Poet Panelists

Cornelius Eady is a Poet/Playwright/Songwriter and Cave Canem Co-Founder. He was born in Rochester, NY in 1954, and is Professor of English, and Chair of Excellence at the University of Tenn., Knoxville. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, winner of the 1985 Lamont Prize; The Gathering of My Name, nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry; Brutal Imagination, and Hardheaded Weather. He wrote the libretto to Diedra Murray’s opera Running Man, which was short listed for the Pulitzer Prize in Theatre, and his verse play Brutal Imagination won the Oppenheimer Prize for the best first play from an American Playwright in 2001. His awards include Fellowships from the NEA, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and was The Miller Family Endowed Chair in Literature and Writing, and Professor in English and Theater at The University of Missouri-Columbia.

Dean Kostos’s tenth collection, Broken Color, is forthcoming. His memoir, The Boy Who Listened to Paintings, was published in October, 2019. It is a finalist for the Foreword Indie Awards. His eighth collection—Pierced by Night-Colored Threads—was released in 2017. His previous collection—This Is Not a Skyscraper—won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, selected by Mark Doty. Kostos is the author of the previous collections: Rivering, Last Supper of the Senses, The Sentence That Ends with a Comma (which was required reading at Duke University), and Celestial Rust. He edited Pomegranate Seeds; its debut reading was held at the UN. His poems, personal essays, and reviews have appeared in over 300 journals. These include The Bangalore Review (India), Barrow Street, Boulevard, Chelsea, Cimarron Review, Mediterranean Poetry (Sweden), New Madrid, Southwest Review, Stand Magazine (UK), Western Humanities Review, on Oprah Winfrey’s website Oxygen.com, the Harvard UP website, and elsewhere. He has taught poetry writing at the Gallatin School of New York University, The Columbia Scholastic Press Association, The City University of New York, and Wesleyan. He is a recipient of a Yaddo fellowship and a Rockefeller Innovation grant. He has served as literary judge for Columbia University’s Gold Crown Awards. Kostos is currently working on a libretto.

Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, essayist, and writer of tales whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from words to words-and-pictures, and from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Analyst, The Second Blush and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems. She is also the author of several books of prose and a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece. Peacock has also written two biographies, The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, and Flower Diary: Mary Hiester Reid Paints, Travels, Marries & Opens a Door. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, The New Republic, The Paris Review, and other leading literary journals. Among her honors are fellowships from the Danforth, Ingram Merrill, and Woodrow Wilson Foundations, as well as the National Endowment for the Arts. In Canada she is the series editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English, and the Poetry Editor of the Literary Review of Canada.