Note: Complete Contest Information will be available Starting September 1, 2017

Cyrus Cassells’ has five poetry collections: The Crossed-Out Swastika, More Than Peace and Cypresses (both from Copper Canyon Press); Beautiful Signor which won the Lambda Literary Award; Soul Make a Path Through Shouting , which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize and received the William Carlos Williams Award; and The Mud Actor , his first book, which was a National Poetry Series selection. Cassells is the recipient of a 1995 Pushcart Prize, the Peter I.B. Lavan Younger Poets Award and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has worked as a translator, film critic, actor and teacher. He is a professor of English at Texas State.

TONY HOAGLAND has authored 5 books of poetry, most recently  Application for Release from the Dream: Poems (2015). Other titles include Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, Sweet Ruin, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, Donkey Gospel, winner of the James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets, and What Narcissism Means to Me, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as two collection of essays about poetry, Real Sofistikashun, & Twenty Poems That Could Save America and Other Essays all published  by Graywolf Press.  He has received the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, the Mark Twain Award from the Poetry Foundation, and the O. B. Hardison, Jr. Poetry Prize from the Folger Shakespeare Library, as well as NEA and Guggenheim Fellowships among others. He teaches at the University of Houston and in the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

RAINA J. LEÓN is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, CantoMundo and Macondo, and has been published in over 50 publications in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and academic scholarship. Her first collection of poetry, Canticle of Idols was a finalist for both the Cave Canem First Book Poetry Prize and the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. Her second book, Boogeyman Dawn was a finalist for the Naomi Long Madgett Prize. In 2016, her third book, sombra:  dis(locate)  and a chapbook, profeta without refuge, were released. She has received fellowships and residencies with Macondo, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She is currently an associate professor of education in the Kalmanovitz School of Education at St. Mary’s College of California.

SASHA WEST‘s first book  Failure and I Bury the Body, was selected by D. Nurkse for the National Poetry Series, and published by Harper Collins.  Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, Ninth Letter, Forklift, Ohio, Third Coast, Born, and elsewhere. She holds graduate degrees from Johns Hopkins University and the University of Houston, where she was editor of Gulf Coast. Her work has garnered awards including scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Rice University’s Parks Fellowship, Pushcart nominations, and Inprint’s Verlaine Prize. She lives in Austin and teaches writing at the University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs.