A MESSY SURVIVAL, A REPRISE OF JOY: THE CRAFT OF POETRY

DANEZ SMITH is the author of four collections of poetry, including Homie, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Don’t Call Us Dead, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection and a finalist for the National Book Award. Their work has been also awarded the Minnesota Book Award in Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and was named a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Poetry. A former co-host of the Webby-nominated podcast VS, they live in Minneapolis. Bluff: Poems (Graywolf Press) is their most recent collection.

GABRIEL RAMIREZ, author of If Pit Bulls Had a God, It'd be a Pit Bull is a queer Afro-Caribbean writer and educator. A 2023 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry at Adroit Journal and a 2024-2025 CantoMundo Poetry Coalition Fellow. Gabriel has received support from The Conversation Literary Arts Festival, Miami Book Fair, The Watering Hole, and Callaloo. You can find their work in publications like Muzzle Magazine, Split This Rock’s The Quarry, Poetry Magazine, BOMB, Acentos Review, and others, as well as Latino Poetry: The Library of America Anthology (Library of America 2024).

JOSEPH EARL THOMAS is the author of Sink: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing), God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer: A Novel (Grand Central Publishing), and the forthcoming story collection Leviathan Beach (Grand Central Publishing). His prose, poetry, and criticism has been published in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Dilettante Army, and The New York Times Book Review. Sink was longlisted for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award and shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s MFA program in prose, Thomas is earning a Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College and courses in Black studies, poetics, queer theory, video games, and more at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.