Haus für Poesie

Currently living in Tucson, Arizona, Sherwin Bitsui (b. 1975) is originally from White Cone, part of the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He belongs to the Todich’ii’nii clan. Bitusi recently published his second volume of poetry with the long poem “Flood Song”. The sharp, lively pictures that Bitsui paints in his poetry are reminiscent of surrealist schools of thought, above all Latin American surrealism. He combines images of the wide landscapes of southwest USA with Navajo mythology, these myths in turn colliding with contemporary urban life. Alongside these antagonisms, the tension between US English and Diné, the highly complex Navajo language, is also inherent in Bitsui’s texts, which are all written in English. Bitsui is a former student of the Institute of American Indian Arts and he has won several scholarships to date.
Publications:
Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press 2003)
Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press 2009)

(born 1952 in Akron, Ohio) lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she is also Professor of Creative Writing.
In 1987, Dove was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fer cycle of poems “Thomas and Beulah” (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1986). In this work as in others, Dove places the apparently insignificant moments that shape our lives in relation to historical and political developments.
From 1993 to 1995 Rita Dove was Poet Laureate of the United States. She was the first person of Afro-American origin, and also the youngest, to have been accorded this honour. During her tenure of this office, Dove mainly tried to put across the message that poetry is not something that is reserved for an elite but should have a place in daily life. Among other things, she appeared on Sesame Street to get children interested in poems and literature.
Rita Dove and her work have been honoured with many awards, including, as well as stipendiums and prizes, more than twenty honorary doctorates. Recent distinctions have included the John Heinz Prize (1996), the highest award in monetary terms for American artists, the “National Humanities Medal” awarded by the President of the United States (also 1996), the Library Lion Medal of the New York Public Library (2000), the “Duke Ellington Lifetime Achievement Award” (2001) and the “Common Wealth Award” (2006).
Her most recent collections of poetry have been “On the Bus with Rosa Parks” (1999), “American Smooth” (2004) and the highly-praised “Sonata Mulattica” (2009), all published by W W Norton&Co.

Christian Hawkey (b. 1969 Pine Island, Florida), a lyricist, art critic and publisher, and the founder of the literary journal “Jubilat”, lives in Berlin and Brooklyn, where he teaches literature and creative writing at the Pratt Institute. In 2008, he received a scholarship from the Artists-in-Berlin programme of the DAAD. His poetry volume “The Book of Funnels” (Verse Press 2004) and “Citizen Of” (Wave Books 2007) won, among other accolades, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, the Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award and an award from the Academy of American Poets. Christian Hawkey’s poems have been published in the most important journals and anthologies in North America, as well as in Sweden, Slovenia, Austria and Germany. “Reisen in Ziegengeschwindigkeit” is his first publication in German, translated by Steffen Popp and Uljana Wolf. Most recently, new poems translated by Steffen Popp have been published in the literary journal “Spritz”.
Publications (selection):
The Book of Funnels. Poems (Verse Press, 2004)
Citizen of. Poems (Wave Books, 2007) 

Claudia Keelan (b. 1959 Anaheim) lives in Las Vegas where she publishes the poetry magazine “Interim” and teaches creative writing at the University of Las Vegas. In her texts, the epigone Gertrude Stein attempts to create a synthesis through the pairing and comparison of various circumstances, in doing so pursuing a poetic dialectic. One example of this is her long poem “Bluff City”, in which, inspired by the activities of the US civil rights movement, she compares the present day with the 1960s, with the result that you feel as if you are living not just in one time, but simultaneously in the past and the present, and inevitably exposed to both influences. Keelan has published six volumes of poetry to date and her works appear in numerous anthologies. Among other awards, she won the Silver Pen Award in 2001.
Publications (selection):
The Secularist (University of Georgia, 1997)
Utopic (Alice James, 2000)
The Devotion Field (Alice James Books, 2005)
Missing Her (New Issues Press, 2009)

Edwin Torres (b. 1957 New York) is a spoken word artist of Puerto Rican descent who travelled the world with the legendary “Nuyorican Poets Cafe Live” collective. Alongside his own individual work, he works continually with other artists. Torres’s work combines performative spoken word poetry with sound poetry and use of the body, sound elements and theatre. He has won numerous scholarships, above all from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art. His works have appeared in journals and anthologies, while his CD  “Holy Kid” was part of the “The American Century Pt. II” exhibition. Torres founded the “non-movement” NORICUA, with whom he performed in the Bronx and Berlin, among other places, and disseminated “non-ideologies”. He was also co-publisher of the highly acclaimed poetry DVD “Rattapallax”.
Publications:
I Hear Things People Haven't Really Said, Onomalingua (Rattappalax Press, 1991)
Fractured Humorous (Subpress, 1999)
The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books, 2001)
Please (Faux Press, 2002)
The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books, 2007)

Rosmarie Waldrop (b. 1935 Kitzingen am Main) met her husband Keith when she was a student in Würzburg. She has now been living with him in the USA for more than 50 years. With Keith, Rosmarie Waldrop runs Burning Deck Press, one of the most significant publishers of contemporary poetry in the USA. Waldrop not only publishes experimental texts or translates them into English – she is herself one of the most important exponents of experimental poetry in the USA. Since 1967, she has published a comprehensive range of work for which she has received numerous accolades, including being made Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government and being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In the poems that make up “Shorter American Memory” (1988), Waldrop dealt explicitly with the history of her adopted country. Rosmarie Waldrop will be a guest at the poesiefestival with her work “Ein Schlüssel zur Sprache Amerikas” (Urs Engeler Editor, 2004), translated by Elke Erb and Marianne Frisch. The volume is a multi-layered discussion about conquest – whether this is the colonisation of America by European settlers or Waldrop’s own immersion in the USA and its language, or the relationship and connotations of femininity and masculinity.
Publications:
The Reproduction of Profiles (NY: New Directions, 1987) German version: Reproduktion von  Profilen, translated by Hannah Möckel-Rieke (Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 1995)
Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn Publishing, 2003)
Blindsight (New Directions, 2004)
Dissonance (if you are interested) (University Alabama Press, 2005)
Splitting Image (Zasterle, 2006)
Curves to the Apple (New Directions, 2006)

Saul Williams (b. 1972 New York) is a hybrid. He is a rock star, rapper and poet. He was the Grand Slam Champion des Nuyorican Poets Cafe and played the lead role in the film “Slam”, which was a winner at the Sundance Festival and scooped the Golden Camera award in Cannes. He has worked, among others, with Erykah Badu, De La Soul, The Fugees, Rage Against the Machine and Nine Inch Nails. In addition to music CDs, he has also published four volumes of poetry. His works are characterised by uncompromising political messages. His album against the war in Iraq called “Not in my name” has become one of his best-known works.
Publications:
The Seventh Octave (1998)
S/he (1999)
, Said the Shotgun to the Head.  (2003)
The Dead Emcee Scrolls (2006)
CD releases:
Penny for A Thought (2000)Amethyst Rock Star (2001)Not in My Name (2003)Saul Williams (2004)
The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust! (2007)
NGH WHT - The Dead Emcee Scroll with The Arditti Quartet (2009)

John Yau was born in New York in 1950, where he still lives today. He is the son of Chinese-American parents who emigrated to the USA shortly before his birth. As far as art is concerned – and Yau is not only an author but also teaches art history at the Rutgers University in New Jersey – he found the poetry of the 1960s particularly appealing during his years as a student. Yau is one of the most important poets of his generation, and his work can best be classified as language poetry. His poems are often inspired by his working together with plastic artists such as painters and photographers. In his texts, John Yau goes searching for the structure of language, embracing not only the grammatical and structural aspects but also the semantic aspects of language, for example how language designates the foreign, the other, with words and terms, and how exclusion and oppression appear in language and ultimately therefore in the world. Alongside volumes of poetry, Yau has also made innumerable contributions to catalogues and art history works, and he was won many awards.
Publications:
My Symptoms (1998)
In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations (1999)
Borrowed Love Poems (2002)
Ing Grish (2005)
Paradiso Diaspora (2006)
In German:
Berlin Diptychon (Weidle Verlag, 1995)
New York Islands (artist’s book with Martin Noël, Weidle Verlag, 1999)
Andalusia (with drawings and photographs by Leiko Ikemura, Weidle Verlag, 2006)