John Hoppenthaler - Week 1

John Hoppenthaler’s books of poetry are Lives of Water and Anticipate the Coming Reservoir. His poetry appears in Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Christian Science Monitor, and Southern Review, as well as in many anthologies. For the cultural site Connotation Press: An Online Artifact, he edits “A Poetry Congeries” and curates the Guest Poetry Editor Feature. He teaches at East Carolina University.

Nicole Cooley - Week 2

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans. Her most recent book of poems is Breach, to be published by LSU Press in April 2010, which focuses on Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. She has published two other books of poems and a novel. She has been awarded the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, a "Discovery"/Nation Award, and the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America. She directs the new MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College-City University of New York.

Maggie Anderson - Week 3

Maggie Anderson is the author of five books of poetry, including Windfall:New and Selected Poems and Cold Comfort. She is the editor of the poetry anthology, The Next of Us is About to Be Born, poems from the Wick Poetry Series, which she edited from 1992-2009. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Anderson is the founding director of the Wick Poetry Center and Professor Emerita of English at Kent State University.

Stephen Haven - Week 4

Stephen Haven is the author of two books of poems, Dust and Bread and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks, and of the memoir The River Lock: One Boy’s Life along the Mohawk. His poems have appeared in many journals, including Salmagundi, Parnassus, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, Literary Imagination, Image, and Crazyhorse. He is Director of the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University.

David Baker - Week 5

David Baker is author of a dozen books, including Never-Ending Birds (poetry) and the Radiant Lyre (essays). His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and Poetry, and has received awards from the Guggenheim and Mellon Foundations as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. He holds the Thomas B. Fordham Chair of Poetry at Denison University and teaches also in the MFA program for writers at Warren Wilson College. He is Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review.

Jim Daniels - Week 6

Jim Daniels is the author of thirteen poetry books, including Having a Little Talk with Capital P Poetry and From Milltown to Malltown (poems and photos, with Charlee Brodsky and Jane McCafferty). He has published three collections of fiction and written two produced screenplays. His awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. He is the Thomas Stockman Baker Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University.

Laura Kasischke - Week 6

Laura Kasischke (advanced poetry workshop) has published seven collections of poetry, most recently Lilies Without. She has also published seven novels, including The Life Before Her Eyes, adapted for a film directed by Vadim Perelman. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Southern Review, Iowa Review, New Republic, and elsewhere. She has received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, several Pushcart Prizes, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan.

Todd Davis - Week 7

Todd Davis teaches creative writing and environmental studies at Penn State University’s Altoona College. He is the winner of the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Prize, author of three books of poetry – Ripe, Some Heaven, and The Least of These – and co-editor of Making Poems. His poems have been published widely and have been featured by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac and by Ted Kooser in American Life in Poetry.

Wendy Mnookin - Week 8

Wendy Mnookin’s most recent book, The Moon Makes Its Own Plea, was published in 2008. Her other books are What He Took, To Get Here, and Guenever Speaks, a collection of persona poems. Her poems have been featured on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Poetry Daily. Mnookin teaches poetry at Emerson College and at Grub Street, a non-profit writing program in Boston.

Ansie Baird - Week 9

Ansie Baird teaches at The Buffalo Seminary, is an editor for Earth's Daughters, has taught for Just Buffalo in their Writers In E ducation program, and participated in the Albright-Knox collaborative entitled “A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words.” Her work has been published in The Paris Review and other journals. Her book, In Advance Of All Parting, won the White Pine Press national poetry competition and was published by White Pine Press in 2009.