CELEBRATING THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEES FOR POETRY

ELIZABETH WILLIS is the author of Liontaming in America (New Directions), a hybrid work engaged with American belief and relationship structures, theater, activism, and film. Her other books of poetry include Alive: New and Selected Poems, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Address, Meteoric Flowers, Turneresque, The Human Abstract, and the artist’s book Spectral Evidence. She also wrote about the intersection of art and labor and edited the volume Radical Vernacular: Lorine Niedecker and the Poetics of Place. She teaches at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

M.S. REDCHERRIES received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a J.D. from Arizona State University’s College of Law. She is a citizen of the Northern Cheyenne Nation and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

OCTAVIO QUINTANILLA is the author of the poetry collections If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014), The Book of Wounded Sparrows (Texas Review Press, 2024) – which has been longlisted for the American Book Award – and Las Horas Imposibles/The Impossible Hours, winner of the 2024 Ambroggio Prize given by the Academy of American Poets, forthcoming from the University of Arizona Press.

ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. He has been the recipient of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award. Phillips has also been a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and an NAACP Image Award, and has been longlisted for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is a professor of English at Stony Brook University in New York and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, will be published by FSG in 2025. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

RUTH DICKEY is the executive director of the National Book Foundation and has spent 30 years working at the intersection of community building, writing, and art. She was a 2017 fellow with the National Arts Strategies Chief Executive Program and served as a judge in fiction for the 2019 National Book Awards.