PALM BEACH POETRY FESTIVAL to Feature World-Renowned Poets to Teach Poetry Workshops and Much More January 20, 2008

Participating Poets will Include Two Pulitzer Prize Winners
& Two-Time National Poetry Slam Champion

(Delray Beach, FL August 9, 2007) Miles Coon, director of the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, today announced that the fourth annual event is returning to Old School Square in Delray Beach for six days, January 21-26, 2008.

The six-day Poetry Festival will include a variety of advanced and intermediate workshops that are expected to attract aspiring poets from around the world, as well as a series of public readings, lectures and a panel discussion all presented by an impressive line-up of acclaimed masters committed to clarity of expression and widely recognized as excellent teachers and engaging readers of their poems, promises Coon.

Among our participating poets next January will be two Pulitzer Prize winners, a two-time champion of the National Poetry Slam, two of Floridas most acclaimed poets, and several performance poets who bring enormous energy to the spoken word, says Coon. In addition, we will present winners and finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Award in Literature of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim and NEA Fellowships, the National Book Award, the Kingsley-Tufts Poetry Award, and Pushcart Prizes.

Advanced Workshops - Faculty
+ Kim Addonizio is the author of several acclaimed poetry collections, novels and story collection. Her awards include two NEA fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, a Commonwealth Club Poetry Medal, and the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award.

+ Claudia Emerson was awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for her book Late Wife: Poems. She is Professor of English and Arrington Distinguished Chair in Poetry at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, VA. Emerson is the recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Virginia Commission for the Arts.

+ Thomas Lux holds the Bourne Chair in Poetry and directs the McEver Visiting Writers Program at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. His distinguished teaching career includes 27 years on the writing faculty and Director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence. Mr. Lux has been a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and has received three National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim Fellowship.

+ Campbell McGrath has received many of America's top literary honors for his poetry, including a MacArthur "genius" grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Kingsley Tufts Prize. He has published six books of poetry, and his works have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, on the op-ed page of The New York Times, and in most of the country's significant literary journals. He teaches at Florida International University, where he is the Philip and Patricia Frost Professor of Creative Writing.

+ Sharon Olds has been called one of the most extraordinary poets of our time. Her numerous honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Ploughshares, and has been anthologized in more than a hundred collections.

+ C.K. Williams is the author of nine books of poetry, the most recent of which, The Singing, won the National Book Award for 2003. His previous book, Repair, was awarded the 2000 Pulitzer Prize, as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and his collection Flesh and Blood received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Recently he was awarded the 20th Annual Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an honor given to an American poet in recognition of extraordinary accomplishment. Among his honors are awards in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the PEN/Voelcker Career Achievement Award, and fellowships from the Lila Wallace Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2003, and teaches in the Writing Program at Princeton University.

Intermediate Workshops - Faculty
+ Major Jackson is the author of two collections of poetry: Hoops and Leaving Saturn, the winner of the 2000 Cave Canem Poetry Prize and finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He also is a recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award and has been honored by the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and the Witter Bynner Foundation in conjunction with the Library of Congress. Last year, he served as a creative arts fellow at the Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and as the Jack Kerouac Writer-in-Residence at University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Major Jackson is an Associate Professor of English at University of Vermont and a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars.

+ Malena M