Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty’s work was recently featured in POETRY, and her poem, Stripshot, was named one of the best poems read in 2024 by 50 Contemporary Poets on LitHub.Beatty’s memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and a chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022). In the New York Times, Naomi Shihab Nye said: Jan Beatty’s new poems in “The Body Wars” shimmer with luminous connection, travel a big life and grand map of encounters. Other work includes Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on Lithub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty’s work has been published in the Atlantic, the New York Times Sunday Magazine, POETRY, New England Review, North American Review, and Best American Poetry. Awards include the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, Discovery/The Nation Prize finalist, Pablo Neruda Prize, Artists Grant from The Pittsburgh Foundation, and a Creative Achievement Award in Literature, Heinz Foundation. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program. Her latest book is Dragstripping (Pitt Poetry Series, 2024).
Geffrey Davis
Geffrey Davis was born in Seattle, Washington, and studied literature and writing at Oregon State University and Penn State University. His books include One Wild Word Away, Night Angler, and Revising the Storm, and he co-wrote the chapbook Begotten with poet F. Douglas Brown. His fourth collection of poems, No Good Ghost, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in 2028.
A recipient of a Pushcart Prize and the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, Davis has been awarded fellowships from Breadloaf, Cave Canem, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Whiting Foundation for his involvement with The Prison Story Project, which strives to empower incarcerated women and men to reclaim their own stories through writing. His writing has been published in The Atlantic, The Nation, New England Review, The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere.
Davis currently lives in the Ozarks and teaches at University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing & Translation. He is also core faculty at The Rainier Writing Workshop low-residency MFA program and serves as poetry editor for Iron Horse Literary Review.
Jenny Molberg
Jenny Molberg’s third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her poems and essays have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. Her work has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Vermont Studio Center, among others.
Born and raised in Texas, Molberg holds a BA from Louisiana State University, an MFA from American University, and a PhD from the University of Texas. She is the editor of Adelaide Crapsey: The Life and Work of an American Master and co-editor of Field Studies: New and Collected Poems by Molly Brodak (forthcoming from U of Iowa Press). She is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College. Her latest book is The Medium (LSU Press, 2027).