Our Advisory Circle
Richard Blanco
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco is the youngest and the first Latino, immigrant, and gay person to serve in such a role. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, the negotiation of cultural identity characterizes his many collections of award-winning poetry, including his most recent, How to Love a Country, which interrogates the American narrative and sociopolitical matters of immigration, race, sexuality, and more. He has also authored the memoirs For All of Us: One Today: An Inaugural Poet’s Journey and The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood. Blanco is a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, has received numerous honorary doctorates, serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets, and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University.
F. Douglas Brown
F. Douglas Brown is the author of two poetry collections, ICON (Writ Large Press, 2018), and Zero to Three (University of Georgia, 2014), winner of the 2013 Cave Canem Poetry Prize selected by US Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. Brown, an educator for over 25 years, currently teaches American Literature and African American Poetry at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, an all-boys Jesuit school. He holds fellowships from Cave Canem and Kundiman, and was selected by Poets & Writers as one of their ten notable Debut Poets of 2014. He is co-founder and co-curator of un::fade::able - The Requiem for Sandra Bland, a quarterly reading series examining restorative justice through poetry as a means to address racism.
Blas Falconer
An Associate Professor in the Creative Writing MFA Program at San Diego State University, Blas Falconer is the author of three poetry collections, including Forgive the Body This Failure, and a coeditor of two essay collections, The Other Latin@: Writing Against a Singular Identity and Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets. His poems have been featured by Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Harvard Review, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, Poetry Society of America, the Academy of American Poets, and The New York Times, among other literary journals and institutions. His awards include an NEA Fellowship, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange, and a Tennessee Individual Artist Grant. He is a poetry editor for The Los Angeles Review and Mentor and Muse (online).
Laura García-Lorca de los Ríos
Laura García-Lorca de los Ríos is President of the Federico García Lorca Foundation. She studied Spanish Literature at Cambridge University and Performing Arts at John Strasberg’s The Real Stage in New York, worked as director’s assistant and performed in various classic and contemporary Off-Broadway theater productions. She launched Vogue in Spain, for which she was the Managing Editor for six years. Between 1995 and 2005, she was the Director of the Huerta de San Vicente. In 2004 she spearheaded the construction of the Centro Federico García Lorca in Granada, an important cultural space in the city for events, performances and installations that today is home to the Foundation’s full archival collection. She is a Member of the Board of the Francisco Giner de los Ríos Foundation and Member of the Advisory Board of the Teatro Real.
Jennifer Grotz
Jennifer Grotz is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Window Left Open, and three books of translation, most recently Everything I Don’t Know, the selected poems of Jerzy Ficowski co-translated from the Polish by Jerzy Ficowski. She teaches at the University of Rochester and serves as the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences.
Raina J. León
Raina J. León is a Black and Afro-Boricua Philadelphian (living for many years in the Chochenyo Ohlone territory of Berkeley). She is a mother, daughter, sister, madrina, comadre, partner, poet, writer, and teacher educator. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She seeks out communities of care and craft and is a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, Cave Canem, CantoMundo, Macondo. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn and sombra: dis(locate) and the chapbooks, profeta without refuge and Areyto to Atabey: Essays on the Mother(ing) Self. She has received fellowships and residencies with the Community of Writers, Montana Artists Refuge, Macdowell, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale, among others. She is a member of the SF Writers Grotto and The Ruby in San Francisco. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She educates our present and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California, only the third Black person (all Black women) and the first Afro-Latina to achieve that rank there, and as a creative arts practitioner and co-learning holding space in various communities.
Alexandra Lytton Regalado
Alexandra Lytton Regalado is author of Matria, winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). She is a CantoMundo fellow, winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, The Academy of American Poets, Narrative, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction among others. Co-founder of Kalina press, Alexandra is author, editor, and/or translator of more than ten Central American-themed books. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com
Luis Muñoz
Luis Muñoz is a native of Granada, Spain. He holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Granada. He has published six collections of poetry: Vecindad (2018); Querido silencio (2006), which won El Público award; Correspondencias (2001), which won the Generación del 27 and Ojo Crítico awards; El apetito (1998); Manzanas amarillas (1995); and Septiembre (1991). His poetic work up to 2005 is also gathered in the book Limpiar pescado. Poesía reunida 1991-2005 (2005). A bilingual selection of Muñoz’s poems, From Behind What Lanscape. New and Selected Poems, translated by Curtis Bauer and with a foreword by Ilya Kaminsky, was published in 2015. Luis teaches at the University of Iowa, where he directs the MFA in Spanish Creative Writing Program.
Mark Wunderlich
Mark Wunderlich is the author of four books of poems, the most recent of which is God of Nothingness forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2021. His other books include The Earth Avails, which received the Rilke Prize, Voluntary Servitude, and The Anchorage, which received the Lambda Literary Award. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Amy Lowell Trust, Civitella Ranieri Foundation and the James Merrill House, and his poems, essays, reviews and translations have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, Paris Review, The Believer and elsewhere, and his work has been featured on NPR's All Things Considered. Since 2003 he has taught at Bennington College in Vermont where he was the founding director of Poetry at Bennington,the college's endowed program of visiting poets, and since 2017 he has served as the director of the Bennington Writing Seminars graduate writing program. He lives in New York's Hudson Valley near the village of Catskill.