A. Van Jordan (Chair) is the author of four collections: Rise, which won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award; M-A-C-N-O-L-I-A; Quantum Lyrics; and The Cineast. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and a Pushcart Prize. He is also a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a United States Artists Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry. He has taught at a number of institutions including the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, the University of Texas at Austin, Rutgers University-Newark where he served as the Henry Rutgers Presidential Professor, and at the University of Michigan, where he currently serves as the Robert Hayden Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature and as Director of the Helen Zell Writers MFA Program. (Photo credit: A. Alvarez)