The Stafford Challenge
2024 Guest Poet Events

Wednesday, January 17, 5pm PT

Kim Stafford, founding director of the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College, teaches and travels to raise the human spirit. He is the author of a dozen books of poetry and prose, including The Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft and 100 Tricks Every Boy Can Do: How My Brother Disappeared. His most recent book is the poetry collection Singer Come from Afar (Red Hen, 2021). He has taught writing in dozens of schools and community centers, and in Scotland, Italy, Mexico, and Bhutan. In 2018 he was named Oregon’s 9th Poet Laureate by Governor Kate Brown for a two-year term.

• Click here to read poems by Kim Stafford

Tuesday, February 20, 5pm PT

Mona Lisa Saloy, Ph.D. Louisiana Poet Laureate (2021-2023), is an author, folklorist, Louisiana Folklife Commissioner, educator, and scholar of Creole culture in articles, documentaries, and poems about Black New Orleans before and after Katrina; currently Conrad N. Hilton Endowed Professor of English at Dillard University; poetry books: Red Beans & Ricely Yours, won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award. Second Line Home, celebrates New Orleans Black Creole culture. Recent pubs include The Chicago Quarterly Review, Vol 33; Black FIRE!!! This Time Anthology; and in Tribes journal NYC, 2022. Her new collection Black Creole Chronicles: Poems (University of New Orleans Press 2023), chosen for ONE BOOK ONE NEW ORLEANS 2024. Mona Lisa Saloy writes for those who don’t or can’t tell Black Creole cultural stories. www.monalisasaloy.com Tweet to @redbeansista

• Click here to read God Was Willing Sis: I’m Home
• Click here to read poems from Black Creole Chronicles

Tuesday, March 19, 5pm PT

Emmett Wheatfall lives in Portland, Oregon. He features, writes, records, publishes, and performs poetry to music. Fernwood Press, an imprint of Barclay Press has published three books of Emmett's poetry. His collection titled As Clean as a Bone was published in May 2018 and was a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist as well as a da Vinci Eye award finalist. His other books are Our Scarlet Blue Wounds (November 2019), With Extreme Prejudice, Lest We Forget (June 2022), and poetry chapbook First Among Beautiful Stars (September 2023). For more biographical information visit http://emmettwheatfall.com.

• Click here to read Of Peace and Non-Violence
• Click here to read Little White Girl

Tuesday, April 16, 5pm PT

Georgia A. Popoff is a writer, editor, arts-in-education specialist, and a program coordinator for the YMCA of Central NY’s Writers Voice, where she teaches poetry and creative nonfiction. Her fourth collection of poetry, Psychometry, was released in late 2019 by Tiger Bark Press, and was a finalist for Utica College’s Eugene Nassar Poetry Prize and the CNY Book Award for Poetry. Her fifth collection, Living with Haints, is forthcoming in 2024. In 2022, Georgia was named Poet Laureate of Onondaga County for a 2-year term of service. She is the series editor for the University of Michigan Press Under Discussion book series on contemporary poets. For more information and for links to purchase books, visit www.georgiapopoff.com. You can also follow her on Facebook, and on Instagram and Twitter: @gappoet.

• Click to read three poems by Georgia Popoff

Thursday, May 9, 5pm PT

Lauren Camp currently serves as New Mexico Poet Laureate. She is the author of seven books, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023). Camp is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate fellow, recipient of a Dorset Prize and finalist for the Arab American Book Award and Adrienne Rich Award. Her poems have been translated into Mandarin, Turkish, Spanish, French, and Arabic. She is an emeritus fellow for Black Earth Institute and was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. www.laurencamp.com

• Click to read Winter of Tumult and Artifact
• Click to read Must Learn Neither
  

Tuesday, June 18, 5pm PT

Jessica Jacobs is the author of unalone, poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis (Four Way Books, forthcoming March 2024); Take Me with You, Wherever You’re Going (Four Way Books, 2019), one of Library Journal’s Best Poetry Books of the Year and winner of the Devil’s Kitchen and Goldie Awards; and Pelvis with Distance (White Pine Press, 2015), winner of the New Mexico Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and is the co-author of Write It! 100 Poetry Prompts to Inspire (Spruce Books/Penguin RandomHouse, 2020). Jessica is the founder and executive director of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry. https://jessicalgjacobs.com/

• Click to read poems from unalone

Thursday, July 18, 5pm PT

Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and outdoor educator who is fascinated by the intersections between scientific observation and poetic wonder. Emilie has developed dozens of publications and curricula focused on outdoor science education and social-emotional learning through her work with the award-winning BEETLES Project at the Lawrence Hall of Science. She's also widely published as a poet, and her poems appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine, The English Leadership Quarterly, and numerous anthologies. Emilie's debut poetry collection, What We Were Born For, won the Blue Light Book award in 2021. In her writing and teaching, Emilie centers awareness and curiosity as tools to bring people into deeper relationship with themselves, their communities, and the places they inhabit. Emilie holds a Bachelor’s degree in Geology-Biology from Brown University and an MFA in poetry from Maharishi International University. She lives in San Rafael, California, and spends much of her time wondering about oaks and teaching poetry in local classrooms.

• Click to read For the Grandmother Teaching Children How to Plant Seeds at the Community Garden
• Click here to read For the Students

Tuesday, August 13, 5pm PT

Marcela Sulak is the author of the lyrical memoir about translation, transformations, immigration, conversion, and farming, Mouth Full of Seeds. Her four poetry collections include, most recently, The Fault (2024), the National Jewish Book Award finalist, City of Sky Papers. She’s co-edited Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres, and has published four book-length translations of poetry from the Hebrew, Czech, and French, including Twenty Girls to Envy Me. Selected Poems by Orit Gidali (University of Texas Press, 2016), which was long listed for the 2017 PEN Award for Poetry Translation. Sulak directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University and edits The Ilanot Review.

• Click here to read two poems from The Fault
• Click here to read The Hidden

Tuesday, September 10, 5pm PT

Palestinian-American writer, editor and educator Naomi Shihab Nye grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she graduated from Trinity University and continues to live. She has been Young People’s Poet Laureate for the U.S. (Poetry Foundation), poetry editor for the New York Times magazine, and The Texas Observer, and a visiting writer in hundreds of schools and communities all over the world. Her books include Everything Comes Next, The Tiny Journalist, Voices in the Air, Sitti’s Secrets, Habibi, This Same Sky, and The Tree is Older than You Are: Poems & Paintings from Mexico. Her volume 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East, was a finalist for the National Book Award. The Turtle of Oman and The Turtle of Michigan have both been part of the Little Read program, North Carolina. She received Lifetime Achievement Awards from The Texas Institute of Letters and the National Book Critics Circle. Photo by Ricardo Romo.

• Click here to read Red Brocade
• Click here to read Gate A-4
  

Tuesday, October 29, 5pm PT

CMarie Fuhrman is the author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems and co-editor of Cascadia: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations. She has published or forthcoming poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals and anthologies. CMarie is an award-winning columnist for the Inlander and Director of the Elk River Writers Workshop. She is Associate Director and Director of Poetry at Western Colorado University, where she teaches nature writing. CMarie is the host of Terra Firma. She resides in the Salmon River Mountains of Idaho with dogs and wilderness. CMarieFuhrman.com

• Click here to listen to Beargrass
• Click here to read Land Acknowledgment (The Inlander, October 2021)
  

Thursday, November 14, 5pm PT

John Rosenwald lives in Farmington, Maine. From 1976 until 2009 he served as Professor of English at Beloit College. Since 1975 he and his wife, Ann Arbor, have participated in the Annual Great Mother Conference originally organized by Robert Bly. As Fulbright Professor of American Culture, he has taught frequently at major Chinese universities. While there he became an early translator of contemporary Chinese poetry and a collector of Chinese peasant art. He joined the Beloit Poetry Journal staff in 1976 and was co-editor from 2002 until 2015. In 2018 he published both Harvest: Selected Poems and an experimental novel, The Feast of Steven, then in 2021 his translation of
Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, which was awarded the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance prize for Excellence in Publishing. Other honors include the 1996 Underkofler Outstanding Teacher Award, the 2003 Zhejiang Province West Lake Friendship Award,
and an Honorary Doctorate in 2009 from the University of Maine Farmington. He is also a political activist, involved in numerous ways within his local and state communities. Photo by Ann Arbor

• Click here to read a selection of John's translations

Tuesday, December 17, 3:30pm PT

Poet and theologian, Pádraig Ó Tuama’s work centers around themes of language, power, conflict and religion. Working fluently on the page and in public, he is a compelling poet and skilled speaker, teacher and group worker. He presents Poetry Unbound with On Being Studios. From 2014-2019 he was the leader of the Corrymeela Community, Ireland’s oldest peace and reconciliation community. With undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in theology, multiple professional qualifications in conflict mediation (specializing in groups), he also holds a PhD (Poetry & Theology) from the University of Glasgow.

When BBC journalist William Crawley introduced Pádraig on the stage to deliver a TEDx talk on Story, Crawley said, "He's probably the best public speaker I know." Profiling Pádraig Ó Tuama in The New Yorker, journalist and poet Eliza Grizwold wrote “Poetry, for him, is the language the heart speaks not when it reaches for some externalized divinity but when it seeks to understand itself.” padraigotuama.com

• Click here to read a selection of Pádraig Ó Tuama's poems

Photo credit: David Pugh