Join us for an evening of poetry, featuring this year’s finalists for the Dartmouth Poet-in-Residence at The Frost Place competition. Read more about the program here.
About the Poets
James Davis May
James Davis May is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has degrees from Allegheny
College (BA), the University of Houston (MFA), and Georgia State University (PhD). His poems
have appeared in 32 Poems, Birmingham Poetry Review, Image, New England Review, The New Republic, Terrain, The Southern Review, The Sun, and other journals. He received a literature fellowship in creative writing from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Walter E. Dakin fellowship from the
Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Robert Frost Poetry Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’
Conference. He is also the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Cecil Hemley Award, the
Rattle Poetry Prize’s Readers’ Choice Award, and the Foley Poetry Prize from America. May’s most
recent book, Unusually Grand Ideas, appeared in 2023 and was shortlisted for the Julie Suk Award and
named to the Georgia Center for the Book’s list of Books All Georgians Should Read. My Lost
Saints, his third collection, will be published in 2027 by Louisiana State University Press. May lives in
Macon, Georgia, where he directs the creative writing program at Mercer University.
Lilian-Yvonne Bertram
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram is an African American writer, poet, artist, and educator whose poetic practiceincludes the intersection of computation, AI, race, and gender. They are the author of Travesty Generator (Noemi Press), a book of computational poetry longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award for Poetry. They are the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Their other poetry books include How Narrow My Escapes (DIAGRAM/New Michigan), Personal Science (Tupelo Press), a slice from the cake made of air (Red Hen Press), and But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise (Red Hen Press). Their most recent full-length poetry book, Negative Money, was published in 2023. Their chapbook, written with AI, is called A Black Story May Contain Sensitive Content and won the 2023 Diagram/New Michigan chapbook contest. They direct the MFA in creative writing program at the University of Maryland and are a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts poetry grant recipient and 2024 Deutsch Foundation Ruby’s Grant recipient. They are co-editor with Nick Montfort of the recently released anthology Output: An Anthology of Computer-Generated Text, 1953-2023.
Sandra Beasley
Sandra Beasley is author of four poetry collections: Made to Explode, winner of the Housatonic Book Award; Count the Waves; I Was the Jukebox, winner of the Barnard Women Poets Prize,; and Theories of Falling, winner of the New Issues Poetry Prize. Honors for her work include a 2015 NEA Literature Fellowship, the Center for Book Arts Chapbook Prize, the John Montague International Poetry Fellowship, and six DCCAH Artist Fellowships. She is also the author of the memoir Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, and the editor of Vinegar and Char: Verse from the Southern Foodways Alliance. She lives in Washington, D.C. She serves as the poetry editor for Blair, a nonprofit press based in Durham, North Carolina.