17th Annual Scissortail: Featured Authors

LOU BERNEY

Lou Berney is the author of November Road (winner of the Dagger, Hammett, Anthony, Barry, Lefty, and Macavity, and a Washington Post Best Book of 2018), The Long and Faraway Gone (winner of the Edgar, Anthony, Barry, Macavity, and ALA awards), Whiplash River, and Gutshot Straight, all from William Morrow. He’s also written a collection of stories, The Road to Bobby Joe, and his short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He teaches in the MFA program at Oklahoma City University.

JENNIFER CASAS GIVHAN

Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American and indigenous poet and novelist (author of Trinity Sight and Jubilee), who grew up in the Imperial Valley, a small, border community in the Southern California desert. Her family has ancestral ties to the indigenous peoples of New Mexico and Texas, including Ysleta del Sur and the Tigua Indian peoples of the Ysleta region of El Paso.

Givhan earned her Master’s degree in Fine Arts in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and a Master’s degree in English Literature and Creative Writing at California State University Fullerton. She has been awarded a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latinx Scholarship, a 2020 Southwest Book Award, an Honorable Mention for 2021 The Rudolfo Anaya Best Latino Focused Fiction Book Award category from the International Latino Book Awards Foundation, The 2019 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize chosen by Tyehimba Jess, Cutthroat Journal’s 2018 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize chosen by Patricia Spears Jones, The 2017 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize chosen by Monica Youn, The 2015 Lascaux Review Editors’ Choice Poetry Prize, and The Pinch Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Limón.

Givhan’s poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction has appeared in The New Republic, The Nation, Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, POETRY, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Salon, The Rumpus, and Prairie Schooner, among many others.

ARTHUR SZE

Arthur Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of eleven books of poetry, including The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021); Sight Lines (Copper Canyon, 2019), which won the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry; Compass Rose (Copper Canyon, 2014), a Pulitzer Prize finalist; The Ginkgo Light (Copper Canyon, 2009), selected for the Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Book Award in Poetry and a PEN Southwest Book Award; Quipu (Copper Canyon, 2005); The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon, 1998), selected for the Balcones Poetry Prize and an Asian-American Literary Award; and Archipelago (Copper Canyon, 1995), selected for an American Book Award.

His other books include River River (1987), Dazzled (1982), Two Ravens (1976; revised edition, 1984), and The Willow Wind (1972; revised edition, 1981). He has also published The Silk Dragon: Translations from the Chinese (Copper Canyon, 2001), selected for a Western States Book Award, and edited Chinese Writers on Writing (Trinity University Press, 2010). Pig's Heaven Inn, a bilingual, Chinese/English selected poems, was published in Beijing (Intellectual Property Publishing House, 2014).

His poems have appeared internationally in such publications as American Poet; The American Poetry Review; Boston Review; Chicago Review; Conjunctions; Field; The Georgia Review; Harvard Review; The Kenyon Review; Manoa; The Massachusetts Review; Michigan Quarterly Review; Narrative; The Nation; New England Review; The New Republic; The New York Times; The New Yorker; Orion; The Paris Review; Ploughshares; Poetry; Tin House; Triquarterly; The Virginia Quarterly Review; The Washington Post; Hotel Parnassus: Poetry International 2007 (Rotterdam); Kyoto Journal (Kyoto); Pamirs Poetry Journey: The First Chinese-English Poetry Festival, 2007 (Huang Shan, China); Promoteo (XIX Festival Internacional de Poesía de Medellín, 2009); American Alphabets; The Best American Poetry (2004, 2019, 2020); Language for a New Century; The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses (1996, 2010, 2020) and Verse and Universe. His poems have been translated into thirteen languages: Albanian, Brazilian Portuguese, Burmese, Chinese, Dutch, German, Italian, Korean, Lithuanian, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish, and Uzbek.

He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the 8th Annual ‘T’ Space Poetry Award (2020), The Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers (2013), a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award (1998-2000), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1997), a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry (1995), two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships (1982, 1993), a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, Brown University (1991), five Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry grants (1980, 1983, 1994, 1997, 2012), and the Eisner Prize, University of California at Berkeley (1971). Sze was a Helen Zell Visiting Writer at the University of Michigan (2019), a Humana Visiting Scholar at Centre College (2012), a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University (2005), a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College (2004-2005), and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, Naropa University, and the University of Utah. He served as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2012 to 2017 and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and was the first Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives.