Poetry Series

Originally from Jamaica, Shara McCallum is the author of six books of poetry published in the US and UK, including No Ruined Stone forthcoming in 2021) and Madwoman (winner of the 2018 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry and the 2018 Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club). Her work has been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Dutch, and Turkish. She is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the US Library of Congress and a Poetry Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. McCallum is a Liberal Arts Professor of English at Penn State University and on the faculty of the Pacific University Low-Residency MFA Program.

Laurie Ann Guerrero was born and raised in the Southside of San Antonio. She is the author of a chapbook, Babies Under the Skin (Panhandler Publishing, 2008); Tongue in the Mouth of the Dying (Notre Dame, 2013) winner of the Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize; and A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlan Libre 2015). I Have Eaten the Rattlesnake: New & Selected is forthcoming in Fall 2020 from TCU Press).Guerrero was appointed Poet Laureate of San Antonio in 2014, the Poet Laureate of State of Texas in 2016, and is the Writer-in-Residence at Texas A&M University-San Antonio. She will judge Westminster’s student writing awards and the 2021 ellipsis prize. www.laurieannguerrero.com

Born stateless in Germany and raised in New York City and its suburbs, Natasha Sajé is the author of three books of poems, including Vivarium(Tupelo, 2014), as well as a postmodern poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory (Michigan, 2014). Her distinctions include Fulbright and Camargo fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola and Robert Winner awards from the Poetry Society of America, and the Utah Book Award. Sajé has taught in the Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program since 1996 and at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she directs the Weeks Poetry Series, since 1998. She will read from Terroir: Love, Out of Place, a memoir published by Trinity University Press in November 2020. natashasaje.com

Miriam Bird Greenberg is a poet and occasional essayist with a fieldwork-derived practice. The author of two chapbooks and In the Volcano’s Mouth, winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, she's at work on a hybrid-genre manuscript about the economic migrants and asylum seekers of Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions. She's held fellowships from the NEA, the Poetry Foundation, and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and has taught poetry and poetics at Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow and at the National University of Singapore. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where for many years she collaboratively developed site-specific performances for very small audiences. Her book The Other World was designed in collaboration with master printer Keith Graham, and published by the Center for Book Arts in October 2019. miriambirdgreenberg.com

Fady Joudah has published four collections of poems, The Earth in the Attic, Alight, Textu, a book-long sequence of short poems whose meter is based on cellphone character count; and, most recently, Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in Houston, where he practices internal medicine.

Wayne Miller is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Post-(Milkweed, 2016), which won the UNT Rilke Prize and the Colorado Book Award, and the forthcoming We the Jury. He has co-translated two books by the Albanian poet Moikom Zeqo—most recently Zodiac (Zephyr, 2015), which was shortlisted for the PEN Center USA Award in Translation—and he has co-edited three books, most recently Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century (Milkweed, 2016). The recipient of six awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Bess Hokin Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and a Fulbright Distinguished Scholarship to the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University Belfast, Miller teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and serves as editor of Copper Nickel.

Westminster students work all year to produce our national literary magazine. They will read selections from the new issue, with featured reader Emma Bolden whose work was published (and awarded the ellipsis prize) in last year’s issue.

Emma Bolden writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She is the author of House Is an Enigma (Southeast Missouri State University Press), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press), and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a 2017 Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and a 2019 Literary Arts Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry, and The Best Small Fictions. She is the associate director of marketing at a private small business incubator and serves as Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review. emmabolden.com