Natasha Trethewey won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2007 for her book, "Native Guard," written about her mother and black Civil War soldiers on the Mississippi coast.

Javairia Henry recently graduated from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. Her poem, "Graffiti," is taken from "The Way We See It: Complete Coverage of the Nation's Capital From the Inside Out."…

"Luminous Great Mass" is from Peter O'Leary's collection, "Watchfulness" (Spuyten Duyvil, 2001). The poem is also included in the Poetry Foundation's Chicago Poetry Tour, a multimedia tour of poetry written in and about the city of Chicago.

John Ashbery is the author of more than 30 volumes of poetry, criticism and essays. He has won nearly every major American award for poetry, and his body of work has led many to consider him one of the nation's…

J. Michael Martinez's collection "Heredities" was selected for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award and will be published by Louisiana State University Press. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Literature at the University of Colorado at Boulder.