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Kayleb Candrili
Kayleb Candrili was born in rural Pennsylvania and earned a Bachelors in English and a Masters in Creative Writing from Penn State University. They hold both an MFA and an MLIS degree from the University of Alabama. Candrili received the 2019 Whiting Award for poetry and fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts. Their book What Runs Over won the 2016 Pamet River Prize and was a 2017 Lambda Literary finalist for Transgender Poetry.
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Kamilah Moon
Kamilah Moon is a native of Nashville, TN and is an Assistant Professor of Poetry and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College. She is a CLMP Firecracker Award finalist for her book 'Starshine and Clay' and a finalist for both the Audre Lorde and Lambda Literary Awards for her book She Has A Name. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Best American Poetry, Harvard Review, Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review and elsewhere. She has received fellowships to MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center and Hedgebrook.
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Amanda Johnston
The poet Amanda Johnston was born in East St. Louis, and began writing when she lived in Kentucky. She has won the 2005 Christina Sergeyevna Award from the Austin International Poetry Festival, and was a joint finalist for the Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism from Split This Rock. She had recieved multiple Artist Enrichment grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women and has received fellowships from Cave Canem Foundation and the Austin Project at the University of Texas. Johnston was recognized as one of Blavity’s "13 Black Poets You Should Know," and her work has been featured the Poetry Society of America’s series In Their Own Words, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series.
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Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana and won the 2020 Pulitzer prize for poetry for his book of poems 'The Tradition'. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His first book 'Please' won the American Book Award and his second, 'The New Testament' won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His poems have appeared in multiple publications including the 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.
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Jaki Shelton Green
Jaki Shelton Green is a writer, poet and North Carolina native. The Academy of American Poets named Green as one of their first ever Laureate Fellows in 2019 and she is the first African American and third woman to be appointed as the North Carolina Poet Laureate in 2018. She was inducted into the state’s Literary Hall of Fame in 2014. She is the author of eight collections of poetry and poetry work has been published in over eighty national and international anthologies.
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Ilene Evans
Evans is an actress, storyteller, musician, historian, and teaching artist living in West Virginia. She is co-founder of Voices from the Earth, a non-profit arts organization and has served as the President of the West Virginia Storytelling Guild. She has travelled extensively with her work and was selected by the US Embassy to tour Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and Columbia to share her work in the history and culture of African Americans through the arts. In 2015, as a member of the National Association of Black Storytellers, she travelled to Ghana, to bring the story of Harriet Tubman and the diaspora to the University of Ghana. For her ability and passion to give voice and celebrate the life of Harriet Tubman, Evans received the Foundation of Freedom Award from Wheeling Jesuit University.
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Andrea Fekete
Andrea Fekete is a native West Virginian and earned her MFA in creative writing from West Virginia Wesleyan College and her MA in English from Marshall University. In 2019 she co-curated Feminine Rising: Voices of Power & Invisibility a collection of poetry & essays from 70 award-winning & emerging women writers. The book was awarded the Silver in Foreword Review's Indie Book of the Year in Women's Studies. Fekete was awarded a Fellowship from the Mid-Atlantic Foundation for the Arts.
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William H. Turner
Turner was born in 1946 in Lynch, Kentucky, and is known for his research on African-American communities in Appalachia. In August 2020 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from The University of North Carolina Asheville in “recognition of transformative leadership, distinguished service and notable accomplishments”. The Appalachian Studies Association (ASA) honored Turner for a lifetime of service to the Appalachian region in 2009. In 2008, he was named Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Citizen of the Year, for “advocating for the rights and expanded educational opportunities for people in Appalachian Kentucky,” and in 2007 he was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame.