Meet the 2025 Festival Headliners

Ross Gay Ross Gay is interested in joy. Ross Gay wants to understand joy. Ross Gay is curious about joy. Ross Gay studies joy. Something like that. ~ Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. In addition to his poetry, Ross has released three collections of essays—The Book of Delights was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller; Inciting Joy was released in 2022, and his newest collection, The Book of (More) Delights was released in September of 2023.

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Marilyn Chin We are excited to announce that Marilyn Chin will be joining us as a headliner at the 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival! Marilyn Chin is the award-winning poet and author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow (2003), Hard Love Province (2014), and A Portrait of the Self As Nation (2018), Sage (2023), among others. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, Chin’s works have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Contemporary Women Poets essayist Anne-Elizabeth Green observed, “The pains of cultural assimilation infuse [Chin’s] poems.” She is also the author of the novel Revenge of the Mooncake Vixen (2009). In addition to writing poetry and fiction, she has translated poems by the modern Chinese poet Ai Qing and co-translated poems by the Japanese poet Gozo Yoshimasu. Chin has read and taught workshops all over the world. Recently, she was guest poet at universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manchester, Sydney, Berlin, Iowa and elsewhere. She’s won numerous awards, including the 2020 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. She is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry, and The Best American Poetry. She is Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and presently serves as a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets.

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Danez Smith Danez Smith was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. They are the author of Don't Call Us Dead (2017), a finalist for the National Book Award; [insert] Boy (2014), winner of the Lambda Literary Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; and the chapbook hands on ya knees (Penmanship Books, 2013). Smith is the recipient of fellowships from the McKnight Foundation, Cave Canem, Voices of Our Nation (VONA), and elsewhere. They are a founding member of the multigenre, multicultural Dark Noise Collective. Their writing has appeared in many magazines and journals, such as Poetry, Ploughshares, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Kinfolks. In poetry slam, Smith is a 2011 Individual World Poetry Slam finalist and the reigning two-time Rustbelt Individual Champion, and was on the 2014 championship team Sad Boy Supper Club. In 2014 they were the festival director for the Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam, and were awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Smith earned a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they were a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar. From 2017 to 2021, they were a co-host of the Poetry Foundation's podcast, VS.

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Diannely Antigua Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts. She is the author of two poetry collections, Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019), which was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award, and Good Monster (Copper Canyon Press, 2024). She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. From 2022-2024, she was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, NH, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project, and in 2024, she was awarded an Excellence in Artistry Award from Black Lives Matter New Hampshire. She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry which seeks to make poetry accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul.

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Felicia Zamora Felicia Zamora is a poet, educator, and editor currently living in Ohio. She is the author of eight books of poetry including, Murmuration Archives, forthcoming in 2026; Interstitial Archaeology, forthcoming in 2025; Quotient, 2022; I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize and winner of the 2022 Ohioana Book Award in Poetry; Body of Render, winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award; Instrument of Gaps, 2018; Open, Marvel, 2018; and Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize. She is an associate professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati, a poetry editor for Colorado Review, and a contributing editor for West Branch.

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Saeed Jones Saeed Jones is the author of the memoir HOW WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES (Simon & Schuster), winner of the 2019 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction and the poetry collection PRELUDE TO BRUISE (Coffee House Books), winner for the 2015 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry. His poetry and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times, Oxford American and GQ among other publications. His most recent book ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD (Coffee House Press) won the 2023 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry. Saeed Jones is the 2024-2025 artist-in-residence in the Media, Health and Medicine program at Harvard Medical School. His next book HOME OUT THERE, a memoir, is forthcoming from Washington Square Press. He co-hosts the podcast VIBE CHECK with Sam Sanders and Zach Stafford.

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Keetje Kuipers Keetje Kuipers is the author of four collections of poetry, all from BOA Editions: Lonely Women Make Good Lovers (2025), winner of the Isabella Gardner Award; All Its Charms (2019), which includes poems honored by publication in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies; The Keys to the Jail (2014); and Beautiful in the Mouth (2010), which was chosen by Thomas Lux as the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, Yale Review, and Poetry, among others. Keetje has been a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, an NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, the Katharine Bakeless Nason Fellow in Poetry at Bread Loaf, the Emerging Writer Lecturer at Gettysburg College, and the recipient of multiple residency fellowships, including PEN Northwest’s Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at universities and conferences around the world, including at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. Her home is in Missoula, Montana, on the land of the Salish and Kalispel peoples and directly at the foot of the Rattlesnake Wilderness Area. She lives there with her wife and their two children, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.