NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION PRESENTS: CELEBRATING THE 2025 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD HONOREES FOR POETRY – POETRY

CATHY LINH CHE is a writer, multidisciplinary artist, and the author of Becoming Ghost: Poetry (Washington Square Press) and Split. She also co-authored the children’s book An Asian American A to Z: A Children’s Guide to Our History with Kyle Lucia Wu. Her video installation Appocalips is an Open Call commission with The Shed NY, and her film We Were the Scenery won the Short Film Jury Award: Nonfiction at the Sundance Film Festival. Che teaches as core faculty in poetry at the low-residency MFA program in creative writing at Antioch University in Los Angeles and is the executive director at Kundiman. She lives in New York.

ESTHER LIN was born in Rio de Janeiro and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She is the author of Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books), longlisted for the National Book Award, and The Ghost Wife, and she is co-editor of Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented Diaspora (HarperCollins 2024). Her work has been included in Best New Poets 2022 and the 2023 Best of the Net Anthology. Currently, she is a critic at large for Poetry Northwest and co-organizes the Undocupoets.

GABRIELLE CALVOCORESSI is the author of The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart: Poems; Apocalyptic Swing: Poems, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Rocket Fantastic: Poems, winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They are the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship at Stanford University; a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer's Award; a Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas; the Bernard F. Conners Prize from The Paris Review; and a residency from the Civitella di Ranieri Foundation, among others. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in numerous magazines and journals including The Baffler, The New York Times, Poetry, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and The New Yorker. They are an editor-at-large at Los Angeles Review of Books and poetry editor at Southern Cultures. Works in progress include a nonfiction book entitled The Year I Didn't Kill Myself and a novel, The Alderman of the Graveyard. Calvocoressi was the Beatrice Shepherd Blane Fellow at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute for 2022-2023. They teach at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and live in Old East Durham, North Carolina, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. Their new collection of poetry is The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press).

NATALIE SHAPERO’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and other journals. Her most recent book, Stay Dead (Copper Canyon Press), is longlisted for the National Book Award. She is also the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013), and she has performed at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, the Poetry Project at St. Mark's, and elsewhere. She teaches writing at UC Irvine.

RICHARD SIKEN is a poet and painter. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück; a Lambda Literary Award; and a Thom Gunn Award; and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025). He is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

RICKEY LAURENTIIS is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, Bomb, and on Poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans.

RUTH BEHAR is the Newbery Honor Award-winning and Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl, Letters from Cuba, and Across So Many Seas (Nancy Paulsen Books). She was born in Havana, grew up in New York, and has lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes the Sephardic picture book Tía Fortuna's New Home: A Jewish Cuban Journey; the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home: Returning to Jewish Cuba and Traveling Heavy: A Memoir In Between Journeys; and poetry and memoir. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur "Genius Grant" and has received other honors including a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and being named a "Great Immigrant" by the Carnegie Corporation. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

TIANA CLARK is the author of the collections Scorched Earth: Poems; I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, which won the 2017 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize; and Equilibrium, which won the 2016 Frost Place Chapbook Competition. Her other honors include a Pushcart Prize, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and Tennessee State University, where she studied Africana and women’s studies, and is the Grace Hazard Conkling Writer-in-Residence at Smith College. Find out more at www.TianaClark.com.