Author of more than 10 books of poetry, as well as plays, children’s books, and memoirs, Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned performer and writer of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd poet laureate of the United States from 2019 to 2022. Harjo’s many honors include the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Prize for Lifetime Achievement from the Poetry Foundation, the Academy of American Poets Wallace Stevens Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Harjo is the 2023 winner of the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

 

Sandra Lim’s latest book of poetry is The Curious Thing (W.W. Norton, 2021). Her previous collections include The Wilderness (W.W. Norton, 2014), winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize selected by Louise Glück, and Loveliest Grotesque (Kore Press, 2006). She is the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award, Pushcart Prizes, and the Levis Reading Prize. In 2023, she was named Distinguished University Professor at UMass Lowell, where she teaches literature and creative writing. Born in Seoul, Korea, she lives in Cambridge, MA.

 

Karin Roffman is the author of the first biography of John Ashbery, The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), which was named one of the 100 notable books for 2017 by the New York Times.  She is currently at work on a full biography of John Ashbery; a biography of the American painter Jane Freilicher will follow.  In 2019, in collaboration with the Yale University Digital Humanities Lab, she released John Ashbery’s Nest, a virtual tour and website on John Ashbery’s Hudson house (see http://vr.ashberyhouse.yale.edu/). Her research has been supported by two ACLS fellowships (2011-12, 2017-18), the Howard Foundation (2011-12) and an NEH summer stipend (2009), as well as grants from the Houghton Library, the Harry Ransom Center, and the American Philosophical Society. Her first book, From the Modernist Annex: American Women Writers in Museums and Libraries (2010), on the poetry and prose of Edith Wharton, Marianne Moore, Nella Larsen and Ruth Benedict won the University of Alabama Press’s American Literature Elizabeth Agee Manuscript Prize and subsequent publication