In her landmark collection Land’s End: New and Selected Poems (The University of Chicago Press, 2020), activist, poet, and Smith College alum Gail Mazur uses descriptive-meditative narratives to weave the past and present together and interrogate loss and art. The National Book Award Citation for Mazur’s 2001 collection They Can’t Take That Away from Me praised her work as … Read more
Bianca Stone is a writer and visual artist, and the author of four acclaimed books, including a collection of poetry comics, and, most recently, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), which The Kenyon Review praised for its depiction of a “womanhood [that is raw, raging, sad, and beautiful] in which we can find some … Read more
Using complex formal innovations, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) grapples with her brother’s suicide, gathering lyrical lines into forms that echo and reconstruct the shapes left behind following her brother’s removal of his image from family photos. The Michigan Quarterly Review writes that Nguyen’s poetry and multimedia artistry “implicates a … Read more
Chet’la Sebree, the 2021 Boutelle-Day Poet-in-Residence at Smith College, is the author of two collections of poetry, most recently Field Study (FSG Originals, 2021), a genre-defying book that employs Tweets, quotations from Black visionaries, pop-cultural references, and other prose fragments to interrogate race, racism, desire, and Black womanhood. In his award citation for the book’s James Laughlin Award, … Read more
In Jenny Johnson’s debut book of poetry, In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017), she unpacks the queerness of the natural world as a means to rethink and blur the boundaries between what is real and imagined. In doing so, the reader is able to think through the way in which sexuality and gender norms have been crafted … Read more