21st-century American poets

Shane McCrae (born September 22, 1975, Portland, Oregon) is an American poet, and is currently Poetry Editor of Image.McCrae was the recipient of a 2011 Whiting Award, and in 2012 his collection Mule was a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a PEN Center USA Literary Award. In 2013, McCrae received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He received a Lannan Literary Award in 2017, in 2018 his collection In the Language of My Captor won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and in 2019 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best American Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Fence, and AGNI.

Farid Matuk is an American poet and educator, born to a Peruvian father and Syrian mother in Peru. He writes in both English and Spanish, and his Spanish translations have appeared in Kadar Koli, Translation Review, Mandorla, and Bombay Gin. His poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Flag + Void, Iowa Review, and Poetry and abroad in White Wall Review (Canada), Critical Quarterly (UK), and Poem: International English Language Quarterly (UK). He is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Arizona. His book This Isa Nice Neighborhood (Letter Machine, 2010) was the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Arab American Book Awards. and was included in The Poetry Society of America's New American Poets series. My Daughter La Chola (Ahsata, 2013) received an Honorable Mention in the 2014 Arab American Book Awards. My Daughter La Chola was also named among the best books of 2013 by The Volta and by The Poetry Foundation while selections from its pages have been anthologized in The Best American Experimental Poetry, 2014, The &Now Awards: The Best Innovative Writing Vol. 3, and in Angels of the Americlypse: An Anthology of New Latino@ Writing. He serves as poetry editor for Fence and on the editorial board for the Creative Writing Studies book series at Bloomsbury. Matuk is the recipient of both the Ford Fellowship and Fulbright Fellowship. The University of Arizona Press published his second full-length collection, The Real Horse, in 2018.

Maggie Nelson (born 1973) is an American writer. She has been described as a genre-busting writer defying classification, working in autobiography, art criticism, theory, feminism, queerness, sexual violence, the history of the avant-garde, aesthetic theory, philosophy, scholarship, and poetry. Nelson has been the recipient of a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, a 2012 Creative Capital Literature Fellowship, a 2011 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Nonfiction. Other honors include the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and a 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Arts Writers Grant.

Raúl R. Salinas (March 17, 1934 - February 13, 2008), better known by his pen name raúlrsalinas, was a Chicano pinto poet, memoirist, social activist, and prison journalist. Much of raúlrsalinas' writing was grounded in arguments for social justice and human rights. He was an early pioneer of Chicano pinto (prisoner) poetry and is notable for his use of vernacular, bilingual, and free verse aesthetics.Alongside Ricardo Sánchez, Judy Lucero, Luis Talamantez, and Jimmy Santiago Baca, raúlrsalinas sought to make prisoners' rights a more central focus of the Chicano Movement. Incarcerated for over a decade (1959–1972) for carrying a small amount of marijuana, raúlrsalinas wrote extensively while in prison, including essays, letters, prose, and journalism, the vast majority which is now held at Stanford University. raúlrsalinas' work extended beyond his prison writing, focusing also on his Xicanindio (indigenous identified Chicano) heritage and his politics as a Latino internationalist. According to Oxford University, raúlrsalinas "transformed elements of the American literary canon."

April Bernard (born 1956) is an American poet. She was born and raised in New England, and graduated from Harvard University. She has worked as a senior editor at Vanity Fair, Premiere, and Manhattan, inc. In the early 1990s, she taught at Amherst College. In Fall 2003, she was Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. She currently teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, the Boston Review, AGNI, Ploughshares, Parnassus, and The New York Review of Books.

Dan Chiasson (; born May 9, 1971 in Burlington, Vermont) is an American poet, critic, and journalist. The Sewanee Review called Chiasson "the country’s most visible poet-critic." He is the Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English Literature at Wellesley College.
Chiasson is the author of six books: The Afterlife of Objects (University of Chicago Press, 2002), Natural History (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America (University of Chicago Press, 2007), Where's the Moon, There's the Moon (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), Bicentennial (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) and The Math Campers (Alfred A. Knopf, 2020).
Chiasson is currently working on a nonfiction book about politics and change in American life, "Bernie for Burlington: Sanders in a Changing Vermont, 1968-1991," based in part on his own early memories of Mayor Sanders, to be published by Pantheon in 2025.

Morgan Parker (born December 19, 1987) is an American poet, novelist, and editor. She is the author of poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books, 2015), There are More Beautiful Things than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), and Magical Negro (Tin House Books, 2019), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also author of the young adult novel, Who Put This Song On (Delacorte Press, 2019).

Carrie Allen McCray (October 4, 1913 – July 25, 2008) was an African-American writer.

Ramona Lofton (born August 4, 1950), better known by her pen name Sapphire, is an American author and performance poet.

Anne Waldman (born April 2, 1945) is an American poet.
Since the 1960s, Waldman has been an active member of the Outriders Poetry Project experimental poetry community as a writer, performer, collaborator, professor, editor, scholar, and cultural/political activist. She has also been connected to the Beat Generation poets.