2021 Retreat

Tara Betts

Tara Betts lives in Chicago and is the author of the manuscript “Refuse to Disappear,” as well as Break the Habit (Trio House Press, 2016) and Arc & Hue(Willow Books, 2009). She is a graduate of the New England College MFA Program. She represented Chicago twice at the National Poetry Slam, coached youth who went on to Brave New Voices, and appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam. Her writing has also been dramatized for the stage.

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson

Andrea “Vocab” Sanderson is a poet, singer, and hip hop artist. A San Antonio native, she is the author of the collection She Lives In Music (Flower Song Press, 2020). She has traveled internationally to perform and teach and currently serves as a Teaching Artist for Gemini Ink since 2009. Sanderson is the Poet Laureate of San Antonio, Texas and in 2021 received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship.

Joshua Bennet

Dr. Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author of three books of poetry and literary criticism: The Sobbing School—which was a National Poetry Series selection and a finalist for an NAACP Image Award—Being Property Once Myself, and Owed. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf.

Paul Tran

Paul Tran is a Visiting Faculty in Poetry at Pacific University MFA in Writing, a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, a recipient of the Ruth Lilly & Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and current Poetry Editor at The Offing Magazine, which won a Whiting Literary Magazine Prize from the Whiting Foundation. Their work appears in The New Yorker, The Nation, Best American Poetry, and elsewhere.