October 5: Ayelet Amittay, Leslie Contreras Schwartz, & David Lehman

Ayelet Amittay is a poet and psychiatric nurse practitioner in Eugene, Oregon. Her first book, The Eating Knife, is forthcoming from Fernwood Press. Her chapbook, Therapy Room, won second prize in the 2024 3-day International Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, Journal of the American Poetry Association, Pleiades, Rattle, and other publications. She runs a private practice, Wild Geese Mental Health, and teaches at the Touchstone Institute. You can find her at www.ayeletpoet.com or on social media @ayeletpoet.

Leslie Contreras Schwartz is a multi-genre writer, a 2021 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, the 2019-2021 Houston Poet Laureate, and the author of the 2022 C&R Press Nonfiction Prize Winner From the Womb of Sky and Earth, a lyrical memoir. She is the author of five collections of poetry, including the forthcoming Sweet Geometry (FlowerSong Press), Black Dove/Paloma Negra, a finalist for the 2021 Best Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters; and Nightbloom & Cenote, a semi-finalist for the 2017 Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Contreras Schwartz is currently a poetry and nonfiction faculty member at Alma College’s MFA low-residency program in creative writing. 

David Lehman launched The Best American Poetry in 1988 and continues as the annual anthology’s general editor. His books include The Morning Line, a collection of poems, and A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, which won ASCAP’’s Deems Taylor Award. He edited The Oxford Book of American Poetry. Educated at Columbia and Cambridge universities, he has written for publications ranging from Newsweek, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post to American Heritage, The American Scholar, Art in America, and Partisan Review. He has taught at Hamilton College, NYU, Bennington, Columbia, and the New School. He lives in Ithaca, New York.