Beltran:  graduated from Southern Methodist University in 2003 with a BA in Sociology and a Minor in English with a Creative Writing Emphasis.  She had the great pleasure of learning from Jack Myers from 1999 to 2003, considerably expanding her poetic horizons.  She was First Place winner of the 2002 – 2003 David R. Russell Award in Poetry at SMU.  Currently, she is the National Sales Director for Texas Southwest Floors, Inc.

is the author of three books of poetry, Paper Bird (Texas Tech), which won the AWP Award Series in Poetry, The Red Hour (HarperCollins), and Horizon Note (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the Brittingham Prize, and the chapbooks The Oboist and Naked Writing.  She is also co – editor of the Practice of Poetry: Writing Exercises from Poets Who Teach (HarperCollins, 1992).  The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, and fellowships from the arts councils of Illinois and Alabama, she is Professor of English at the University of Alabama.

books include Neither World, winner of the 1995 James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Exceptions and Melancholies: Poems 1986 –2006, winner of the 2007 PEN USA Poetry Award, as well as an award– winning translation of the Federico García Lorca collection, Poema del cante jondo / Poem of the Deep Song.

teaches in the History Department at the University of Texas at San Antonio.  Her first collection of poems, Fishing for Light, won the Wings Press Whitebird Chapbook competition for 2009.  Pecan Grove Press will publish a full collection titled Ours is a Flower in the spring of 2010.  Her poems have appeared in Borderlands and The Texas Observer as well as several anthologies, including Beloved on the Earth (Holy Cow Press, 2009).