Adult/Family

Erin Belieu is the author of numerous poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including Cocklebur: New and Selected Poems (October 6, 2026). Poems from her latest collection have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Copper Nickel. Belieu’s accolades include winning the National Poetry Series, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Award, the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award, and the AWP George Garrett Prize for literary mentorship and citizenship. Recently she was awarded the Mari Sandoz Prize, given by the state of Nebraska’s library association to recognize Nebraska authors who’ve made a lasting impact on the state and country’s literary culture. A well known feminist and disability activist in the literary community over thirty years, Belieu teaches for the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston and for the Holy Family low residency MFA in Philadelphia. 

Kevin Prufer’s most recent books are The Fears (Copper Canyon Press, 2023), winner of the 2024 Rilke Prize, and Sleepaway: A Novel (Acre Books, 2024). His books have been named among the year’s best by The New York Times, Booklist, and Publishers Weekly, and his poetry collection How He Loved Them was longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize and received the Julie Suk Award. He is the 2026 Texas Poet Laureate and directs the Unsung Masters Series. His forthcoming books are Good People: Poems (Copper Canyon, 2027) and the novel Summer of Shooting Stars (Slant Books, 2027).

Michael D. Snediker is the author of four books of poems, including The New York Editions (Fordham University Press), Jones Very (Ornithopter Press), and Reciprocity (Tupelo Press, forthcoming), as well as Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood & Other Felicitious Persuasions and Contingent Figure: Chronic Pain & Queer Embodiment (both published with University of Minnesota Press). His poems have appeared in places including The Atlantic, Brooklyn Rail, Drift, Lana Turner, and VOLT, and he is the fortunate recipient of residencies at The James Merrill House and Yaddo. He’s presently writing about landscape as ascesis in Thoreau’s journals, and is Professor of American Literature and Poetics at the University of Houston.

Roberto Tejada is the author of the poetry collections Carbonate of Copper (Fordham, 2025), Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham, 2022), and Exposition Park (Wesleyan, 2010), among others. He writes art and media histories that include Along the Diagonal: Art / Essays / América(Fordham, 2026), a book on Mexican American conceptual artist Celia Alvarez Muñoz (UCLA/CSRC; Minnesota, 2009), a collection of essays on Latinx art and culture, Still Nowhere in an Empty Vastness (Noemi, 2019), and National Camera: Photography and Mexico’s Image Environment (Minnesota, 2009).