Fiction | Nonfiction | Poetry | Moderators |
Listed in alphabetical order
Poet/playwright, singer/songwriter, and cornet player, Al Basile is known to blues fans worldwide, with 20 solo albums and 8 nominations for Blues Music Awards. Into the Dance is his fourth poetry collection. He has written and produced six audio plays in verse (his recent plays Hill & Dale and Open Question won gold and platinum awards from the HEARnow national audio drama festival). He is a member of the Powow River poets and has taught song lyric writing at the West Chester Poetry Conference and online at Writer.org. He is the host of the online poets-in-conversation show Poems On. Powow member page.
Martín Espada has published more than twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new book of poems is called Jailbreak of Sparrows (2025). His last book of poems, Floaters (2021), won the National Book Award and a Massachusetts Book Award. Other collections of poems include Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016), The Trouble Ball (2011), and Alabanza (2003). He has received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Shelley Memorial Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Letras Boricuas Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. A former tenant lawyer, Espada teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
Bardic Gifts and Epic Tales — Saturday 3:45 PM
Dominican-born Rhina P. Espaillat is a much-honored Newburyport bilingual poet, essayist, short-story writer, translator, and educator. Her most recent book is her translation from Spanish to English of the personal poetry of Dominican poet José Mármol, Sketch of Flight (UME, República Dominicana, 2022). Her published work includes poetry, essays, and short stories, appearing in over 100 magazines and anthologies. She is a founding member of two long-lived, active poetry workshops: NYC’s Fresh Meadows Poets and Newburyport’s Powow River Poets. Honors include the T. S. Eliot Prize in Poetry, Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award, Richard Wilbur Award, Oberon Poetry Prize. Powow member page.
Rachel Hadas is the author of many books of poetry, essays, and translations. Ghost Guest (Ragged Sky Press) was published in 2023; Forty-four Pastorals was released this spring (2025) by Measure Press, and From Which We Start Awake is due out from Able Muse Press later this year. The recipient of honors and awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Hadas is Professor Emerita at Rutgers University-Newark, where she taught English for many years. Her translations from Greek include plays by Euripides and a book of Nonnus’s Tales of Dionysus; she is currently the Original English Verse editor of “Classical Outlook.”
Mary Hills Kuck, a Midwesterner, born and raised in Illinois, has spent most of her adult life in the US Northeast and in Jamaica, West Indies. Since retiring from teaching German, English, and ESL in a variety of settings, she has settled in Massachusetts with her husband and family. Her first full-length book of poetry, Before I Forget, was released by Kelsay Books in 2024 and her poetry chapbook, Intermittent Sacraments, by Finishing Line Press (2021). Her poetry appears in the Connecticut River Review, SLANT, Tipton Poetry Journal, Poetry Quarterly, Main St. Rag, and others. Honors include her nomination for a Pushcart Prize. Powow member page.
Poet, novelist, essayist, Brad Leithauser, is the author of eighteen books, the most recent of which is Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry. His nineteenth, The Old Current, a collection of poems, will be published in the spring of 2025. He is a former theater critic for Time, and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2005, he was inducted into the Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland. A former professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Bardic Gifts and Epic Tales — Saturday 3:45 PM
Started by two Newburyport High School students, Poetry Soup has been simmering for thirty years. During that time hundreds of young poets have participated in the monthly readings that include… an open mike for students and an adult featured speaker. Thanks to visits from exceptional mentors, students have been inspired to find their voices and recognize the power of their words.
Alfred Nicol will present poems from his new collection, After the Carnival, published by Wiseblood Books. Nicol was the recipient of the 2004 Richard Wilbur Award for his first book of poems, Winter Light. Previous books include Animal Psalms and Brief Accident of Light, a collaboration with Rhina Espaillat. His poems have appeared in Poetry, Commonweal, The Formalist, The Hopkins Review, America and other journals, and anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2018 and Contemporary Catholic Poetry. Nicol’s translation of One Hundred Visions of War by Julien Vocance (Wiseblood, 2022) has been called “an essential addition to the history of modernist poetry.” Powow member page.
Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, a Four Way Books founding editor, has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest. Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship and were just named finalists for the 2025 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living, published by Lost Horse Press in 2024.
Jane Satterfield’s five poetry books include The Badass Brontës (Diode Editions Award), Apocalypse Mix (Autumn House Poetry Prize), and Her Familiars. She has received National Endowment for the Arts and Maryland Arts Council poetry fellowships, Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award for Poetry, and the Ledbury Poetry Festival Prize. Selections from Daughters of Empire: A Memoir of a Year in Britain and Beyond (Demeter Press, 2009) won Florida Review’s Editors’ Prize and the Faulkner Society’s Essay Award. Satterfield has served as faculty for the West Chester Poetry and Frost Farm Conferences and is a professor of writing at Loyola University Maryland.
Poems by the Haitian-American poet and critic Patrick Sylvain appear in Agni, American Poetry Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner, and on the Poetry and Jazz CD, The Poets are Gathering. His poetry books include Unfinished Dreams /Rèv San Bout, just out from JEBCA, and Underworlds (Central Square Press, 2018). With a doctorate from Brandeis, and degrees from UMass and Harvard, Sylvain is Assistant Professor at Simmons University, and publishes widely on Haiti and Haitian diaspora culture, politics, language, and religion, with publishing credit as lead author for Education Across Borders: Immigration, Race, and Identity in the Classroom (Beacon Press, 2022).
Chelsea Woodard’s third collection, At the Lepidopterist’s House (SIR Press, 2023) won the 2022 Michael Waters Poetry Prize and the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Book Award. Chelsea is also the recipient of the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship, and a residency at Vermont Studio Center. She lives and teaches in New Hampshire.
