A Wound That Fights: Poetry for Liberation featuring National Student Poets Program Alumni

Darius Atefat-Peckham is an Iranian American poet and essayist. Atefat-Peckham is the author of Book of Kin, which won the 2023 Autumn House Poetry Prize, and the chapbook How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021). He is editor of his mother Susan Atefat-Peckham’s posthumous poetry collection Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry Press, 2023). His work has appeared in Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, Indiana Review, Shenandoah, The Journal, Rattle, and elsewhere. His work has also been included in the anthology My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices from the Iranian Diaspora (University of Texas Press, 2020). In 2018, he was selected by the Library of Congress as a National Student Poet. In this role, he traveled across the Midwest to teach middle and high school students about the concurrence of grief and joy in literature.

RC Davis was the 2021 National Student Poet of the Midwest. His work has appeared in Driftwood, 3Elements Review, Bodega Magazine and elsewhere and he was featured in the anthology, Respect the Mic. Originally from Oak Park, Illinois, he is studying philosophy and creative writing at Oberlin College.

Madelyn Dietz believes every craft should include a heavy helping of joy. Whether she’s writing prose or poetry, she adores capering with and uplifting all the minutiae, foods, and strangers she loves. She has been named a U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a National Student Poet, and an A. Scott Berg Fellow. She currently studies at Princeton University and is always on the lookout for the campus foxes—which are often on the lookout for squirrels.

Maya Salameh is the author of How To Make An Algorithm In The Microwave (University of Arkansas Press, 2022), winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, and the chapbook rooh (Paper Nautilus Press, 2020). She has served as a National Student Poet, America’s highest honor for youth poets, and received fellowships and support from the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the President’s Committee for the Arts and Humanities. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in POETRY, The Offing, Gulf Coast, The Rumpus, AGNI, and the LA Times, among others. She can be found @mayaslmh or mayasalameh.com.

David Xiang is a medical student and writer at Harvard Medical School. He served as a National Student Poet in 2015. Since then, he has continued to write and teach, leading workshops at Cambridge Public Library and the MGH Dementia Care Collaborative, and for his classmates in medical school. He hopes to become a physician-writer one day, and to use his writing to bring more awareness of patient and provider experiences in the hospital, touching on a wide variety of topics from medical education to end-of-life care.