Forged in Verse: Chicago, the Midwest & the American Poetic Tradition, Sponsored by Red Hen Press

Mayda del Valle was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. She is the author of The University of Hip-Hop, winner of the 2016 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize (Northwestern UP), and A South Side Girl’s Guide to Love and Sex (Tia Chucha Press). She began her career at the Nuyorican Poets Café, where she was the 2001 Grand Slam Champion, and went on to be the National Poetry Slam Champion the same year. She appeared in the HBO series Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry and was a contributing writer and original cast member of the Tony Award–winning Def Poetry Jam on Broadway. She has performed at venues across the world, including the White House in 2009, by invitation of President Obama and the First Lady. In 2024 del Valle received the Letras Boricuas Fellowship from the Flamboyan Arts Fund and the Mellon Foundation. Most recently she was selected as the second poet laureate of the City of Chicago and began her tenure in January 2026.

Luis J. Rodriguez is the author of 18 multigenre books, including the bestselling memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. and its sequel, It Calls You Back: An Odyssey Through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing. In Chicago, he founded Tia Chucha Press in 1989, which continues to publish poets from throughout the country. After moving to LA, he cofounded, with his wife Trini, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural & Bookstore in 2001. For 45 years he’s done creative writing workshops, poetry readings, and healing circles in prisons, jails, and juvenile lockups throughout the US, as well as in Mexico, Central America, South America, and Europe. With nine books of poetry, Rodriguez also served as Los Angeles poet laureate from 2014 to 2016. Rodriguez recently received a California Legacy Fellowship and a Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2026, the Poetry Foundation selected him for a Pegasus Award for Service in Poetry.

Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana, and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in creative writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English literature and creative writing from the University of Southern California. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Testify (2017) and Trouble Funk (2023). His poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Ploughshares and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is an assistant professor of English at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.

Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton), The Armageddon of Funk, and We Are All the Black Boy (Tia Chucha Press). Recognition of his work includes multiple individual artist grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, a Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award, San Francisco Public Library Laureate, Creative Work Fund Award, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, an NEA Fellowship, and more. He is coeditor, with poet and translator Chun Yu, of The Wind Stokes Flames, a forthcoming English/Chinese anthology. Yu has translated his poems as part of their cofounded project Two Languages / One Community. The translation of his serial poem on police killings “What Not to Do (an unfinished poem)” is published at Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. He served as deputy director for San Francisco’s MOAD and founding director of Chicago’s Guild Literary Complex.