Bruce George
Poet and Co-Founder of Def Poetry Jam (HBO)

Bruce is a visionary, executive producer, writer, poet and activist. He was born and raised in New York City. He has written poetry/prose & articles for over 37 years. His work has been published in major magazines, anthologies, and literary publications. He has written testimonials from the likes of Essence Magazine, Emerge Magazine, Class Magazine, Harlem River Press etc…

Bruce has joint-ventured with Harold Whaley who's the COOof Mongram Virtua and Terry Cyrus of OutSpoken Media as Virtual Consultants within "Second Life" www.secondlife.com which is an entire virtual world. He has won multiple poetry & talent contests. He has won several awards such as a “Peabody Award” for “Russell Simmons Presents, Def Poetry (HBO)”, a “Miky Award” for “Russell Simmons Presents, Def Poetry Jam (HBO)”, an “Upscale Showcase Award”, a “Trail Blazer Award” etc… for his outstanding vision, production, writing and performance. 

Bruce is the Founder/Executive Consultant of Ebony Energy Talent Network (Booking Agency) featuring major talent such as Paul Mooney, Rev. Jessie Jackson, Amiri Baraka, The Last Poets, Malik Yoba, Dawn Robinson etc. He is also the Co-Founder of the critically acclaimed award winning “Russell Simmons’s Def Poetry Jam" and the Founder/Managing Editor of “The Bandana Republic, an Anthology of Poetry & Prose by Gang Members & Their Affiliates.”

Bruce is the Founder/Executive Producer of a spoken word documentary entitled: “Bone Bristle, A Spoken Word Documentary” which is in post-production. The film features critically acclaimed writers, poets & spoken word artists. As an activist Bruce has been and currently is associated with major grassroots organizations that fosters and uplifts people in struggle. He has served on numerous panels (Hampton, Harvard, The New School, Fordham University, Medgar Evers, Schomburg Center For Research in Black Culture etc…) and judged hundreds of poetry/spoken word competitions.

Robert Pinsky
Poetry Editor of Slate, Former U.S. Poet Laureate (1997-2000) 

Robert Pinsky’s most recent books are Gulf Music, a book of poems, and Essential Pleasures, an anthology. Earlier works include The Figured Wheel, awarded the Lenore Marshall Prize and The Inferno of Dante, which won the Howard Morton Landon Prize in translation and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.  His prose works include Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town and The Life of David, an account of the Biblical hero.  A three-time Poet Laureate of the United States, Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project; the project’s most recent anthology, An Invitation to Poetry, includes a DVD featuring Americans reading and talking about beloved poems. His works about poetry include The Sounds of Poetry and Democracy, Culture and the Voice of Poetry, based on his Tanner Lectures on Human Values, at Princeton University. Pinsky is the poetry editor of the online magazine Slate and teaches in the graduate creative writing program at Boston University.

Jim Schley
Managing Editor of Tupelo Press

Jim Schley is the Managing Editor of Tupelo Press and author of a book of poems, As When, In Season (Marick Press, 2008). He is former Executive Director of The Frost Place, a museum and poetry center at one of Robert Frost's homesteads, former Editor-in-Chief of the book publisher Chelsea Green, and former Co-Editor of the quarterly New England Review. He lives in Vermont. 

Emily Warn
Editor-in-Chief, Poetry Foundation

Emily Warn was born in San Francisco and moved at the age of seven from the then Bohemian neighborhood in Marin, California to the Orthodox Jewish community in Detroit. For Warn, poetry links music and meaning every bit as powerfully and oddly as religious traditions do, inventing complicated, invisible relations. She moved to the Pacific Northwest 1978 to work for North Cascades National Park, and a year later moved to Seattle where she has lived, more or less ever since. She most recently served as the Webby Award–winning founding editor of poetryfoundation.org, and now divides her time between Seattle and Twisp, Washington.

Warn has published five collections of poetry, including three books: The Leaf Path (1982), The Novice Insomniac (1996) and Shadow Architect (2008), all from Copper Canyon Press, and two chapbooks The Book of Esther (1986) and Highway Suite (1987). Her essays and poems appear widely, including in Poetry, BookForum, Blackbird, Parabola, The Seattle Times, The Writers’ Almanac, The Bloomsbury Review, The Stranger, and Critical Mass–the National Book Critics Circle blog.

She has taught creative writing or served as writer-in-residence at many schools and arts centers, including Lynchburg College in Virginia, The Bush School in Seattle, Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Centrum Foundation in Port Townsend, and Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, New Mexico. She was educated at Kalamazoo College and the University of Washington, and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.

Emily has also worked in the high-technology, first at Microsoft where she was a Group Programming Manager for Microsoft.com, and later as web consultant, working for amazon.com, The Methow Conservancy, and Farming and the Environment.