Ishion Hutchinson
National Book Critics Circle Award Pulitzer Prize Winner
American Academy in Rome
Yusef Komunyakaa
New York State Poet Laureate
American Academy in Rome
New York University
Valzhyna Mort
Bess Hokins Prize for Poetry
LPD – In Dialogue with Writers
Featured Biographies
Ishion Hutchinson
POET
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of two poetry collections: Far District and House of Lords and Commons. He is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Whiting Writers Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the Larry Levis Prize from the Academy of American Poets, among others. He is the current Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellow residing at the American Academy in Rome, Italy.
Yusef Komunyakaa
PULIZER PRIZE WINNER, AMERICAN POET, NYU
Yusef Komunyakaa’s books of poetry include Taboo, Dien Cai Dau, Neon Vernacular (for which he received the Pulitzer Prize), Warhorses, The Chameleon Couch, and most recently The Emperor of Water Clocks. His awards include the William Faulkner Prize (Université Rennes, France), the Ruth Lilly Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize, and the 2011 Wallace Stevens Award. His plays, performance art and libretti have been performed internationally, and include Saturnalia, Wakonda’s Dream, and Gilgamesh: A Verse Play. He teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at New York University and serves as State Poet of New York.
Valzhyna Mort
POET
Valzhyna Mort is the author of Factory of Tears and Collected Body (Copper Canyon Press 2008 and
2011). She has received the Lannan Foundation Fellowship, the Bess Hokins Prize for Poetry, the Amy
Clampitt Fellowship, and the Burda Prize for Eastern European authors. With Ilya Kaminsky and Katie Farris,
Mort co-edited Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poems and Prose (Tupelo Press 2014). Born
in Minsk, Belarus, she teaches at Cornell University. Her new book in Belarusian, Rose Pandemic, came out in Minsk in May.