The Poetry Foundation and POETRY Welcome New Magazine and Blog Team Members

The Poetry Foundation and Poetry magazine continue their commitment to grow opportunities for people in the poetry ecosystem, welcoming new guest editors and a new reader for Poetry, as well as new reviewers to Harriet Books.

Poetry Magazine
Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy joined the Poetry magazine team in October as the new guest editor for the March, April, and May 2022 issues.

• Srikanth “Chicu” Reddy (he/him) is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Chicago, where he edits the Phoenix Poets book series. Reddy has received fellowships from the Creative Capital Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Awards for his latest book of poetry, Underworld Lit, include being a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Four Quartets Prize, and a Times Literary Supplement “Book of the Year” for 2020.

Esther G. Belin will join the magazine to edit the June, July/August, and September 2022 issues.

• Esther G. Belin (she/her) is an urban Indian, born at an Indian Health Service hospital in Gallup, New Mexico and raised in the greater Los Angeles area. She has two poetry collections, From the Belly of My Beauty, and Of Cartography, both published by the University of Arizona Press. She and three others edited an anthology of Navajo Literature, The Diné Reader. Belin is a faculty mentor in the Institute of American Indian Arts Low-Rez MFA program. She is a citizen of the Navajo Nation and lives on the Colorado side of the 4 corners region.

Whitney DeVos joined in September as a reader, assisting with Poetry magazine content for the spring and summer issues. 

• Whitney DeVos (she/her) is a scholar, writer, translator, and assistant poetry editor at Asymptote. DeVos is author of the chapbook On Being Blonde by Slug Press, as well as translator of two pamphlets: Notes Toward a Pamphlet and The Semblable, both published in 2020 by Ugly Duckling Presse. As a doctoral candidate in Literature at UC Santa Cruz, she researches comparative poetics and literature of the Western hemisphere. Her dissertation examines documentary poetry after 1945. Raised in southern California on the unceded territory of the Tongva people, she currently lives and writes from México-Tenochtitlan, Mexico City.

 

Harriet Books
The Poetry Foundation welcomes two new Harriet Books reviewers: Layla Benitez-James and David Woo. 

• Layla Benitez-James (she/her) is the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode But He Had to Make Sure (Jai-Alai Books, 2017), selected by Major Jackson for Cave Canem’s 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Benitez-James has served as the director of literary outreach for the Unamuno Author Series in Madrid, and is the editor of its poetry festival anthology, Desperate Literature. Her work has also been featured in Black Femme Collective, Virginia Quarterly Review, Latino Book Review, Poetry London, Acentos Review, and Hinchas de Poesia.
   
• David Woo (he/him) is the son of immigrants from China who was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona. Woo studied English at Harvard and Stanford, and Chinese at Yale, and was a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford. He is the author of two poetry collections, The Eclipses (2005), which won the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize, and Divine Fire (2021). His work has been featured in The New Yorker, New Republic, and Threepenny Review,  and in anthologies such as the Library of America’s American Religious Poems and The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America.

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