RUTH STONE is the author of thirteen books of poetry, including Ordinary Words, which won the 1999 National Book Critics Book Award, and In the Next Galaxy (both from Copper Canyon) which won the 2002 National Book Award. She was the recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award and the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Cerf Lifetime Achievement Award from the State of Vermont. Stone’s last book, What Love Comes To: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2008), was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She was Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2007 until her death in November of 2011. Vermont Poet Laureate, Bianca Stone, will be reading her Grandmother’s poems.
TOM SLEIGH’s many books include the 2023 Paterson Poetry Prize winner, The King’s Touch; House of Fact, House of Ruin; Station Zed, and Army Cats, all from Graywolf Press. His most recent book of essays is The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees. His awards include a Guggenheim, two NEA grants, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Updike Award and Academy Award, both from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Threepenny Review, Poetry, and other magazines. A Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, he lives in Brooklyn, NY.
GREGORY DJANIKIAN was for many years the Director of Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania until his retirement in 2018. He has published seven collections of poetry with Carnegie Mellon, the latest of which is Sojourners of the In-Between (2020). His poems have appeared in many journals, including Bennington Review, Crazy Horse, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Poetry International, Raleigh Review, and in many anthologies. Nostalgia for the Future: New and Collected 1984-2023 was published in April of this year by Green Writers Press. He lives in Narberth, PA with his wife, the artist Alysa Bennett.
CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of five books of poetry, including In the Lateness of the World (all from Penguin Press), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; Blue Hour (2004), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Angel of History (1995), winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and The Country Between Us (1982), winner of the Lamont Prize. She is the author of a memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019.) Her famed international anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness (W.W. Norton, 1993) was followed by the 2014 anthology, The Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001. She is Distinguished University Professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.
backroadsreadings.org 