Board Members

Jennifer Bartlett (she/her) was born in the San Francisco Bay Area and educated at the University of New Mexico, Vermont College, and Brooklyn College. She is the author of Derivative of the Moving Image (UNM Press 2007), (a) lullaby without any music (Chax 2012), and Autobiography/Anti-Autobiography (Theenk 2014). Bartlett also co-edited, with Sheila Black and Michael Northen, Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Bartlett has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Fund for Poetry, and the Dodd Research Center at the University of Connecticut.

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Charles Bernstein is the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and for lifetime achievement in American Poetry. He is the author of Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, April 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016). Bernstein is Regan Professor, Emeritus, of English and Comparative Literature, at the University of Pennsylvania and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. More info @ writing.upenn.edu/epc.

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Emily Rapp Black is the author of four books of nonfiction, and is Associate Professor at UC-Riverside.

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Michael Davidson is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He has written extensively on poetry and poetics (The San Francisco Renaissance, Ghostlier Demarcations, Guys Like Us, On the Outskirts of Form) and more recently on disability issues: Concerto for the Left Hand (University of Michigan), Invalid Modernism (Oxford University Press), and Distressing Language: Disability and the Poetics of Error (New York University Press, 2022).  He is the editor of The Collected Poems of George Oppen and has published eight books of poetry, the most recent, Bleed Through: New and Selected Poems (Coffee House). 

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Deaf, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street, 2014), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award. A recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, Day’s recent work can be found in Best American Poetry 2020 & The New York Times. Day teaches in the MFA Program at North Carolina State University. www.megday.com.

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C. S. Giscombe’s poetry books are Prairie Style, Giscome Road, Here, etc.; his book of linked essays (concerning Canada, race, and family) is Into and Out of Dislocation. His recognitions include the 2010 Stephen Henderson Award, an American Book Award and the Carl Sandburg Prize. Ohio Railroads (a poem in essay form) was published in 2014 and Border Towns (essays on poetry, color, nature, cooking, television, etc.) appeared in 2016. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a proponent of old-school extremity prosthetics—having repaired his mechanical blue arm many times in unlikely locations—and a long-distance cyclist.

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Octavio Quintanilla is the author of the poetry collection, If I Go Missing (Slough Press, 2014) and served as the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of San Antonio, TX. His poetry, fiction, translations, and photography have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as The Southampton Review, Salamander, RHINO, Alaska Quarterly Review, Pilgrimage, Green Mountains Review, Southwestern American Literature, The Texas Observer, and Existere: A Journal of Art & Literature. His Frontextos (visual poems) have been published in Poetry Northwest, Texas Review Press, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Midway Journal, The Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and elsewhere. Octavio teaches Literature and Creative Writing in the M.A./M.F.A. program at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio. You can visit Octavio at octavioquintanilla.com.

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Robin Reagler is the author of Dear Red Airplane, Teeth & Teeth, Into The The, and Night Is This Anyway. She was the Executive Director of Writer in the Schools (WITS) for 22 years and is currently a full-time professor at Houston Community College. She has served on the Boards of AWP, Public Poetry, and LitNet, the national advocacy group for the literary sector.

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Orchid Tierney is a poet and scholar from Aotearoa New Zealand, who now lives in Gambier, Ohio. She is the author of the collection a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System, 2019) and six chapbooks, including my beatrice (above/ground press, 2020) and ocean plastic (BlazeVOX Books, 2019). Her scholarship, reviews, and poetry have appeared in Jacket2, Venti, Fractured Ecologies, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Y22 Individual Artist Excellence Award. She is an assistant professor of English at Kenyon College and a senior editor at the Kenyon Review. orchidtierney.com.

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Poet, essayist, editor, musician, singer, artist, social worker, and Disability Justice activist-educator Diane R. Wiener (she/they) is the author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale, 2022). Her poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and other work also appear in a wide variety of publications. Diane is the Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering: A Journal of Disability Poetry and Literature, housed at Syracuse University. You can visit Diane online at dianerwiener.com 

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