Featured Poets
Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, having been selected by President Obama. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.
heidi andrea restrepo rhodes (she/her) is a queer, disabled, Colombian/Latinx, poet, scholar, educator, and cultural worker. Her poetry collection, The Inheritance of Haunting (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) won the 2018 Letras Latinas Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She was a 2022 Zoeglossia Fellow, a 2021 Radar Fellow, a 2021 Mellon Arts Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration at Yale University, a 2019 CantoMundo Fellow, and a 2018 VONA alum. Her poetry has been published in Poetry, Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, Split This Rock’s Quarry, Nat.Brut, and Foglifter, among other places. She currently lives and teaches in southern California.
Spencer Reece is the author of Acts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024); The Road to Emmaus (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), long-listed for the National Book Award and short-listed for the Griffin Prize; and The Clerk’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin Co., 2004), which was both selected by Louise Glück as the winner of the Bakeless Prize and recognized with an award from the Library of Congress. Reece has also published a book of watercolors, All The Beauty Still Left: A Poet’s Painted Hours (Turtle Point Press, 2021), and written a memoir, The Secret Gospel of Mark: A Poet’s Memoir (Seven Stories Press, 2021). He has also edited a bilingual anthology of poems by the abandoned girls of Our Little Roses, titled Counting Time Like People Count Stars: Poems by the Girls of Our Little Roses, San Pedro Sula, Honduras (Tia Chucha, 2017). As an Episcopalian priest, Reece has served in San Pedro Sula, Honduras; Madrid, Spain; and New York, New York. He is currently the vicar of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Wickford, Rhode Island.
aracelis girmay is a poet and teacher who makes work across genres. She is the author of the poetry collections the black maria (BOA, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA, 2011), and Teeth (Curbstone, 2007). For this work she was a finalist for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Her books have also been named finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and the Connecticut Book Award. She has received fellowships from the Whiting Foundation, Civitella Ranieri, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. Girmay is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, and was a flower, made in collaboration with book artist Valentina Améstica. Other recent work includes a picture book collaboration with her sister entitled What Do You Know? and the forthcoming picture book collaboration with artist Diana Ejaita entitled Kamau and Zuzu Find A Way, both with Enchanted Lion Books. Recent works (poetry and prose) have been published or are forthcoming in Astra, The Paris Review online, Periphery Journal, Jewish Currents, The New York Times Magazine, and e-flux. Girmay is the editor of How to Carry Water: Selected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA, 2020) and So We Can Know: Writers of Color on Pregnancy, Loss, Abortion, and Birth (Haymarket Books, 2023). She is on the editorial board of the African Poetry Book Fund and is the editor-at-large of the Blessing the Boats Selections (BOA Editions).
Willie James Jennings is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Africana Studies at Yale Divinity School. Before coming to Yale, Jennings taught theology at Duke Divinity School for 25 years, where he also served for 10 years as academic dean. In 2023, Jennings delivered Oxford University’s Bampton Lectures, becoming the first African American to speak at the 243-year-old lecture series and one of the few Americans ever to earn the distinction. His book The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (Yale 2010) won the American Academy of Religion Award of Excellence in the Study of Religion in the Constructive-Reflective category the year after it appeared and, in 2015, the Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the largest prize for a theological work in North America. Englewood Review of Books called the work a “theological masterpiece.” His commentary on the Book of Acts, titled Acts: A Commentary, The Revolution of the Intimate (for the Belief Series, Westminster/John Knox) received the Reference Book of the Year Award from The Academy of Parish Clergy in 2018. He has also recently published a book that examines the problems of theological education within western education, entitled After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging (Eerdmans, 2020). Jennings is now working on a major monograph provisionally entitled Unfolding the World: Recasting a Christian Doctrine of Creation as well as a finishing a book of poetry entitled The Time of Possession.
Nicholas Samaras’ background is multinational and multicultural. Of Greek-American and European parentage, he was born on Rudyard Kipling’s estate (“Wimpole Park ”) in Cambridgeshire, England, raised there and on the island of Patmos, Greece (the island where St. John composed the book of Revelation). His first book of poetry, Hands of the Saddlemaker received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. His individual poems have been featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Kenyon Review, etc. He earned his doctorate from the University of Denver. Mr. Samaras now lives with his family in Tampa, where he teaches at the University of South Florida in the new Creative Writing Masters’ Program. In the summer of 2005, he taught in Florence, Italy.