Nossrat Yassini Poetry Fellowships

Nossrat Yassini Poets-in-Residence

Each year, the Nossrat Yassini Poet-in-Residence program seeks outstanding poets with an established publication history for a position as visiting poet at the University of New Hampshire. The program is designed to support the annual Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival, to promote poetic culture in the UNH community, and to offer our students a chance to work with a broad range of poets and experience diverse aesthetics and voices.

Elizabeth A.I. Powell, 2026-2027

Elizabeth A.I. Powell is the author of three books of poems, including ATOMIZER (LSU Press, 2020), which The Boston Globe called  "confident poems, ones that disrupt and magnify our relationship with one way in which we sense the world."

Her second book of poems, Willy Loman’s Reckless Daughter: Living Truthfully Under Imaginary Circumstances  was named a “Books We Love 2016” by The New Yorker.  Her novel, Concerning the Holy Ghost's Interpretation of JCrew Catalogues, was published in 2019 in the U.K. Her work has appeared in the Pushcart Prize Anthology, American Poetry Review, The New Republic, Women's Review of Books, Colorado Review, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Missouri Review, Mississippi Review, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, West Branch, and elsewhere.

Powell is Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor of Green Mountains Review, and Professor and Chair of Writing and Literature at Northern Vermont University-Johnson. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Nebraska-Omaha. In 2020, she was Distinguished Visiting Faculty at the Oregon State University-Bend MFA program

Diannely Antigua, 2023-2026

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), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and 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. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. 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, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. 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.

Nossrat Yassini Poetry Grad Fellows

Each year we select an outstanding student poet interested in cultivating professional skills and learning about arts administration to be our Nossrat Yassini Poetry Grad Fellow. This fellow supports the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival, the Nossrat Yassini Teen Poetry Festival, and publication of our teen anthology. Each of our fellows has added something distinct to our programming and left their own legacy behind.