In honor of April's
National Poetry Month, your Alumni Engagement team invites you to listen to the works of three distinguished alumni poets, while learning about their creative journeys.
Bill Hollands ’87 worked for the New York Public Library and Microsoft before becoming a high school English teacher in Seattle. Since returning to writing poetry following a long hiatus, his work has been featured on
The Slowdown podcast and in numerous poetry journals. In 2025, he was selected as a Jack Straw Writing Fellow, the same year his debut collection,
Mangrove (ELJ Editions), was published.
Mayda del Valle ’00 is the Poet Laureate of Chicago. She launched her career at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, where she became the 2001 Grand Slam Champion before also winning the National Poetry Slam the same year, becoming the youngest poet and the first Latine person to do so. She is the author of
A South Side Girl’s Guide to Love and Sex and
The University of Hip-Hop, published in 2018 and 2017, respectively, by Northwestern University Press.
Emily Bright ’04 is the weekend host of Minnesota Public Radio News, where she also covers arts and books. She read from her first collection,
Fierce Delight: Poems of Early Motherhood (North Star Press), on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” in 2025, and her second poetry book,
This Ground Beneath Our Feet (Holy Cow Press), will be published in April 2026.