2019 Retreat

Jericho Brown

Jericho Brown is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection is The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019). His poems have appeared in The Bennington Review, Buzzfeed, Fence, jubilat, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, TIME magazine, and several volumes of The Best American Poetry. He is an associate professor and the director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University. Read More.

Mon​ét Noelle Marshall

Mon​ét Noelle Marshall is a Durham, North Carolina-based ​artist,​ director, producer and creative consultant.​ She serves as the Founding Artistic Director of MOJOAA Performing Arts Company, producing new works by and new opportunities for Black playwrights. She is also the Founder and Lead Con(sulting) Artist at BaD Arts Consulting which helps creatives do better business and businesses be more creative. BaD Arts Consulting provides arts integrated solutions to creatives, businesses and nonprofits through consultation, event curation, marketing and facilitation. Monèt activates the arts to engage communities ​in collective visioning, changemaking and joy as social action. See her featured in American Theatre: 6 Theatre Workers You Should Know! Read More.

Dustin Pearson

Dustin Pearson is the author of MILLENNIAL ROOST (C&R Press, 2018) and A FAMILY IS A HOUSE (C&R Press, 2019). He is a McKnight Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing at Florida State University. The recipient of fellowships from Cave Canem and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing, Pearson has served as the editor of Hayden’s Ferry Review and a Director of the Clemson Literary Festival. He won the Academy of American Poets Katharine C. Turner Prize and holds an MFA from Arizona State University. His work appears in Blackbird, Vinyl Poetry, Bennington Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. Read More.

Franny Choi

Franny Choi is the author of two poetry collections, Soft Science (Alice James Books, 2019) and Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014), as well as a chapbook, Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). Her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. She lives in Hamtramck, MI and teaches poetry through Inside Out Literary Arts. Read More.

Tim Seibles

Tim Seibles is the author of six collections of poetry, including Body Moves (1988), Hurdy-Gurdy (1992),  Hammerlock (1999), Buffalo Head Solos (2004), and Fast Animal (2012), which won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize, received the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award, and was nominated for a 2012 National Book Award. His latest work of poetry, One Turn Around the Sun was published by Etruscan Press in 2017. His poems has been published in the Indiana Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Cortland Review, Ploughshares Massachusetts Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and numerous other literary journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry. Seibles lives and teaches at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. Read More.