Gail Mazur, Major Jackson, Didi Jackson, Nausheen Eusuf, and Lloyd Schwartz

Didi Jackson

Didi Jackson's poems have appeared in the New Yorker, New England Review, and Ploughshares, among other publications. She is the author of the forthcoming Moon Jar, which was a finalist for the Alice James Book Award, the Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize by Persea Books, and the Autumn House Press first book award. Her chapbook, Slag and Fortune, was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly. Currently, she teaches Poetry and the Visual Arts, Creative Writing, and African American Poetry at the University of Vermont and serves as the associate poetry editor for Green Mountains Review.

Gail Mazur

Gail Mazur is the founding director of the Blacksmith House Poetry series and the author of six previous books of poems, including They Can’t Take That Away from Me, a finalist for the National Book Award. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Insitute of Radcliffe College as well as the St. Botolph Club Foundation Distinguished Artist Award.

Photo Credit: Morgan Lacasse

Lloyd Schwartz

Lloyd Schwartz is the Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts, and the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He was the Classical Music Editor of The Boston Phoenix and is the longtime classical music critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, and a noted scholar and editor of the works of Elizabeth Bishop. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, The New Republic, Plume, and Harvard Review and have been selected for the Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. Among his awards are National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships for his poetry and the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. His most recent poetry collection is Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press).

Photo credit: Michael J. Lutch

Major Jackson

Major Jackson is the author of five books of poetry including the forthcoming collection The Absurd Man, Roll Deep, Holding Company, Hoops, and Leaving Saturn, finalist of a National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. He is the editor of Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, Major Jackson has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. He has published poems and essays in Agni, American Poetry Review, the New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and World Literature Today. Major Jackson lives in South Burlington, Vermont, where he is the Richard A. Dennis Professor of English at the University of Vermont. He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review.

Photo Credit: Erin Patrice O'Brien

Nausheen Eusuf

Nausheen Eusuf was born and raised in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She recently completed her PhD in English from Boston University, specializing in poetry & poetics. She has a BA from Wellesley College, an MA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins, and an MA in English from the University of Georgia. Her poetry has won a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The American Scholar, Southwest Review, Salmagundi, PN Review, Literary Imagination, Smartish Pace, World Literature Today, and Best American Poetry 2018 & 2019. She is the author of the chapbook What Remains from Longleaf Press, and the full-length collection Not Elegy, But Eros, published simultaneously by NYQ Books in the US and Bengal Lights Books in Bangladesh.