David Lehman, Editor in Chief. David Lehman was born in New York City. He initiated
The Best American Poetry series in 1988 and remains series editor of the annual anthology. He is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Yeshiva Boys (Scribner, 2009). Among his nonfiction books are A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs (Nextbook, 2009), The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (Anchor, 1999) and The Perfect Murder ( Michigan, 2000). He edited Great American Prose Poems: From Poe to the Present , (Scribner, 2003) and The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008). He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry, a one-volume comprehensive anthology of poems from Anne Bradstreet to the present. He teaches writing and literature in the graduate writing program of the New School in New York City. He lives in New York City and spends summers in Ithaca, New York.
Stacey Harwood, Managing Editor, is a policy analyst for the New York State Public Service Commission, the agency that regulates gas, electric, water, and telephone service in New York State. She writes Critic’s Pick and Eat This Now columns for Time Out New York. Her poems and essays have been published or are forthcoming in The LA Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, Humor, Lit, Saveur, and elsewhere. Paul Muldoon selected her poem Contributors' Notes for The Best American Poetry 2005.
Lera Auerbach, The Trouble Clef. Lera is among the most widely performed composers of her generation. She has composed major works for orchestra, ballet, chamber ensemble, chorus, and opera, and is a concert pianist and award-winning poet. Her new ballet, “The Little Mermaid,” will receive its American premiere in 2010 by the San Francisco Ballet. Lera is writing an opera based on her stage play “Gogol” for Vienna’s Theater an der Wien for premiere in 2011, and will be composer-in-residence with the Dresden Staatskapelle Orchestra the same year.
In May 2009, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C. presented a composer portrait of Auerbach, and during the summer she was honored with composer portraits and premieres at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland and the Pacific Music Festival in Japan. She was a featured poet at the 2009 West Cork Literary Festival in Ireland. Lera was named Poet of the Year by the International Pushkin Society in 1997 at the age of 23, and in 2007 was named a "Young Global Leader" by the World Economic Forum. Find out more about Lera Auerbach here.
Gabrielle Calvocoressi', Sports Desk. Gabrielle Calvocoressi is the author of two books of poetry,
The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart and
Apocalyptic Swing, both from Persea Books. She was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Read an interview with Gabrielle on the Rumpus
here. Read her Sports Desk posts
here.
Jim Cummins, Midwest Correspondent. Jim is the author of The Whole Truth, (North Point Press, 1986), Portrait in a Spoon, (University of South Carolina Press,1997), Then & Now, (Ohio University Press, 2004). He is co-author, with David Lehman, of Jim & Dave Defeat the Masked Man (Soft Skull Press, 2005). His poems have been selected for The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1994, 1995, 1998, 2005 and 2009, The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006), and 180 More, edited by Billy Collins. Cummins has been curator of the Elliston Poetry Collection at the University of Cincinnati since 1975, where he is also Professor of English. Read his BAP blog posts here.
Moira Egan, European Correspondent. Moira is the author of Cleave (WWPH, 2004) and of La Seta della Cravatta/The Silk of the Tie, a bi-lingual collection of poems with Italian versions by Damiano Abeni. Further to the naughty sonnets that appear in Best American Poetry 2008, her chapbook, Bar Napkin Sonnets won The Ledge 2008 Chapbook Competition and will be published later this year. Her second full-length collection, SPIN, will be published in spring 2010 by Entasis Press. With her husband, Damiano Abeni, she translates poems back and forth between English and Italian; most recently, they published Un mondo che non può essere migliore: Poesie scelte 1956-2007, a substantial selection of the poems of John Ashbery (Sossella Editore, 2008). She lives in Rome. Read more about Moira Egan here. Read her BAP blog posts here.
Jill Alexander Essbaum, Coeur Despondent. Jill is the author of the 1999 Bakeless Prize winner, Heaven (UPNE 2000), and Harlot (No Tell Books, 2007).
Her poems have appeared in journals religious and secular, print and online, well-known and famously obscure, including Poetry, The Christian Century, No Tell Motel, Rhino, Image, MiPoesias, Black Warrior Review, Christianity and Literature, and many others. Read Jill's BAP blog posts here
Jenny Factor, West Coast Correspondent. Jenny Factor’s poem collection Unraveling at the Name (Copper Canyon Press) won a Hayden Carruth Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Factor’s poems and reviews have appeared in the Paris Review and more than a dozen anthologies, including The Best American Erotic Poems (Scribner, 2008). Her work has been supported by an Astraea Grant in poetry. Jenny received her M.F.A. in Literature from Bennington College, and her BA from Harvard College. She currently teaches and serves as the Core Faculty in poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles’ low-residency MFA Program. Learn more about Jenny Factor here. Read her BAP blog posts here.(Painting by Catherine Bryant)
Loren Goodman, Pacific Correspondent. Loren Goodman is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and English Literature at Yonsei University/Underwood International College in Seoul, Korea. His first book of poems, Famous Americans, was selected by W.S. Merwin for the 2002 Yale Series of Younger Poets. His chapbook Suppository Writing (2008) is available from The Chuckwagon. Read his BAP blog posts here.
Bill Hayward, Filmmaker/Photographer. Hayward's most recent book of portraits of the collaborative self is entitled Bad Behavior, (Rizzoli). Bill is working on a new portrait collection entitled I Hear America Singing, America in Portraits of the Collaborative Self. Hayward is also in production on Asphalt, Muscle and Bone, a film about a man at risk, the persistence of imagination and the impossibility of love. Images from Hayward's work can be viewed at billhayward.com and at reddressfilms.com. Visit Bill's blog here. See his BAP blog posts here.
Tom Healy, Every Other Monday. A veteran of the New York art world, Tom is the author of What the Right Hand Knows (Four Way Books), with a cover by John Ashbery. Tom teaches a seminar at Pratt on the musical obsessions of writers. He is a contributing editor of BOMB and a visiting fellow at the Goreé Institute in Dakar, Senegal. He lives in New York and Miami. Read his BAP blog posts here.
Jennifer Michael Hecht, The Lion and the Honeycomb. Jennifer is the author of two books of poetry Funny (University of Wisconsin, 2005) and The Next Ancient World (Tupeloe Press, 2001). Her non-fiction books are Doubt: A History (HarperOne, 2004) and The Happiness Myth (HarperOne, 2007).She earned her Ph.D. in the History of Science from Columbia University. Her poems have been included in The Best American Poetry anthologies of 1999 and 2006. She teaches in the Graduate Creative Writing Program at The New School and is a fellow of The New York Institute for the Humanities. Read more about Jennifer Michael Hecht here. Follow her blog, Dear Fonzie, here. Read her BAP blog posts here.
Joy Katz, Significant Mother. Joy is editor-at-large for Pleiades. Her poetry collections are The Garden Room (Tupelo Press, 2006) and Fabulae (Southern Illinois University Press, 2002), and she co-edited the recent anthology Dark Horses: Poets on Lost Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2006). Her poems and essays appear in Fence, Colorado Review, Seneca Review, Court Green, The Best American Poetry anthologies of 2003 and 2006 and the New York Times Book Review, among other places. She lives in Pittsburgh, PA with her husband and young son. Read her BAP blog posts here.
Laura Orem, Red Lion Correspondent. Laura is a writer, visual artist, and teacher. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and is a Writing Fellow at Goucher College. She is the senior editor of the online journal Praxilla Her poetry and essays have appeared in many journals, both in print and online, including Nimrod, heART (Human Equity Through Art), Wordwrights, The Montserrat Review, Poets Against the War, and The Writer's Chronicle. Laura lives in Red Lion, PA with six cats, four dogs, two sheep, two sons, one horse, and one husband. Read her BAP blog posts here.
Katha Pollitt. Pollitt's new book of poems, The Mind-Body Problem, is just out from Random House. She is a columnist at The Nation and lives in New York City. Her collection of personal essays, Learning to Drive, is out in paperback. Her poems have been included in The Best American Poetry 1991 and The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Listen to Katha Pollitt's interview with poet Matthea Harvey here. Read her interview with Adam Gopnick for Granta here. Follow her blog here. And read her BAP blog posts here.
Phoebe Putnam. Phoebe teaches in the History and Literature concentration at Harvard, and recently completed her first manuscript, Land Lies in Water, on the panoramic vantage in small poems by early-career poets. She has published on Wallace Stevens, and is a recipient of Harvard University's Bowdoin Prize for her essay on Elizabeth Bishop's poetics of touch. Her design blog, Silk Felt Soil, can be found here. Find her BAP blog posts here.
Elizabeth D. Samet, Film. Samet is the author of SOLDIER'S HEART: Reading Literature Through Peace & War at West Point (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898 (Stanford University Press, 2003). She received her B.A. from Harvard and her Ph.D. in English literature from Yale. She is a Professor of Literature at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The opinions expressed on this blog are Samet's own and not necessarily those of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or the Department of Defense. Read her BAP blog posts here.
Mitch Sisskind, Correspondent at Large. Mitch was born in Chicago, and has lived in Los Angeles since 1986. He is the autor of two books of short stories: Visitations (1984) and Dog Man Stories (1993). His poem, Like a Monkey, was chosen by David Wagoner for The Best American Poetry 2009. Read his BAP blog posts here.
Catharine R. Stimpson. Catharine is the dean of NYU's Graduate School of Arts and Science and is a University Professor. Prior to her arrival at NYU in 1998, Stimpson was director of the MacArthur Foundation Fellows Program. She has served as University Professor at Rutgers, where she was also dean of the graduate school and vice provost for graduate education from 1986 to 1992. She is a former chair of the New York State Humanities Council and the National Council for Research on Women, and president of the Modern Language Association. She was the first director of the Women's Center of Barnard College and of the Institute for Research on Women at Rutgers. Stimpson's many publications include Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural Spaces and the Library of America's Gertrude Stein: Writings 1903-1932. Read more about Catharine Stimpson here. Read her BAP blog posts here.
Emma Trelles, Tropical Correspondent. Emma Trelles is the author of Tropicalia, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press and winner of the 2010 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the chapbook Little Spells (GOSS183), a recommended read by the Valparaiso Poetry Review and the Montserrat Review. She is the recipient of a Green Eyeshade award for art criticism and has been a featured author at the Miami Book Fair International and at the Palabra Pura reading series at the Guild Literary Complex in Chicago. She received her MFA in creative writing from Florida International University and lives with her husband in South Florida, where she works as an arts writer and a writing consultant for Nova Southeastern University. Visit her at www.emmatrelles.com and read her BAP blog posts here.
Ken Tucker, Culture Correspondent. Ken is Entertainment Weekly’s Editor-At-Large. He does weekly music reviews for NPR's "Fresh Air with Terry Gross." His most recent book is Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America (St. Martins, 2008). Ken Tucker's "Watching TV" column took top honors for best online column in this year's min awards. Keep up with Ken at Ken Tucker’s Pop Culture here. Read his BAP blog posts here.
