Poetry at Bryant Park Reading Room

Beth Ann Fennelly, a 2020 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, was the poet laureate of Mississippi from 2016-2021 and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi. She’s won grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the United States Artists, a Pushcart, and a Fulbright to Brazil. Fennelly has published three books of poetry and four of prose. Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W.W. Norton) was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book. Her newest book, The Irish Goodbye: Micro-Memoirs was published by Norton in February. A contributor to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Esquire and other outlets, she lives with her husband, Tom Franklin, and their three children in Oxford, MS.David Baker is the author many books of poetry, including Transit (2026), Whale Fall (2022), and Swift: New and Selected Poems (2019); his Never-Ending Birds was awarded the 2011 Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize. He is coeditor of Collected Poems of Stanley Plumly (2025). Baker’s work appears in APR, The Atlantic, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Poetry, and is included in the landmark anthology A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. Baker served for many years as Poetry Editor of The Kenyon Review. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Denison University and divides his time between Granville, Ohio, and Hudson, New York.Maya C. Popa is the author of If You Love That Lady (W.W. Norton, 2026), Wound is the Origin of Wonder (W.W. Norton, 2022) and American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), as well as three chapbooks. She is the poetry reviews editor at Publishers Weekly and teaches poetry at NYU. Popa holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London; an MA from Oxford University, where she was a Clarendon Scholar; and an MFA from NYU. She is the founder of Conscious Writers Collective, a global online writing platform and community providing ongoing literary education and support outside formal academia.Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry and three chapbooks, most recently A Prayer of Six Wings, a finalist for the 2026 Patterson Book Prize. Honors include the 2024 E.E.Cummings Prize, the 2023 Guernsey International Poetry Prize, the 2023 Rumi Prize for Poetry, the International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. At Columbia University he is Professor of Psychiatry in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and teaches Narrative Medicine.