Tiana Clark

May 26, 2025

• Tiana Clark is the author of two poetry collections, her new book Scorched Earth and I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Clark’s other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies. She is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at TianaClark.com.

Rachel Trousdale

May 24, 2025

Rachel Trousdale is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poetry collection, Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem, won the inaugural Cardinal Poetry Prize and will be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2025. Her latest scholarly book is Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Her website is Racheltrousdale.com, and you can find her on social media at X and on Bluesky.

Dzvinia Orlowsky

May 19, 2025

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Dzvinia Orlowsky is a Ukrainian-American Pushcart Prize poet, translator, and a founding editor of Four Way Books. She has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press, including her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest and Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow, a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship and were finalists for the 2025 PEN America Literary Award for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press 2024).  www.dzviniaorlowsky.com

Carlene Kucharczyk

May 19, 2025

Carlene Kucharczyk’s debut collection Strange Hymn, published this spring by the University of Massachusetts Press, is the winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of a Creation Grant from the Vermont Arts Council and holds an MFA from North Carolina State University. Her work has been published in journals such as Mid-American Review, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, and Conduit, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Marti­n Espada

May 19, 2025

Martin Espada, known for his powerful and socially conscious writing, has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist, and translator . His new collection of poetry is Jailbreak of Sparrows; his previous book, Floaters, won the National Book Award for Poetry and a Massachusetts Book Award. A former tenant lawyer with Su Clinica Legal in Greater Boston, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.