The Writing Seminars

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, including Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems(2023), The Absurd Man(2020), Roll Deep (2015), Holding Company (2010), Hoops (2006) and Leaving Saturn (2002), which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize for a first book of poems. His edited volumes include: Best American Poetry 2019, Renga for Obama, and Library of America’s Countee Cullen: Collected Poems. He is also the […]

Hernan Diaz is the author of In the Distance, a gorgeously written page-turning epic tale that upends and reinvents the old-school western genre. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner award, this extraordinary novel offers a probing examination of the stereotypes that populate America’s past, following a young Swedish immigrant as he travels through the American frontier […]

David Yezzi’s latest books are Late Romance: Anthony Hecht—A Poet’s Life and More Things in Heaven: New and Selected Poems. As an actor, he recently performed the roles of King Lear (Baltimore Shakespeare Factory) and Hamlet’s Ghost (Chesapeake Shakespeare). A 2022 short-term visiting fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, he teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins.  

Ange Mlinko is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Venice, and a forthcoming book of lyric criticism, Difficult Ornaments: Florida and the Poets. She has won the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, the Frederick Bock Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books and the London Review […]

Callie Siskel is the author of Two Minds (W. W. Norton) and Arctic Revival, winner of the Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems appear in the Atlantic,Kenyon Review, Yale Review, and Paris Review. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in Los Angeles, where she is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books. Taylor […]

Andrew Motion was UK Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009, and is co-founder of The Poetry Archive and Poetry by Heart. His most recent publications are New and Selected Poems 1977-2022, The Penguin Book of Elegy (co-edited with Stephen Regan) and Waders. He is Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins, and lives in Baltimore. Declan Ryan is a […]

Jonathan Escoffery is the author of the critically acclaimed debut story collection If I Survive You (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a finalist for the 2023 Booker Prize. His next book is the forthcoming novel Play Stone Kill Bird. Escoffery is the winner of The Paris Review’s 2020 Plimpton Prize for Fiction and is the recipient of a 2020 National Endowment for […]

Christopher Childers is a poet and translator living in Baltimore, MD. He has published poems, essays and translations in The Yale Review, The Kenyon Review, Literary Matters, and Smartish Pace, among others. He is the recipient of several awards, including an NEA Translators' Fellowship and the Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace, and has […]

Hari Kunzru is the author of seven novels, including Blue Ruin, forthcoming from Knopf on May 14, 2024. He is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books and writes the “Easy Chair” column for Harper’s Magazine. He is an Honorary Fellow of Wadham College Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and has been […]

Robyn Schiff is the author of four poetry collections: Worth (University of Iowa Press, 2002), Revolver(University of Iowa Press, 2008),  A Woman of Property(Penguin, 2016), and Information Desk: An Epic (Penguin, 2023), which was named a best book of the year by The Washington Postand The New Yorker, and was an Editor's Choice at The New York Times. A professor at the University […]

Lauren Russell is the author of A Window That Can Neither Open nor Close: Poems, Plots, Chance (Milkweed Editions, 2024); Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 2021 Anna Rabinowitz Award for “venturesome, interdisciplinary work”; and What’s Hanging on the Hush (Ahsahta Press, 2017). Russell has received fellowships from the […]