Poetry Speaks by Elise Paschen

Elise Paschen is the author of Infidelities, which won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Award, and Houses: Coasts, as well as other periodicals and anthologies. She possesses an M.Phil. from Harvard University and is a Harvard University graduate. and a Ph.D. Oxford University offers degrees in twentieth-century literature. She is the co-editor of Poetry Speaks, Poetry in Motion, and Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast. She was the Executive Director of the Poetry Society of America from 1988 to 2001 and co-founder of Poetry in Motion, a countrywide initiative that places poetry in subways and buses.

Dr. Paschen resides in Chicago with her husband and two children and teaches in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Writing Program. Dominique Raccah, the founder, president, and publisher of Sourcebooks, a major independent publishing house outside of Chicago, is the series editor. Nonfiction, fiction, and poetry are all published by Sourcebooks today. She is the editor of the Poetry Speaks and Shakespeare Sourcebooks series.

Billy Collins is the author of numerous poetry collections, including The Problem with Poetry and Other Poems, Nine Horses, Sailing Alone Around the Room, and Picnic, Lightning. His poems have been published in The Best American Poetry on a regular basis. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at City University of New York's Lehman College. He was the United States Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and is now the New York State Poet Laureate.

Nikki Giovanni is a poet, lecturer, and educator who has published over two dozen books, including Quilted the Black-Eyed Pea, Racism 101, Blues For All the Changes, and Love Poems. In 2003, the Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection, a spoken-word CD, was a Grammy Award finalist. She has won the NAACP Image Award for Literature three times and the Langston Hughes Award for Outstanding Contributions to Arts and Letters, as well as the Rosa Parks Woman of Courage Award. Essence, Mademoiselle, and Ladies' Home Journal have all named her Woman of the Year.

She teaches writing and literature at Virginia Tech as a University Distinguished Professor.