poets cannot be neutralized
Born in Fukuoka, Japan, Mitsuye Yamada moved to Seattle, Washington, in 1926 with her family. Her father was an interpreter for the US Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the family was taken to an internment camp in 1942 when her father was wrongfully accused of spying. Yamada and her brother …
poets touch the wound
Patricia Smith has been called “a testament to the power of words to change lives.” She is the author of seven books of poetry, including Incendiary Art(2017), winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (2012), which won the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy …
poets tell important stories
Emmy Pérez is the author of With the River on Our Face (University of Arizona Press, 2016) and Solstice (Swan Scythe Press, 2003 and 2011). Originally from Santa Ana, California, she earned her BA from the University of Southern California and her MFA from Columbia University. Her work has been published in journals such as North …
poets speak truth to power
Danez Smith was born St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Don’t Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award; Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight …
poets transform bowls
Poet, translator, teacher, playwright, librettist, and collaborative artist Valerie Martínez was born and raised in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She earned a BA from Vassar College and an MFA from the University of Arizona. Her books of poetry include Absence, Luminescent (1999), World to World (2004), And They Called It Horizon (2010), and the book-length poem, Each …
poets peel off their stubbornness
Mexican American poet Juan Delgado first started coming to the United States with his family when he was a child. He attended California State University, San Bernardino, where he studied accounting before discovering writing and majoring in English. He earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he …
poets play basketball with words
Elizabeth Acevedo holds a BA in Performing Arts from The George Washington University and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Maryland. She is a National Poetry Slam Champion as well as a Cave Canem Fellow, CantoMundo Fellow, and participant of the Callaloo Writer’s Workshop. She is the author …
Let the poemapalooza begin!
April is National Poetry Month. I know, I know. You don’t do poetry. You lost the urge for it when your English teacher made you beat it senseless. Come back to the word that captures a world. Each April I feature a poem every day on 37days. It is my …
Welcome to Spring
In this hemisphere, today marks the first day of Spring, a hopefulness, a color spark, a transition into heat, that time of year where when it rains, suddenly color appears from the ground like it was the end of the raindrop. Flip flops for the occasion, even if still too …
On the first anniversary of his death, a poem by Derek Walcott
LOVE AFTER LOVE The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. …
