Henry Hughes and Jennifer Richter

Henry Hughes grew up on Long Island, New York. After completing an MA in creative writing at Purdue University in 1990, he spent five years working in Japan and China. Hughes finished a Ph.D. in American literature at Purdue in 2002 and now teaches at Western Oregon University. His poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Malahat Review, Queen’s Quarterly, Southern Humanities Review, Seattle Review and Poetry Northwest, and are represented in several anthologies including Long Journey: Contemporary Northwest Poets published by Oregon State University Press. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs, received the 2004 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Moist Meridian, was published in 2009. He is the editor of the anthology, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing, to be published this spring by Knopf, and his commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review.

Jennifer Richter

Jennifer Richter’s book Threshold was chosen by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey as winner of the 2009 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition; the book was published in April 2010 and has since been a national bestseller.  Richter’s work has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Cloudbank, and the anthology A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-five Years of Women’s Poetry.  She was awarded a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and Jones Lectureship in Poetry by Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program for four years.  She currently teaches for Stanford University’s Online Writer’s Studio and lives in Corvallis with her children and her husband, the novelist Keith Scribner.