Michael Dumanis and Manuel Gonzales

OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIRTUALLY | Dumanis is the author of two poetry collections, Creature (forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2023) and My Soviet Union (University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He is also coeditor, with Cate Marvin, of Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century (Sarabande, 2006) and, with Kevin Prufer, of Russell Atkins: On the Life and Work of an American Master (Pleiades, 2013). His poems have appeared in such journals as American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The Common, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and in the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day Project. Born in Moscow, in the former Soviet Union, Dumanis emigrated with his family at the age of five and grew up in Western New York. He has been a member of the Literature faculty at Bennington College since 2012, and serves as director of the Poetry at Bennington reading series and editor of the literary magazine Bennington Review.

Gonzales is the author of The Miniature Wife and Other Stories, which won the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction and the John Gardner Prize for Fiction, and the novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack! A graduate of the Columbia University Creative Writing Program, he teaches writing and literature at Bennington College. He is also a core faculty member of the Bennington Writing Seminars. He has published fiction and nonfiction in Buzzfeed Reader, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Esquire, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, and The Believer. Gonzales lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.