Javier O. Huerta is the author of American Copia: An Immigrant Epic (Arte Publico 2012) and Some Clarifications y otros poemas (Arte Publico 2007), which received the 31st Chicano/Latino Literary Prize from UC Irvine. His poems have recently been anthologized in Art and Artists: Poems, Best American Nonrequired Reading 2011, and American Tensions: Literature of Identity and the Search for Social Justice. He received his MFA from the Bilingual Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and is currently a doctoral candidate in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines 19th Century articulations of laughter in relation to the simultaneous belief that laughter is essentially mechanistic and that the essence of laughter is irreducible to mechanism. Other research interests include U.S. Latino Literature and Literature of Immigration, including what he considers to be an emerging field, the Literature of the Undocumented. Huerta has been a contributing writer for Harriet, the blog for the Poetry Foundation.
Carmen Giménez Smith is the author of a memoir, Bring Down the Little Birds, four poetry collections— Gender Fables, Goodbye, Flicker, The City She Was, and Odalisque in Pieces. She is the recipient of a 2011 American Book Award, the 2011 Juniper Prize for Poetry, and a 2011-2012 fellowship in creative nonfiction from the Howard Foundation. Formerly a Teaching-Writing Fellow at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she now teaches in the creative writing programs at New Mexico State University, while serving as the editor-in-chief of the literary journal Puerto del Sol and the publisher of Noemi Press.
Josie Sigler Sibara was born Downriver Detroit and grew up in the Midwest. Her chapbook, Calamity, was published by Proem Press in 2009. Her book of poems, living must bury, winner of the 2010 Motherwell Prize, was published by Fence Books. Her collection of short stories, The Galaxie and Other Rides, was selected for the 2011 Ruby Pickens Tartt First Fiction Award, and was published by Livingston Press. Josie holds a dual PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California; her dissertation focused on race and gender in the literature of climate change. She recently completed a PEN Northwest Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Residency, which affords a writer the opportunity to live and work for six months on a remote homestead near the Rogue River in southern Oregon’s Klamath Mountains.
Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man (University of Pittsburgh, 2008), winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009), winner of the Thom Gunn Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry in 2010. His latest book, Farther Traveler: Poetry, Prose, Other, is forthcoming from Counterpath Press in 2013. Recent work appears or is forthcoming in the journals Callaloo, Interim, Bombay Gin, Spoon River Poetry Review, 1913, and The Volta, as well as in the anthologies Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry (Norton, 2013); The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books, 2012); and Among Friends Engendering the Social Site of Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2013). He holds a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a MA in Poetry from New York University’s Graduate Creative Writing Program, and an AB in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Co-founder of the Black Took Collective, Wilson is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Poetry, Fiction and Literature in the Literature Department of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Amaranth Borsuk is the author of Handiwork (Slope, 2012), selected by Paul Hoover for the 2011 Slope Books Prize, and, together with programmer Brad Bouse, of Between Page and Screen (Siglio, 2012), a book of augmented-reality poems. In 2010, her chapbook-length erasure, Tonal Saw, was published by The Song Cave. Her poems, essays, translations and reviews have appeared widely in print and online, and pieces have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Chicago Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, American Letters & Commentary, and The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare. Her intermedia project Abra, a hybrid book-performance collaboration with Kate Durbin, Zach Kleyn, and Ian Hatcher, recently received an Expanded Artists' Books grant from the Center for Book and Paper Arts in Chicago and will be issued as an artist's book and iOS app in fall of 2013. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Poetics at the University of Washington, Bothell.
Geoffrey G. O’Brien is the author of Metropole (2011), Green and Gray (2007), and The Guns and Flags Project(2002), all from The University of California Press. His next book, People on Sunday will be out from Wave Books in Fall 2013; his chapbooks include Hesiod (Song Cave, 2010), and Poem with No Good Lines (Hand Held Editions, 2010). He is the coauthor (with John Ashbery and Timothy Donnelly) of Three Poets: Ashbery, Donnelly, O’Brien(Minus A Press, 2012) and (in collaboration with the poet Jeff Clark) of 2A (Quemadura, 2006). O’Brien is an Associate Professor in the English Department at UC Berkeley and also teaches for the Prison University Project at San Quentin State Prison. Reviews, links, audio, and more here: http://www.wavepoetry.com/
Xochiqueztal Candelaria is a faculty member at San Francisco City College and holds degrees from UC Berkeley and New York University. Her work has appeared in The Nation, New England Review, Gulf Coast, Seneca Review and other magazines. Ms. Candelaria received fellowships from UC Berkeley, New York University, Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Hall Farm Center for the Arts, The National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the LEF Foundation. She was the winner of the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the Louisiana Literature Prize for Poetry, and the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Ms. Candelaria received an individual literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and her book, Empire was published by University of Arizona Press. Ms. Candelaria’s work was featured in West Branch Wired and Poets & Writers. Her essay, “On the Teaching of Phil Levine” will be published in Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine by University of Iowa Press. More poems and audio here: http://www.fishousepoems.org/
Sponsored by Porter Hitchcock Poetry Fund, Laurie Sain Endowment, Literature Department, Creative Writing Program, and Poets and Writers.
