Sam Hamill will open the season with a reading on October 10, 2007. Hamill is not only a publisher but the founder of Copper Canyon Press. He will receive the Forum's first Charity Randall Citation of the season as the author of more than 40 volumes of original poetry, three volumes of literary essays, and a variety of translations from Chinese, Greek, Latin, Japanese, and Estonian. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, he recently published Almost Paradise: New and Selected Poems and Translations. The epigraph of that book is a statement by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that Sam Hamill's work and very life endorse and exemplify: "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." Because the first decade of the twenty-first century finds us as a country in an ongoing and highly disputed war and because a White House poetry convocation of poets was cancelled because of fear of dissent, Hamill gathered the work of many war-resistant poets into a single volume entitled Poets Against the War in 2003. Despite political and journalistic commentary about the war, Poets Against the War made it apparent that only poetry suggests-as it did after the catastrophe of 9/11/2001-the true dimensions and tragedy of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Ken Waldman is a fiddler-poet and a performance-poet in the best sense of both terms who will make his Forum debut on November 7, 2007. For the past two decades Mr. Waldman has lived in Alaska and is the author of two collections of poetry: Nome Poems and To Live in this World. His full-time occupation as a fiddler-poet has taken him to prominent universities, festivals, art centers, and clubs throughout the United States. His most recent and widely read book is As the World Burns. It is composed of sonnets authored by Waldman through the persona of President George W. Bush as well as other poems whose subjects are Vice-President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Texas, and Hurricane Katrina.

Andrea Hollander Budy and Sheryl St. Germain are not only poets but also teachers of poets; they will give a joint reading on December 5, 2007. Andrea Hollander Budy's most recent book, Woman in the Painting, was published by Pittsburgh-base Autumn House Press. She has two previous collections, including House Without a Dreamer, which earned her the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize. She has received more than a dozen national awards, grants, and citations. Although she makes her home in Arkansas, she has had recent appointments as writer-in-residence in Utah as well as at Lyon College, where she was given the Lamar Williamson Prize for Excellence in Teaching. The losses she writes about are primarily but not exclusively those that happen within the family. As a New Orleans native, Sheryl St. Germain, the Director of the Master of Fine Arts Writing program at Chatham College, knows too well of the losses suffered by her native city in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Her books include The Mask of Medusa, Going Home, Making Bread at Midnight, and How Heavy the Breath of God. She has traveled extensively, from Ecuador to Guatemala to Texas to Pittsburgh, and her subjects range from the tropical to the erotic, from insects to angels. Burton Raffel has written of her that "she accepts herself, with an intensity, and with a gloriously swaggering melodiousness that are, I think, new to poetry in our language." Sheryl St. Germain has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Dobie-Paisano Fellowship from the Texas Council on the Arts, and the Ki Davis Award from the Aspen Writers Foundation.

Pittsburgh-based Terrance Hayes will launch the second half of the season with a reading on January 30, 2008. In his poems, he explores the spiritual and intellectual losses of racism and prejudice and the questions of how identity is shaped by the culture in which it is formed. Poet and memoirist Mary Karr has said of his work, "Hayes will disturb the comfortable and comfort the disturbed." He is the author of Wind in a Box. Hip Logic, and Muscular Music. His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award, a Pushcart Prize, two Best American Poetry selections, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poems have appeared in a range of journals, including The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Hayan Charara and Bill Zavatsky will partner together for a joint reading on March 5, 2008. Hayan Charara is an authentic American poet of Lebanese heritage. His poetry testifies not only to his American nationality but to his ancestry when he writes about Detroit, where he was born, and New York, where he lived before moving with his wife to Houston, Texas. The death of his mother, the ongoing grief of his father and the annoying stereotyping that he had to deal with in Michigan are but three of the themes that resonate in his work. It's understandable why he has a camaraderie with poets like Philip Levine, Jim Daniels, and Lawrence Joseph because they all inhabited the same world. Mr. Charara graduated from Wayne State University in Detroit and holds a graduate degree from the James W. Draper Program in Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. His most recent teaching positions were a Professor of Poetry Writing at the University of Texas and at St. Edward's University in Austin. Bill Zavatsky has the amazing gift of making poetic what some would see as merely pedestrian-uptown New York or the pleasure of a Nicaraguan cigar. At a time when poets are cautioned about waxing sentimental about pets, Zavasky writes an elegy about his pet cat Beetle that speaks to the sense of loss in each of us when, in the words of Federica Fellini, "we know what we love only when we've lost it." Mr. Zavatsky studied at Columbia University, worked as a journalist for the New York Times Book Review and Rolling Stone. He is also a professional jazz pianist. As a translator, he has focused on the French poets Valery Larbaud, Robert Desnos, and Andre Breton. His translation of Breton's Earthlight wont he PEN/Book of the Month Club Translation Prize. He presently teaches English at the Trinity School in Manhattan. His books of poems are Theories of Rain, For Steve Royal, and Where X Marks the Spot.

Brian Turner's Here, Bullet is a first-hand poetic account of his months of combat in Iraq. Unignorably he resurrects the Highway of Death, the rudimentary Arabic he had to learn to stay alive, the body bags, the mutilated soldiers in crowded operating rooms, the funeral caravans in Najaf and the sand, the sand, the sand. Having earned his MFA from the University of Oregon, Turner served first in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division and later as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade in Iraq. A review of Here, Bullet in Publisher's Weekly noted that the book "highlights the violence and death of the war in a manner little seen elsewhere." Like the war poems of Wilfred Owen and Randall Jarrell, the poems of Brian Turner are beyond "spin" or denial. Though he lives in California, he is in constant demand as a reader throughout the country. On April 2, 2008 he will make his first Pittsburgh appearance, during which he will receive the second of the Forum's seasonal Charity Randall Citations.