2026 Main Stage Poets, Performers, and Presenters

Robert Hass—poet, critic, and teacher—is one of the most renowned figures of modern American literature, serving as the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997. In 2007, he was awarded the National Book Award and shared the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005. Hass is also the author of Field Guide (1972), Praise (1979), Twentieth Century Pleasures (1984), and A Little Book on Form: An Exploration into the Formal Imagination of Poetry (2018), among other works. He has taught at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Saint Mary’s College of California, and the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a distinguished professor in poetry and poetics until his retirement in 2019.

Brenda Hillman is the author of eleven books of poetry from Wesleyan University Press, the most recent of which is In a Few Minutes Before Later (2022). A twelfth collection, Still House in the Desert, is forthcoming in fall 2026. Her first collection of prose, Three Talks, was published in 2023. A former Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, Hillman’s recent awards include the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Lifetime Achievement Award from PEN (Oakland) in 2025. Hillman is Professor Emerita at Saint Mary’s College of California and currently directs the Poetry Program at Community of Writers. 

Major Jackson is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Razzle Dazzle: New & Selected Poems. He is also the author of A Beat Beyond: The Selected Prose of Major Jackson, edited by Amor Kohli. A recipient of fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Jackson is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He serves as the Poetry Editor of The Harvard Review. From 2023–2025, he hosted the award-winning podcast The Slowdown. Major Jackson was recently named the inaugural recipient of the Patricia Cannon Willis Prize for American Poetry from Yale Library.

Francesca Bell is the author of Bright Stain, finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and the Julie Suk Award, and What Small Sound, finalist for the Julie Suk Award and recipient of an honorable mention for the Eric Hoffer Award, and the translator of Max Sessner’s Whoever Drowned Here, finalist for the Northern California Book Award, all from Red Hen Press. Her work appears in B O D Y, ELLE, Los Angeles Review of Books, New England Review, and Rattle and has been translated into Italian, Hungarian, and Czech. She is the Marin County Poet Laureate and teaches poetry and embroidery at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Dan Bellm has published five books of poems, including Counting (2023), Deep Well (2017), and Practice (2008), winner of the 2009 California Book Award. Recent translations of poetry from Spanish and French include Central American Book of the Dead, by Balam Rodrigo (2023), finalist for the National Translation Award, Speaking in Song, by Pura López Colomé (2017), and The Song of the Dead by Pierre Reverdy (2016). Bellm has taught literary translation and poetry at Antioch University Los Angeles, Mills College, and New York University. He serves as a volunteer interpreter and translator for refugees and asylum seekers with Centro Legal de la Raza, Oakland.

Laurel Chen is a Taiwanese queer, trans, migrant poet and prison abolitionist. A Kundiman Fellow and Pink Door Fellow, their work engages questions of migration, belonging, and systems of harm and care. Laurel earned their B.A. in Ethnic Studies in 2020 and currently lives and writes in the San Francisco Bay Area on unceded Lisjan (Ohlone) territory.

Boris Dralyuk is a poet, translator, and critic. He holds a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from UCLA. His work has appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New Republic, London Review of Books, The Guardian, Granta, and other journals. He is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books, 2022) and Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907-1934 (Brill, 2012), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (Pushkin Press, 2016), co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (Penguin Classics, 2015). He received first prize in the 2011 Compass Translation Award competition and, with Irina Mashinski, first prize in the 2012 Joseph Brodsky / Stephen Spender Translation Prize competition. In 2020 he received the inaugural Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly

Tongo Eisen-Martin earned his MA at Columbia University. He is the author of someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), nominated for a California Book Award; and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, 2017), which received a 2018 American Book Award, a 2018 California Book Award, was named a 2018 National California Booksellers Association Poetry Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2018 Griffin International Poetry Prize. Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University.

Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Children of the Land: a Memoir (Harper Collins); Cenzontle (BOA Editions), winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize; Dulce (Northwestern University Press), winner of the Drinking Gourd Prize; and, most recently, he is the co-editor of the anthology Here to Stay: Poetry and Prose from the Undocumented  Diaspora (Harper Perennial). He is the 2025 guest editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review and has also curated the Academy of American Poet’s Poem-A-Day Series. His work has been long listed for the California Book Award, the Foreword Indies Prize, and the Lambda Literary Award, among other recognitions. He co-founded the Undocupoets, which eliminated citizenship requirements from all major poetry book prizes in the U.S., and for which he was recognized with the Barnes and Noble Writers for Writers Award.

José Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025) and Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man (Red Hen Press, 2025). He has been featured in Best Microfiction, Best American Poetry and Best American Nonrequired Reading. He has taught creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, and at the University of Tennessee where he was the Poet in Residence.

Tess Taylor is a poet, playwright and critic. Her work deals with place, ecology, memory and cultural reckoning.  She has five poetry collections: The Misremembered World;  The Forage House;  Rift Zone, one of the Boston Globe’s best books of 2020, and  Work & Days, one of the NY Times best poetry books of 2016. Her anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them gathers contemporary gardening poems for an era of climate crisis.  Her collage poem Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange, was adapted for stage in 2025 and premiered at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Taylor’s writing appears in Harpers Magazine, The Atlantic, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Times Literary Supplement, CNN, and The New York Times.  She has taught widely, from UC Berkeley to Queen’s University in  Belfast, Northern Ireland, where she served as US Distinguished Fulbright. Her next book, Come Bite, is out from Milkweed Press in 2027. She lives just outside Berkeley, California.

Oswaldo Vargas is a former farmworker, a graduate from UC Davis, and a 2021 recipient of the Undocupoets Fellowship. He has been anthologized in Nepantla: An Anthology Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color (Nightboat Books), Puro Chicanx Writers of the 21st Century (Cutthroat, A Journal Of The Arts and The Black Earth Institute) and Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute). His work can also be seen in publications such as Narrative, Queen Mob's Teahouse, and The West Trade Review. He lives and dreams in Sacramento, California.

Jimmy Vega is the child of Mexican immigrants, a Chicano Los Angeles poet, educator, and interdisciplinary artist. He holds a BA from UCLA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing from CalArts. His poems have appeared or are forth- coming in Diode, Dunce Codex, Maintenant, and elsewhere. He is currently the Interim Executive Director of Beyond Baroque Literary / Arts Center, and lives and works in Los Angeles.

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her ekphrastic debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Rooja and her work have been featured on NPR, The Hive Poetry Collective, and The Slowdown. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Nimrod, Southern Humanities Review, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Rooja is a poetry editor at CALYX Journal and a member of the Sierra Poetry Festival’s Programming Committee. 

Shelly Covert is a descendant of the Nisenan people who have made their homes in and around Nevada County since time immemorial. She is the elected Spokesperson for the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe and sits on the Tribal Council. She is also the Executive Director of California Heritage Indigenous Research Project (CHIRP), the Tribally guided 501c3 that supports the Nevada City Rancheria Nisenan Tribe, through its mission to Preserve, Protect and Perpetuate Nisenan Culture.

Sands Hall is the author of the award-winning memoir, Reclaiming My Decade Lost in Scientology (Counterpoint). She teaches annually for the Community of Writers and the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. Her prize-winning essays and stories have appeared in such journals as Alta Journal, New England Review, Iowa Review, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Karen Terrey—a writer, editor, and writing coach under Tangled Roots Writing—is Nevada County Poet Laureate. Terrey has taught at Lake Tahoe Community College, Sierra Nevada College, and Sierra College, and served as a poetry editor for the Pitkin Review and Quay. She is a recipient of a Sierra Arts Endowment Grant, the John Woods Scholarship to Prague Summer Program, the Steve Turner Scholarship to Surprise Valley Writer's Conference, and a scholarship to the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in Rhino, Edge, Meadow, WordRiot, Puerto Del Sol, Wicked Alice, Canary, and Gray Sparrow Journal, among others. Her poetry anthology Bite and Blood is available from Finishing Line Press and local bookstores, including Sundance Books in Reno, NV, and Word After Word in Truckee, CA.