Tim Seible
Tim Seibles, was born in Philadelphia in 1955. He was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. His poems engage many aspects of life, from the romantic to the sociopolitical to the mystical. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow.
His eight books of poetry include Hurdy-Gurdy, Hammerlock, Buffalo Head Solos, and Fast Animal, a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. One Turn Around the Sun, an extensive examination of his immediate family was published in 2017.
In the last year, Tim has also written poems for two monuments. One in Norfolk, dedicated to the Norfolk 17 who began the fearful process of integrating Virginia public schools, the other for an installation in Dallas, Texas, that addresses the many race-based lynchings that took place there.
His poems have appeared in several anthologies. Among them: In Search of Color Everywhere, Seriously Funny, Uncommon Core, This is The Honey, and Villanelles. Seibles’ works have also been featured in Best American Poetry 2010, 2013, 2023. His latest collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems was released by Etruscan Press in 2021.
Diamond Forde
Dr. Diamond Forde is the author of two poetry collections, Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021) and The Book of Alice (forthcoming with Scribner Books, 2025-26). She has received a doctorate in African American poetics and fat studies at Florida State University, and an MFA in Creative Writing at The University of Alabama. Forde has received recognition in the Furious Flower Poetry Prize, nomination as a Kate Tufts Discovery award finalist, and earned a Ruth Lily Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellowship. Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Obsidian, Callaloo, and elsewhere. Forde serves as the Interviews Editor with Honey Literary, as an assistant professor at North Carolina State University, and as an avid lover of colorful dresses. Find out more at her website: www.diamondforde.com.