Previous Faculty/Guest Poets
Kazim Ali is the author of The Far Mosque (Alice James Books). His poems and essays have appeared in such journals as The Iowa Review, Colorado Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Catamaran, and in the anthologies Writing the Lines of Our Hands and Risen From the East. A graduate of the Creative Writing Program at New York University, he is the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage. He is the publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University.
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Wesleyan University, the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Stanford, where he was a Wallace E. Stegner Fellow in Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including The Yale Review, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Grand Street, and Ploughshares. In 2001, he received a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He now teaches at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, and for the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Regie Cabico is a spoken word pioneer having won top prizes in the 1993, 1994 and 1997 National Poetry Slams. His work appears in over 30 anthologies including Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Spoken Word Revolution and Slam. He has appeared on two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, PBS’ “In The Life” and MTV’s “Free Your Mind” Spoken Word Tour. Regie is the recipient of the 10th annual Writers for Writers Award sponsored by Poets & Writers and has received three New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships for Poetry and Multi-Disciplinary Performance.
Marilyn Chin is the author of Dwarf Bamboo (Greenfield Review Press, 1987) and The Phoenix Gone, the Terrace Empty (Milkweed Editions, 1994). Her latest book, Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, was published by Norton in 2002. She has won numerous awards for her poetry, including two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, four Pushcart Prizes, a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan, and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Residency, the Djerassi Foundation, and others. Chin’s work is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The Norton Introduction to Poetry, The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry, Unsettling America, The Open Boat, and The Best American Poetry of 1996. Her poetry was also featured in Bill Moyers’s PBS series The Language of Life. She codirects the MFA program at San Diego State University.
Lawson Inada is third-generation Japanese American, born and raised in Fresno, California. He has taught at Southern Oregon State College since 1966. For both historical and aesthetic reasons, Lawson Inada is a significant figure in Asian American poetry and literature. He was one of the co-editors of the landmark anthology, Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian-American Writers, and has participated in efforts to recover writing by earlier Japanese American authors such as Toshio Mori and John Okada. Inada’s collection Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971) was one of the first Asian American single-author volumes of poetry from a major New York publishing house. Inada won the American Book Award in 1994 for Legends from Camp and was named Oregon State Poet of the Year in 1991. He has received a number of poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Myung Mi Kim’s books of poems include Commons (University of California Press), DURA (Sun & Moon), The Bounty (Chax Press), and Under Flag, winner of the Multicultural Publisher’s Exchange Award (Kelsey St. Press). Anthology appearances in Asian-American Literature: An Anthology, Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women, Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, Primary Trouble: An Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and other collections. Honors include a residency at Djerassi Resident Artists Program and awards from The Fund for Poetry. She is Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo.
David Mura is a poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura has written two memoirs: Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (Anchor-Random), which won a 1991 Josephine Miles Book Award from the Oakland PEN and was listed in the New York Times Notable Books of Year, and Where the Body Meets Memory: An Odyssey of Race, Sexuality and Identity (1996, Anchor). Among his awards, Mura has received a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, two NEA Literature Fellowships, two Bush Foundation Fellowships, four Loft-McKnight Awards, several Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and a Discovery/The Nation Award.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of Miracle Fruit (Tupelo Press), winner of ForeWord Magazine’s Poetry Book of the Year Award, the Global Filipino Literary Award, and finalist for the Asian American Literary Award and the Glasgow Prize. She received her MFA at Ohio State University and was the Middlebrook Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing at UW-Madison. Other awards for her writing include the Boatwright Prize from Shenandoah, The Richard Hugo Prize from Poetry Northwest, an Associated Writing Programs Intro Award in creative non-fiction and several nominations for the Pushcart Prize. She is Assistant Professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia- right in the heart of cherry and berry country- where she lives with her dog, Villanelle.
Ishle Yi Park is a Korean American woman who has been published in The Best American Poetry of 2003. She has been twice featured on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and performed her poetry on the NAACP Image Awards. She has a CD entitled “Work is Love,” and an upcoming book called “The Temperature of this Water,” which will be released this year. Ishle currently lives in New York.
Jon Pineda is the author of Birthmark (Southern Illinois University Press, 2004), winner of the Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry Open Competition. A recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, he is a graduate of James Madison University and of the MFA program in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he received an AWP Intro Award for Poetry. His recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Sou’wester and various anthologies.
Patrick Rosal is the author of Uprock Headspin Scramble And Dive (Persea Books). His work has been published in many journals and anthologies including North American Review, Columbia, The Literary Review, and The Beacon Best 2001. He has been a featured reader at many venues in and out of NYC, from Boston to Daytona Beach, as well as in London and on the BBC radio’s “World Today.” He is currently Assistant Professor of English at Bloomfield College.
Prageeta Sharma is the author of Bliss to Fill (subpress books, 2000) and The Opening Question (Fence Books, 2004). Her work has also appeared in Agni, Art Asia Pacific, Boston Review, Combo, Fence, Indiana Review, Women’s Review of Books and other periodicals. She received her MFA in poetry from Brown University and an MA in Media Studies from The New School.
Arthur Sze is a second-generation Chinese American. Educated at the University of California, Berkeley, Sze is the author of five volumes of poetry, including most recently The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998), a finalist for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. His poems have also appeared in numerous magazines, including American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Mother Jones, Conjunctions, and The Bloomsbury Review. Translations of Sze’s work have been published in Italy and China. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, three Witter Bynner Foundation Poetry Fellowships, and two Creative Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Sze currently directs the Creative Writing Program at the Institute for American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he has taught for more than a decade.