find out more about Channer on his website.

Dorothea Lasky is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry and prose, including, most recently, MEMORY, The Shining, and the forthcoming Mother. She is also the author of the prose book Animal and a forthcoming book about Sappho from Columbia University Press. She is the editor of Essays and a co-editor of Open the Door: How to Excite Young People About Poetry. Her writing has appeared in POETRY, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Atlantic, and Boston Review, among other places. Her first novel, Katie, is forthcoming from Harper Perennial. Read some of Lasky's work here.

Adedayo Agarau is the winner of the 2024 C.P. Cavafy Prize. He was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University ‘25 and a Cave Canem Fellow. He is the Poetry Reviews Editor for The Rumpus. Adedayo’s debut collection, “The Years of Blood,” which won the Poetic Justice Institute Editor’s Prize, was published by Fordham University Press in September 2025. Adedayo is a creative writing Ph.D. student at the University of Southern California. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop ‘23.

Andrea Cohen’s poems and stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Threepenny Review, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, Glimmer Train,  etc.  A new book of poems, The Sorrow Apartments, is just out with Four Way Books. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. Over the years, she has taught at the University of Iowa, Boston University, and elsewhere. She directs the Blacksmith House Poetry Series in Cambridge, MA.

Martín Espada has published over twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator. His new book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025) from Knopf. He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the PEN/Revson Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst

Robert Pinsky is the author of several poetry books, including Gulf Music, Jersey Rain, The Want Bone, The Figured Wheel, and At the Foundling Hospital. His bestselling translation, The Inferno of Dante, sets a modern standard. He was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1997 to 2000. Among his awards and honors are the William Carlos Williams Award, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the PEN/Voelcker Award, the Korean Manhae Prize, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the PEN American Center. He teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.

Crystal Valentine is a nationally and internationally acclaimed poet, educator, and organizer. A former New York City Youth Poet Laureate, Crystal has been offered fellowships from Callaloo, Tin House, Bread Loaf, and The Boston Foundation. Her work has appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Muzzle Magazine, TriQuarterly Magazine, MSNBC, BET, CNN, and elsewhere. She received an MFA from New York University. Originally hailing from the Bronx, Crystal now resides in Boston, where she serves as the Director of Programming for Mass Poetry.

Jennifer Militello is the Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. Her recent work inlcludes the forthcoming hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, The Pact (Tupelo Press/Shearsman Books, 2021), and the memoir Knock Wood (Dzanc Books, 2019). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Militello has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and currently teaches in the MFA program at New England College.

Winner of the 2025 Granite State Poetry Prize for his manuscript Thorn House, Thom Schramm is the author The Leaf Blower (Blue Cubicle Press, 2016), as well as the editor of Living in Storms: Contemporary Poetry and the Moods of Manic-Depression (Eastern Washington University Press, 2008). His poems have appeared in AGNI, The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Smartish Pace, and have won an Academy of American Poets Prize.

Matthew Olzmann is the author of Constellation Route as well as two previous collections of poetry: Mezzanines and Contradictions in the Design. A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Olzmann’s poems have appeared in the New York Times, Best American Poetry, the Pushcart Prizes, Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. He is a Senior Lecturer of Creative Writing at Dartmouth College and also teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.

Winner of the 2025 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize for Self-Mythology (University of Arkansas Press, 2024), Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from California. Saba's work has been published or is forthcoming in Lit Hub, Kenyon Review, The Margins, and other publications. She serves as the poetry editor for Sundog Lit and a board member for RAWI. Self-Mythology was also selected by Patricia Smith for the Miller Williams Poetry Series.

Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her MFA at NYU. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet-in-Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.

Mckendy Fils-Aimé is a Haitian-American poet and educator. He is a nine-time veteran and perennial semi-finalist of the National Poetry Slam, where has represented venues from Boston, MA, Worcester, MA, and Manchester, NH. Mckendy is a former artist in residence for MassLEAP as well as the Art Alliance of Northern New Hampshire. He is a Callaloo Creative Writing Fellow whose work has appeared in The Shore, Boxcar Poetry Review, The Journal, Callaloo, Acentos Review, and elsewhere.

Nathan McClain (he/him) is the author of two collections of poetry: Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award, and Scale (Four Way Books, 2017). He is a recipient of fellowships from The Frost Place, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and is a Cave Canem fellow. He earned an MFA from Warren Wilson College. His poems and prose have appeared in The Hopkins Review, Plume Poetry 10, Guesthouse, Poetry Northwest, and Zócalo Public Square, among others. He teaches at Hampshire College and serves as poetry editor of the Massachusetts Review.

Camille T. Dungy is the author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon and Schuster: 2023) and four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan University Press: 2017). Dungy’s interest in the intersections between literature, environmental action, history, and culture led her to edit Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (University of Georgia Press: 2009). Currently, she is the poetry editor for Orion magazine. Dungy’s work has appeared in over 40 anthologies plus dozens of print and online venues in the U.S. and abroad. She is a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University.

Born in the Gambia, Kweku Abimbola, winner of the 2024 Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize for Saltwater Demands a Psalm (Graywolf Press, 2023), earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Saltwater Demands a Psalm, also received the First Book Award from the Academy of American Poets in 2022, as well as other honors. He has work published and forthcoming in Shade Literary Arts, 20.35 Africa, The Common, Obsidian, and elsewhere. He lives in Detroit and works as a teaching artist for the literary nonprofit Inside Out Literary Arts. He also lectures in English and Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

New Hampshire Poet Laureate from October 2019 to March 2024, Alexandria Peary holds MFAs in Poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a PhD in English/Composition from the University of New Hampshire. Alexandria is the author of nine books, including five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Battle of Silicon Valley at Daybreak (2022). Her poetry has appeared in the Yale Review, Gettysburg Review, New American Writing, Painted Bride Quarterly, Barrow Street, Denver Quarterly, New England Review, Bombay Gin, and the North American Review. 

Winner of the 2024 Granite State Poetry Prize for his manuscript Sky. Pond. Mouth., Kevin McLellan is also the author of: in other words you (2022 Hilary Tham Capital Collection winner); Ornitheology (Massachusetts Book Awards recipient); Tributary; and Round Trip. Kevin's book objects, Hemispheres and box, reside in special collections including the Blue Star Collection at Harvard University. Kevin's video Dick won Best Short Form Short at the LGBTQ Los Angeles Film Festival and it also appeared at the Flickers' Rhode Island International Film Festival, Berlin Short Film Festival, the Vancouver Queer Film Festival and others.

Daniel Brock Johnson is the author of Shadow Act: an Elegy for Journalist James Foley (McSweeney’s, 2023). Previously, Johnson published How to Catch a Falling Knife with Alice James Books. In 2019, the City of Boston commissioned Johnson to draft lines of poetry for the twin memorials commemorating the Boston Marathon bombings. Johnson’s poetry has been featured in outlets such as National Public Radio, PBS News Hour, The Washington Post, and in a variety of publications including Best American Poetry and Tin House. Johnson has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Poetry Center of Chicago, Foreword Book Awards, and elsewhere. Currently, he works as the executive director of Mass Poetry.

Dr. Ebele Okpokwasili-Johnson, a soprano for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, is also a Child & Adolescent & Adult Psychiatrist and Medical Director of the Behavioral Health Department at Boston’s South End Community Health Center. Ebele attended Columbia University for college where she appeared in a number of plays and wrote and directed an original play titled The Quest. Ebele later attended the University of Illinois, where she earned her Medical Degree and Master’s of Public Health. Ebele has performed for eight years with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus including a U.S. premiere of James MacMillan’s “St. John Passion” with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Ebele lives in the Boston area with Daniel and their two children.

Diane Foley founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation to advocate for freedom for innocent Americans held hostage or wrongfully detained abroad and for journalist safety. Foley has raised awareness about international hostage taking through her government advocacy, the documentary, Jim: the James Foley Story, and opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA Today. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Dr. John W. Foley, and is the mother of four other children and seven grandchildren. Diane received her undergraduate and Masters in Nursing from UNH.

A Puerto Rican and a Cambodian walk into a kitchen. The kitchen is your heart. The food is made with food. The food is sometimes poems. Either way you are fed. 

Adobo-Fish-Sauce is an active choice to celebrate in the face of bitterness. It is responding to “Go back to where you come from!” by bringing where they are from right to you. The duo fuses spoken word, cooking, intentionality, vulnerability, and joy to create a one of a kind experience that can’t be found in any kitchen or open mic.

Bianca Stone is the author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022) winner of the 2022 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), and Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014). Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Nation, and elsewhere. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House.

Myles Taylor is a transmasculine poet, organizer, award-winning poetry slam competitor, food service worker, Emerson College alum, Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, and glitter enthusiast. They are currently the producer of the Boston Poetry Slam at the Cantab Lounge. Their first full-length collection, Masculinity Parable, is now out with Game Over Books.