2009 Poets

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Past poet's
2009 Chapbook

photo by David Flores

Aracelis Girmay
April 1
Sponsored by
Bilingual Review Press

Aracelis Girmay was born in Santa Ana, Calif., in 1977, and was raised in Southern California. She is an inheritor of Eritrean, Puerto Rican and African American traditions and writes poetry, essays and fiction. Girmay holds a B.A. from Connecticut College and an M.F.A. in poetry from New York University. Her childrens' art book, Changing, Changing, was published by George Braziller in 2005. Girmay is a  former Watson fellow and Cave Canem fellow and has published extensively in journals and literary magazines. Girmay leads community writing workshops throughout New York and California. She currently lives in New York.

Bilingual Review Press publishes literary works, scholarship and art books by or about United States Hispanics under the name Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe. It also produces the literary/scholarly journal Bilingual Review, distribute more than 1,000 titles by other presses and is the exclusive distributor of books by Latin American Literary Review Press.

Elizabyth A. Hiscox holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and is an Assistant Poetry Editor for the online literary journal 42 Opus. She was 2007 Poet-in-Residence at St. Chad’s College at the University of Durham, England. Currently, she serves as Program Coordinator for the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing at ASU.

April 8
Douglas Jones

Douglas S. Jones is originally from Northern California and earned his MFA from Arizona State University, where he was the 2005 Teresa A. Wilhoit Fellow in Creative Writing, chosen by C.D. Wright. In 2007 he was Poet-in-Residence at St. Chad’s College at the University of Durham, England. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Blackbird, Clackamas Literary Review, Cake Train, The Potomac Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Whiskey Island and others. 

Sharon Suzuki-Martinez grew up in Hawaii, but moved to Tempe in 2007 from Minneapolis. Her poetry has appeared in “Columbia Poetry Review,” “Snow Monkey,” “Left-Facing Bird,” “Tryst,” “Free Verse,” “Spooky Boyfriend” and other journals. She earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Arizona and has been awarded fellowships to the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies and the Kundiman Poetry Retreat. Poet Heid E. Erdrich says of her work, “Nothing so quirky as Suzuki-Martinez poetry: makes my mind tingle and bend in all directions, but especially toward real human connections through little things. Odd little things. A terrific writer whose books I cannot wait to share.” Currently, she is a writer/editor for University of Phoenix.

Sheilah Britton is an award-winning writer, producer and director who began her career while studying television and film at Arizona State University. She spent more than a decade with the PBS affiliate KAET/Eight producing documentaries and special projects including Out of the Woods, Oasis for the Arts, Arizona Artforms, Read Earth and Books & Co. She currently is Director of Strategic Communications for ASU’s Office of the Vice President for Research and Economic Affairs. Britton has been a writer in residence for Mayo’s Humanities in Medicine Program in collaboration with ASU Creative Writing since November of 2004, working one-on-one to create poems for patients in the palliative care program. She teaches creative writing in ASU’s Program for Talented Youth.

Simon Ortiz’s books include Man on the Moon: Collected Short Stories, Woven Stone, After and Before the Lightning and Speaking for the Generations: Native Writers on Writing, all published by the University of Arizona Press. Ortiz is from Acoma Pueblo and is one of the key figures in the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. He is currently a professor of English and Indigenous Literature at Arizona State University.