Andrew McMillan's first collection,
physical, was the first poetry collection to win the Guardian First Book Award; it also won a Somerset Maugham Award, an Eric Gregory Award, a Northern Writers' Award and the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. His second collection,
playtime, won the inaugural Polari Prize, and his most recent collection is
pandemonium. McMillan is a Senior Lecturer at the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Mary Jean Chan is the author of
Flche, which won the 2019 Costa Poetry Award and was shortlisted in 2020 for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, the Jhalak Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. In 2021,
Flche was a Lambda Literary Award Finalist. Chan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Oxford Brookes University. Born and raised in Hong Kong, they currently live in Oxford.
Ocean Vuong is the author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection
Night Sky with Exit Wounds and the
New York Times bestselling novel
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. A recipient of the 2019 MacArthur "Genius" Grant, he is also the winner of the Whiting Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize. His writings have been featured in
Atlantic,
Harper's Magazine,
Nation,
New Republic,
New Yorker, and the
New York Times. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he currently lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Sen Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of the poetry collection
Tongues of Fire, which received the Laurel Prize and was shortlisted for many awards, including the
Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. His memoir,
All Down Darkness Wide, was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and for the Foyles Non-Fiction Book of the Year, and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Hewitt lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2022, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature.
Kaveh Akbar is the author of
Calling a Wolf a Wolf and
Pilgrim Bell, and has received honours such as a Levis Reading Prize and multiple Pushcart Prizes. Born in Tehran, Iran, he teaches at Purdue University and in low-residency programs at Warren Wilson and Randolph Colleges.
Jay Bernard is the author of the pamphlets
Your Sign is Cuckoo, Girl (Tall Lighthouse, 2008),
English Breakfast (Math Paper Press, 2013) and
The Red and Yellow Nothing (Ink Sweat & Tears Press, 2016), which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award 2017. A film programmer at BFI Flare and an archivist at Statewatch, they also participated in 'The Complete Works II' project in 2014 and in which they were mentored by Kei Miller. Jay was a Foyle Young Poet of the Year in 2005 and a winner of SLAMbassadors UK spoken word championship. In 2019 Jay was selected by Jackie Kay as one of Britain's ten best BAME writers for the British Council and National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase. Their poems have been collected in
Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe, 2009),
The Salt Book of Younger Poets (Salt, 2011),
Ten: The New Wave (Bloodaxe, 2014) and
Out of Bounds: British Black & Asian Poets (Bloodaxe, 2014).
Langston Hughes (1901-1967) was a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance and one of the most influential and acclaimed American writers of the twentieth century. A renowned poet from a young age, Hughes' first collection of poetry,
The Weary Blues, was published when he was just 24. He would go on to publish more than thirty-five books, including his award-winning debut novel,
Not Without Laughter, and the short story collection,
The Ways of White Folks. His widely-read journalism and nonfiction became important documents in the support and promotion of the civil rights movement.
