Ted Kooser is one of America’s best-selling poets. A retired insurance executive and Presidential Professor Emeritus at The University of Nebraska, he served as United States Poet Laureate and won the Pulitzer prize for Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press). As United States Poet Laureate, he launched and edited a weekly newspaper column, “American Life in Poetry,” which has an estimated circulation of over four and a half million readers around the world. Along with poetry, Kooser has published several popular children’s books, a memoir, and numerous collections of nonfiction. He lives near the village of Garland, Nebraska, with his wife.
Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was the author of over three dozen books, including Legends of the Fall and Dalva,
and served as the food columnist for the magazines Brick and Esquire. He published fourteen volumes of poetry, the final being Dead Man's Float (2016). His work has been translated into two dozen languages and produced as four feature-length films. As a young poet he co-edited Sumac magazine, with fellow poet Dan Gerber, and earned a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, he was elected into the Academy of American Arts and Letters. Regarding his most beloved art-form, he wrote: "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." Jim Harrison certainly spoke the language.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the author and/or editor of more than thirty volumes including four collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Red Suitcase (1994), Fuel (1998), You & Yours (2005), and Transfer (2011). She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow and a Witter Bynner Fellow. Her numerous awards include a Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets, the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award from BOA, the Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, the Patterson Poetry Prize, the Robert Creeley Prize and the Betty Prize from Poets House for her service to poetry. In January 2010, Nye was elected to the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. A self-described "wandering poet," she makes her home in San Antonio, Texas.