For over 25 years, the Best American Poetry anthology has been an annual treat for lovers of verse, an honor for its contributors, and conversation starter for the community. This exclusive insiders’ peek into the best-selling series will feature insight, anecdotes, and readings from contributors as well as the guest editor of the latest edition.

PANELISTS

Dana Gioia, the most recent editor of Best American Poetry, is a poet and critic whose collections include Interrogations at Noon, which won the 2001 American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize as the best book of the year. Gioia served as Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts from 2003 to 2009 and as California State Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2019. Gioia is currently the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at USC.

Brendan Constantine’s work has appeared in many of the nation’s standards, including Poem-A-Day, Best American Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly. His most recent collections are Dementia, My Darling (2016) and Bouncy Bounce (2018). He currently teaches poetry at the Windward School in West Los Angeles. Since 2017, Constantine has worked to create poetry workshops for people dealing with Aphasia.

Sonia Greenfield edits the Rise Up Review and directs the Southern California Poetry Festival. Her work has appeared in the 2010 and 2018 Best American Poetry anthologies, Antioch Review, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and Willow Springs. Her first full-length collection, Boy with a Halo at the Farmer's Market, won the 2014 Codhill Poetry Prize; her chapbook, American Parable, won the 2017 Autumn House Press/Coal Hill Review prize; and her collection of prose poems, Letdown, is forthcoming.

Robin Coste Lewis is the poet laureate of Los Angeles and writer-in-residence at USC. Her poetry debut Voyage of the Sable Venus was honored with the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry—the first poetry debut to do so since 1975, and the first debut to win in poetry by an African American. Lewis has published her work widely in various journals and anthologies, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times.

Callie Siskel (moderator) is a poetry editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and a Dornsife Doctoral Fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at USC. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, A Public Space, The Yale Review, Ninth Letter, and other journals, and her publication Arctic Revival (2015) was selected by Elizabeth Alexander for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship.