Poetry in the Woods
Faculty

Learn more about the faculty below.

PITW Faculty 2024.

Elizabeth Hoover

Elizabeth Hoover is an Assistant Professor at Webster University in Saint Louis where she teaches classes like Archival Poetics, Genderqueer Frankenstein, and LGBTQ+ Literature. She is a poet, essayist, and critic. Her first collection of poetry, the archive is all in present tense, received the 2021 Barrow Street Book Prize and her creative nonfiction has appeared in Southeast Review, North American Review, and StoryQuarterly. The recipient of the 2024 Pat Holt Prize for Critical Art Writing from Lambda Literary, Elizabeth has writing about art, film, and books for such publications as Paper, The Art Newspaper, and the Washington Post.

James Kimbrell

James Kimbrell directs the Creative Writing Program at Florida State University. His poems have appeared in anthologies including the Best American Poetry and the Pushcart Prize Anthology. The recipient of a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, His most recent collection is Smote (2015, Sarabande Books) and his forthcoming collection The Law of Truly Large Numbers is due out with the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2025.

Jason Vasser-Elong

Jason Vasser-Elong is a professor of English and African American Studies in the Pierre Laclede Honors College at the University of Missouri – St. Louis (UMSL), where he recently earned a Doctorate of Education with a focus in Educational Practice. He is an applied - anthropologist with a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing and Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology with a concentration in African Diaspora studies. He is the author of Shrimp (2Leaf Press, 2018), a collection of poetry that analyzes identity in a post-colonial context.

Kerry James Evans

Kerry James Evans is a professor in the MFA program at Georgia College & State University and serves as the poetry editor for Arts & Letters. He is the author of Bangalore (Copper Canyon), a Lannan Literary Selection. He earned a PhD in English from Florida State University, an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University-Carbondale, and a BA in English from Missouri State University. His forthcoming collection, Nine Persimmons, is due out in 2026 with University of Nebraska Press under its imprint, The Backwaters Press.

Andrea Scarpino

Andrea Scarpino has published the poetry collections Once Upon Wing Lake, What the Willow Said as it Fell, and Once, Then, and the co-edited anthology Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice. She received a PhD in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, and an MFA from The Ohio State University. She is also co-editor of Nine Mile Magazine and served as Poet Laureate of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula 2015-2017. She teaches at St Louis University High School.

Shane Seely

Shane Seely directs the MFA program at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. His poems have appeared in journals nationwide, including The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, and Antioch Review, and have been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. He is the author of three previous books of poetry, The First Echo (LSU Press, 2019), The Surface of the Lit World (Ohio University Press, 2015 – Winner of the Hollis Summer Poetry Prize) and The Snowbound House (Anhinga Press, 2008 – Winner of the Philip Levine Prize in Poetry).

PITW Faculty Observers 2024.

Amie Whittemore

Amie Whittemore (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), Star-tent: A Triptych (Tolsun Books), and Nest of Matches (Autumn House, 2024). She was the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Eastern Illinois University and also serves as director of MTSU Write, a from-home creative writing mentorship program. Learn more at amiewhittemore.com.

Travis Mossotti

Travis Mossotti's three previous collections are About the Dead, Field Study, and Narcissus Americana. His fourth collection, Racecar Jesus, won the Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Poetry Prize (Black Spring Press Group UK, 2023). Mossotti's fifth collection, Apocryphal Genesis, won the Alma Book Award (Saturnalia Books, 2024). He recently won the 2023 Wales Poetry Award, and he currently serves as a Biodiversity Fellow for the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University. He lives and works in St. Louis.