Poetry
Robin Becker’s five collections of poems include All-American Girl, which won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Lesbian Poetry, and The Horse Fair. She is Associate Professor of English at Penn State University.
Angela Belcher, a North Carolinian, majored in creative writing at Hofstra University and New York University. Her stories have appeared in Obsidian II and Violet, and she has a piece forthcoming in Essence.
Dan Bieker is a natural-sciences instructor at Piedmont Virginia Community College and a self-employed homebuilder. He has read for past book festivals and other events in Charlottesville.
Victor E. Blue, a former journalist, is a doctoral student in the history department at UNC Chapel Hill. His poems, essays, reviews and articles have appeared in the News & Observer, Dark Eros, Fertile Ground, Columbus Dispatch and Catch the Fire.
David Budbill was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1940. He is the author of six books of poems. He has been an occasional commentator on National Public Radio’s "All Things Considered." His most recent book of poems is Moment to Moment: Poems of a Mountain Recluse.
Beverly Fields Burnette is a poet, storyteller and school social worker in Raleigh, North Carolina. Her poetry appears in Adam of Ife: Black Women in Praise of Black Men and Fertile Ground.
Heather Burns is a poetry instructor at the Charlottesville Writing Center. Her poems have appeared in journals, including Southern Poetry Review, Nimrod, Antietam and Virginia Quarterly Review.
Kathryn Stripling Byer’s collections of poetry include The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, Wildwood Flower and Black Shawl. A professor at Western Carolina University, she has won the AWP Award in Poetry and the Lamont Poetry Prize.
Chezia Thompson Cager, author of The Presence of Things Unseen: Giant Talk, is a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Award in Poetry and a winner of the Artscape Poetry Award, following in the footsteps of her Mississippi poet/playwhright grandmother, Mary Ellen Gideon.
Christian A. Campbell, a Bahamian-Trinidadian, is a doctoral student in English at Duke University. he work appears or is forthcoming in The Caribbean Writer, Atlanta Review, Calabash, and American Literature. He is currently completing a book-length manuscript of poetry.
Richard Chess is an associate professor at UNC Asheville, directing the Center for Jewish Studies and the Creative Writing Program. He has two published books of poetry, Tekiah and Chair in the Desert.
L. Teresa Church of Durham, North Carolina, has published in Southern Theater, Fertile Ground, NC Arts and Sauti Mpya. In 1998 she earned an MLS and is employed as an archivist.
Bill Cole, whose primary instruments are Asian double reed horns, earned a PhD in ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University and leads the Untempered Ensemble. He has performed with such artists as Sam Rivers, Julius Hemphill, Ornette Coleman, Max Roach, James "Blood" Ulmer and Jayne Cortez.
Jayne Cortez has published ten books of poems (most recently, Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere) and has performed on nine recordings. She is president of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa and participated in the "Round Table Dialogue Among Civilizations" at the UN Millennium Summit.
Deborah Cummins is the author of a poetry collection, Beyond the Reach, forthcoming this year, and From the Road It Looks Like Paradise, a chapbook. Winner of numerous fellowships and awards, she teaches creative writing workshops in Chicago.
Kate Daniels is the author of three books of poetry, The White Wave, The Niobe Poems and Four Testimonies. She edited Muriel Rukeyser’s selected poems, a collection of essays on Robert Bly and teaches at Vanderbilt University.
George Garrett, author of thirty books and editor or co-editor of nineteen others, recently retired as Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at UVa. His most recent collection of poetry is The Days of Our Lives Lie In Fragments.
Kendra Hamilton is one of twelve southern writers chosen to participate in the 2000 Spoleto Festival’s "Beyond the Flag: Southern Writers Speak." She is published in Callaloo, Brightleaf: New Writing of the South and, forthcoming, in Shenandoah.
Tom House, a Nashville-based poet and singer-songwriter, has produced the CDs The Neighborhood is Changing, This White Man’s Burden and Til You’ve Seen Mine. He has collaborated to create musical adaptations of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Lee Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies.
Susan Hull holds an MFA from the University of Virginia. She is a native of Madison County and teaches at Albemarle High School.
Susan Imhof received an MFA from Warren Wilson College, and has published poems in Virginia Quarterly Review, Seneca Review, Willow Review, Meridian and New Virginia Review. She is editor at the Work Care Group and former poetry editor of the Blue Penny Quarterly.
Paula White Jackson has won two Emerging Artists Fellowships and was Visiting Artist for the Randolph Arts Guild in Asheboro, North Carolina. She lives in Palmyra, Virginia.
Candice M. Jenkins is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke, with a dissertation on the figure of the homewrecker in black women’s fiction. An alumna of Spelman College, she has been published in Cymbals and Catch the Fire.
Patricia A. Johnson, founder and director of SPARKS African American Writers’ Workshop, is the author of Stain My Days Blue. She won the individual competition of the 1996 National Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon.
Stanley Kunitz, U.S. Poet Laureate, welcomed his ninetieth year with a collection of his later poems, Passing Through, for which he won the National Book Award. He has received nearly every honor bestowed upon a poet in this country. Kunitz and his wife, the artist Elise Asher, live in New York City and Provincetown.
Jennifer Kronovet was born and raised in New York City. She will receive her MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis in May. She has been published in PoetryNorthwest and has work forthcoming in Delmar.
Sharon Leiter is a poet and fiction writer. She is the author of a volume of poetry, The Lady and the Bailiff of Time, and a literary study, Akhmatova's Petersburg.
Judy Longley has published three books of poetry. My Journey Toward You was winner of the Marianne Moore Prize. Her recent work has appeared in Poetry and Paris Review.
Charlotte Matthews has a B.A. in English from UVA and an MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her publications include Meridian, Iris, Pegasus and Blue Penny Quarterly. She teaches English at Albemarle High School.
Davis McCombs received his BA from Harvard University in 1993, and an MFA in poetry writing from UVA in 1995. His first collection of poems, Ultima Thule, was selected by W.S. Merwin as the 2000 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
Carrie Allen McCray, social worker and writer, was named teacher of the year by the United Negro College Fund. She is the author of Freedom’s Child: The Life of a Confederate General’s Black Daughter.
Cooper Moore, jazz pianist, opened Studio 501 in New York in the early 1970s, which became a focal point of the decade’s loft jazz scene. He has toured and recorded with Joseph Jarman, David S. Ware, Reggie Workman and William Parker.
Lenard D. Moore, founder and executive director of Carolina African American Writer’ Collective and co-founder of Washington Street Writers Group, is author of Desert Storm: A Brief History, and Forever Home. He teaches English and Poetry at North Carolina State University.
Gaye L. Newton, a graduate of Oberlin College and Purdue University, writes fiction, poetry and song lyrics. Her poetry has been published in BMa: the Sonia Sanchez Literary Review and she is the author of the novel Past Presence.
Mendi Lewis Obadike writes for audio and print. Her poetry appears in JukeBox, Catch the Fire!, Black Arts Quarterly, PoetryBay.com, Fyah.com, and the film Take These Chains. She teaches and writes on sound at Duke University.
Fernando Operé was born in Madrid and has seven collections of poetry in Spanish. He is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia, and the Director of the Latin American Studies Program.
Gregory Orr is the author of seven collections of poetry. He is also the author of Stanley Kunitz: An Introduction to the Poetry. He has taught at the University of Virginia since 1975, where he is a professor of English and poetry editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Wendell W. Ottley III was born and raised in Queens, New York. His poems have appeared in African American Review, Black Arts Quarterly, and Rhapsody in Black. He graduated from Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C. in May 2000.
Eric Pankey, the author of five collections of poems, is currently a Guggenheim Fellow. His most recent book, Cenotaph, will be issued in a paper edition in Fall 2001. He teaches in the MFA program at George Mason University.
William Parker, bass, was a solid member of the Cecil Taylor Unit in the early 1980s, and has performed with numerous major jazz figures. He has appeared on more than 150 recordings as both leader/composer and sideman, recently The Peach Orchard, Sunrise in the Tone World and Zen Mountains/Zen Streets with poet David Budbill.
Browning Porter is director and a poetry instructor at the Charlottesville Writing Center. His poems have appeared in New England Review, Poetry East, Agni, Virginia Quarterly Review and Meridian.
James Reiss’ books of poetry include The Breathers, Express, The Parable of Fire and Ten Thousand Good Mornings. He teaches in Oxford, Ohio, where he edits Miami University Press, a poetry series dedicated to mid-career poets.
Mary Ann Samyn holds an MA from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry writing from the University of Virginia. Her first full-length collection of poems, Captivity Narrative, won the Ohio State University/The Journal Award in 1999.
Alan Shapiro is professor of English and creative writing at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The winner of O.B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize, he is the author of six books of poetry. His most recent book is The Dead Alive and Busy.
Odessa Shaw is the director at NBC 17 and resides in North Carolina. He has currently completed a novel and is seeking a publisher.
Evelyn Shockley, a Cave Canem fellow, is a PhD candidate in English at Duke University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in Blue Mesa Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Obsidian III and the North American Review.
Myra Sklarew is the author of several works of prose and poetry relating to the Holocaust, most recently The Witness Tree. She teaches at American University.
Warren Smith, percussion, a former professor at SUNY at Old Westbury, has worked with Bill Cole since 1972 and is a charter member of Max Roach’s percussion ensemble, M’Boom. His own ensemble, Wistet, performs from his music and teaching studio in New York, Studio WIS.
R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, served as Artist in Residence at the Harper’s Ferry National Historical Park in the spring of 1998. His books include The Cardinal Heart, Trespasser and Split the Lark: Selected Poems.
Katherine Soniat, an associate professor of English at VPI, is the author of Alluvial. Her third book, A Shared Collection, won the Iowa Poetry Prize and also a Virginia Prize for poetry. She lives in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon won an Academy of American Poets prize and was a semi-finalist for the "Discovery"/ the Nation Prize. She was finalist in the New Letters Awards with work in Columbia, Poet Lore, and Callaloo.
Gina M. Streaty is a freelance writer, poet, teacher and lecturer. She is a graduate student at Duke University and has published in Bma, Independent Weekly, The Saracen and elsewhere. She lives in Raleigh with her daughter.
Deborah Tall is the author of three previous books of poems, most recently Come Wind, Come Weather. A teacher of writing and literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband, poet David Weiss, and their two daughters.
Karen Wade resides in Roanoke, Virginia with her husband. Mother of two children and a high school teacher of students with learning disabilities, she is a 2000 Cave Canem Fellow.
Angela A. Williams is a Cave Canem fellow and alumna of UVa. She earned her MFA from the University of Notre Dame. Her writings can be found in Obsidian III, Obsiadan II, The Black Scholar and The Journal of African Travel-Writing.
Charles Wright, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award, resides in Charlottesville and teaches at UVa. His works include Country Music, The World of the Ten Thousand Things and Negative Blue.
Toni Wynn, an arts and science educator, is a Jersey girl who calls Norfolk home. Her publications include Reckoning and Color Voices Place.