Selected Readings from the 2015 Poets
Ted Kooser
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Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, Ted Kooser, was the United States Poet Laureate from 2004–2006. He is the author of 14 full-length collections of poetry; including Splitting An Order (2014), Weather Central, and Delights and Shadows, which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. His prose books include The Wheeling Year (2014) andLocal Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps, which won the Nebraska Book Award for Nonfiction in 2003. His writing has appeared in many periodicals including The Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, The Hudson Review, The Nation, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, and Antioch Review. He has received two NEA fellowships in poetry and written three children’s books from Candlewick Press, The Bell in the Bridge (2015), Bag in the Wind, illustrated by Barry Root, and The House Held Up by Trees.
Marie Howe
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Vijay Seshadri
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Li-Young Lee & Tina Chang
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Li-Young Lee is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, Behind My Eyes. His earlier collections are Book of My Nights; Rose, winner of the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award; The City in Which I Love You, the 1990 Lamont Poetry Selection; and a memoir entitled The Winged Seed: A Remembrance, which received an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and was be reissued by BOA Editions in 2012. Lee’s honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Lannan Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, as well as grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
Tina Chang is the Poet Laureate of Brooklyn, the first woman named to this position, she was raised in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collectionsHalf-Lit Houses and Of Gods & Strangers (Four Way Books) and co-editor of the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (W.W. Norton, 2008) along with Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar. Her poems have appeared in American Poet, McSweeney’s, Ploughshares, and the New York Times among others.
Natalie Diaz, Aja Monet & the Winners of the 2015 Fresh Voices Poetry Competition
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Native American Poet Natalie Diaz is the author of When My Brother Was an Aztec. Her work has been recognized by the Lannan Foundation, and she has received the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry, the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from Bread Loaf, and the Narrative Poetry Prize. Her poetry and other writing can be found in Ploughshares, Narrative, The Rumpus, and Gwarlingo. She lives in Arizona.
2015 Winning Poets of the Fresh Voices Poetry Competition
- Cole Adams, Kingswood-Oxford
- Avery Christensen, Rockville High School
- Khadija Hussain, Wilber Cross High School
- Joscelyn Norris, Westover
- Kaleigh Perkins, Rockville High School