Darrell Bourque is Professor Emeritus in English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he served as director of the Creative Writing and Interdisciplinary Humanities programs. His poetry books include Plainsongs, The Doors Between Us, Burnt Water Suite and The Blue Boa. Darrell Bourque is the author of four books of poems: Plainsongs, Burnt Water Suite, The Doors Between Us and The Blue Boat. His newest work, Call and Response: Conversations in Verse was written with Jack B. Bedell. Forthcoming in 2010 is In Ordinary Light: New and Selected Poems. Bourque is the current Louisiana Poet Laureate. He continues to work as poetry workshop leader and consultant, mostly with the Louisiana Affiliates of the National Writing Project. In November of 2007 he was appointed as Louisiana Poet Laureate, 2008 - 2009, by Governor Kathleen Blanco, and his personal initiative for the laureateship is to develop poetry audiences by teaching and reading in the pre-college classroom as well as in the state's libraries.
Cornelius Eady is the author of Brutal Imagination (G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2001), which was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award in Poetry; the autobiography of a jukebox (1997); You Don't Miss Your Water (1995); The Gathering of My Name (1991), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; BOOM BOOM BOOM (1988); Victims of the Latest Dance Craze (1985), which was chosen by Louise Glück, Charles Simic, and Philip Booth for the 1985 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets; and Kartunes (1980). In 1996, Eady and the poet Toi Derricote founded Cave Canem, a nonprofit organization serving black poets of various backgrounds and acting as a safe space for intellectual engagement and critical debate. Along with Derricote, he also edited Gathering Ground (University of Michigan Press, 2006).
Ravi Howard is the author of the novel Like Trees, Walking, a fictionalized account of a true story, the 1981 lynching of a black teenager in Mobile, Alabama. Ravi Howard was a finalist for both the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction in 2008. Also in 2008, the novel won the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence and the Outstanding Southeastern Author-Fiction Award from the Southeastern Library Association. A native of Montgomery, Alabama, Howard graduated from Howard University in 1996 with a B.A. in journalism. He completed an M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Virginia in 2001. He has received fellowships and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, Hurston-Wright Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Jessica Powers has spent several years working as an editor and publicist for Cinco Puntos Press. She is semi-proficient in three languages–Spanish, Portuguese, and Zulu. She currently lives in California, where she just finished a Master’s Degree in African History at Stanford University “home.” In 2008, Powers founded Catalyst Book Press, a small literary press that publishes 2-3 nonfiction books each year. Knopf released her young adult novel, The Confessional, in July 2007. A frequent contributor to New Pages, she is currently at work on other projects, including a novel that explores youth homelessness, teen pregnancy, and the outer edge of religious fundamentalism.
Mona Lisa Saloy, author and Folklorist, is currently Associate Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Dillard University. Her essay, “Natural & Unnatural Disasters,” will appear in the book Black Nature: 400 Years of African American Nature Poetry. Camille Dungy, editor. University of Georgia Press, December 2009. Mona Lisa’s first collection of verse, Red Beans and Ricely Yours: Poems, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Prize in 2006 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in poetry for 2005, published by Truman State University Press; also, this collection was finalist for the Morgan Prize from StoryLine Press.
Andrew Hunter II most recently played a star roll as “Buzzbee,” in Gnostic Coincedence. He is an actor, director and drama instructor. Hunter graduated from ULL with a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in Theater.
