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New American Poets

Edited by Jack Myers and Roger Weingarten

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  • Format: Softcover
  • ISBN: 978-1-56792-302-5
  • Pages: 464
  • Published: 2005

A generous anthology of some of the most exciting poetry being written today, New American Poets collects some 350 poems by more than ninety of the nation’s strongest young voices. It does not aim to confirm or usurp an existing canon. It does not try to establish a new one. It merely showcases poems that the editors consider “provocative, timely, important, and accessible.” Their taste tends toward free verse, vernacular writing, and poems that reflect “the unique and diverse character of the contemporary American experience, whether that character is rural or urban, aesthetic or political, male or female, black, white, red, brown or yellow.” The poets include Stephen Berg, Rita Dove, Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Rodney Jones, Yusef Komunyakaa, Li-Young Lee, Paul Monette, Sharon Olds, Sherod Santos, Chase Twitchell, and Franz Wright. Innovative and provocative, this volume is required reading for all poetry enthusiasts, or for anyone interested in the current and future trends of American verse.

“This anthology continually delights, surprises, startles. What more can you ask?”
— New York Newsday

Jack Myers was born in Lynn, Massachusetts and educated at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After finishing his MFA at Iowa, Myers moved to Dallas to take a position at the Southern Methodist University, where he would remain, with hiatuses to teach at other schools, for over thirty years. In 2003, he was made Texas Poet Laureate in honor of his accomplishments and commitment to helping aspiring poets. His third wife, Thea Temple, continues to run The Writer’s Garret, a nonprofit writing community that the couple founded in Dallas.

Roger Weingarten has published ten poetry collections and co-edited seven anthologies. He was involved in the establishment of the MFA in Writing and the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College and taught there from 1980 to 2008. He has also taught at many other colleges, universities, and writers’ conferences around the country. He has received numerous awards for his poetry, including a Pushcart Prize, a Louisville Review Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Award, and an Ingram Merill Foundation Award in Literature.