Judith Valente is an on air correspondent for national PBS-TV, and a contributing correspondent to Chicago Public Radio and NPR. She is the author of the poetry collection Discovering Moons (Virtual Artists Collective/Chicago) and the chapbook Inventing An Alphabet, selected by Mary Oliver for the 2004 national Aldrich Poetry Prize. She is co-editor with Charles Reynard of the anthology of poems and essays, Twenty Poems to Nourish Your Soul (Loyola Press, 2005), winner of an Eric Hoffer Book Award citation. Her poems have won an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Award and a Jo-Ann Hirshfield Poetry Prize and been widely published. She is currently at work on a non-fiction book about contemporary monastic life.

Quraysh Ali Lansana is the author of They Shall Run—Harriet Tubman Poems (Third World Press, April 2004) and the poetry collection southside rain (Third World Press, 2000); a children’s book, The Big World (Addison-Wesley, 1999); and a poetry chapbook, cockroach children: corner poems and street psalms (nappyhead press, 1995). He is the editor of Glencoe/McGraw-Hill’s African American Literature Reader (Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2001), and I Represent and dream in yourself, which are two anthologies of literary works from Chicago’s award-winning youth arts employment program, Gallery 37 (Tia Chucha Press, 1996 and 1997, respectively). He is also co-editor of Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art (Third World Press, 2002). He is currently Director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and an Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Chicago State University. He is also a former faculty member of The Juilliard School’s Drama Division. Quraysh also serves as Poetry Editorial Review Board Director for Third World Press, Associate Editor-Poetry for Black Issues Book Review, and serves on the Editorial Board of Tia Chucha Press. Passage, his poetry video collaboration with Kurt Heintz, won the first ever Image Union/Bob Award from WTTW-TV (PBS).

UniVerse of Poetry sponsored readings and showcases commend individuals who demonstrate a consistent dedication and integrity of vision, humanity, innovation and artistry in their writing, increasing the dialogue and significance of poetry within a greater society, nationally and internationally.

Recorded Thursday, December 03, 2009 at Katerina’s.