Poet of the Week

Isabella “Isa” Borgeson (she/they) is a queer, mixed race, filipino american poet and community organizer from Oakland. Their poetry is influenced by their years organizing in the aftermath of super typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda. Isa aims to use their storytelling to visibilize the impact of climate change on their home(land)s, from Oakland to Tanauan.

Jenny Qi is the author of Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her work appears in The New York Times, The Atlantic, High Country News, and elsewhere. She is working on a hybrid collection and a memoir in conversation with her late mother’s writings. She holds a Ph.D. in Cancer Biology from UCSF.

jason b. crawford (They/He) born in Washington DC and raised in Lansing, MI, is the author of Year of the Unicorn Kidz. Their second collection, YEET! is the winner of the Omnidawn 1st/2nd Book Prize and will be published Fall 2025.

Rebecca Faulkner is a London-born poet based in Brooklyn. She is the author of “Permit Me to Write My Own Ending,” (Write Bloody Publishing, 2023), a finalist for the 2024 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize. Her work appears in New York Quarterly,The Maine Review, The Poetry Society of New York, and elsewhere. She was a 2023 poetry recipient of the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women, the winner of Black Fox Literary Magazine’s 2023 Writing Contest, and the 2022 winner of Sand Hills Literary Magazine’s National Poetry Contest. Her upcoming collection, Daughters of the Minotaur (Regal House Publishing 2027), engages with the life and work of five mid-century women artists.

Chris Banks is an award-winning, Pushcart-nominated Canadian poet and author of seven collections of poems, most recently Alternator with Nightwood Editions (Fall 2023). His first full-length collection, Bonfires, was awarded the Jack Chalmers Award for poetry by the Canadian Authors’ Association in 2004. Chris was an associate editor with The New Quarterly, and is Editor in Chief of The Woodlot – A Canadian Poetry Reviews & Essays website. He lives and writes in Kitchener, Ontario.

Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of the poetry collections Far District, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, House of Lords and Commons, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and School of Instructions: a Poem, a finalist for the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Griffin Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize in Literature, the Whiting Award, and a Donald Windham–Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prize, Hutchinson is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor in the Humanities at Cornell University.

Sarah Mills’s poems have appeared in RHINO, trampset, Jet Fuel Review, HAD, Up the Staircase, ​The Shore, Pithead Chapel, Beaver Mag, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Find her on Bluesky @sarahmillswrites.

Kevin Chesser lives in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. His writing can be found in places like Hobart, elsewhere, drDOCTOR, Pithead Chapel, Press Pause, Empty House Press, and others. He is the author of one full length collection of poetry - Relief of My Symptoms (Ghost Palace Press, 2023), plus numerous handmade chapbooks and zines. He earned his MFA from West Virginia Wesleyan University, and occasionally records music under the name Wizard Clipp. Send him a hi hello how are you anytime at www.kchesser.com or @sweat_michaels on Instagram.