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Dr. Carolyn Forché – Presidential Fellow in Creative Writing – Dr. Carolyn Forché was named a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in January 2022, a position held by only 120 poets since 1946. The Academy of American Poets was founded in 1943 and remains a vibrant organization with a robust archive of American poetry and as a force behind National Poetry Month in April. 

Carolyn Forché is the author of five books of poetry. Her first poetry collection, Gathering The Tribes (Yale University Press, 1976), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. In 1977, she traveled to Spain to translate the work of Salvadoran-exiled poet Claribel Alegría and, upon her return, received a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which enabled her to travel to El Salvador, where she worked as a human rights advocate. Her second book, The Country Between Us (Harper and Row, 1982), received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was also the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets. Her third book of poetry, The Angel of History (HarperCollins, 1994), was chosen for The Los Angeles Times Book Award. Blue Hour is her fourth collection of poems (HarperCollins, 2003), and her latest, In the Lateness of the World (Penguin Press, 2020), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2021. 

Her memoir What You Have Heard Is True (Penguin Random House, 2019) was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award and is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life. 

Dr. Hovannisian is the preeminent historian of Armenia and the Armenian genocide. He is the author and editor of many books, including Looking Backward, Moving Forward: Confronting the Armenian Genocide, The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies and the four-volume work, The Republic of Armenia.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the "I Witness Award" of the Jewish World Watch. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and Professor Emeritus at UCLA.

Dr. Johnson spent several decades as an entrepreneur starting and building national businesses prior to becoming a Chapman University Trustee and Professor. After a wide ranging and intriguing business career he returned to the university campus to receive his undergraduate degree at Chapman and graduate degrees at Claremont Graduate University. Traveling to nearly 100 countries with his sons over many years created a strong sense of wonder and curiosity about the American Dream and how it came about. These life journeys led him to study American Politics and the Comparative Politics of the Middle East to try and understand “how things really work”. Although continuing to be deeply involved in philanthropic, political, and academic organizations and boards, he continues to research and study The Founders, Congressional Decision Making and the extremely volatile history and behavior of the Middle East.

Dr. Kurtz is the author of Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2014), which was named a "Best Book of 2014" by The New Yorker, The Boston Globe, and National Public Radio. The Los Angeles Times called the book " breathtaking, " and it has received high critical praise in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, and many other publications. A Dutch translation appeared in 2015.

A 2016 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, he is a graduate of Tufts University, the New England Conservatory of Music, and holds a PhD from Stanford University in German studies and comparative literature. He has taught at Stanford University, San Francisco State University, and is currently on the faculty at The Gallatin School at New York University. He lives in New York City and is at work on a novel and a nonfiction project, both about the Empire State Building.

Nadia Murad is a survivor of the 2014 genocide of the Yazidi people by ISIS in Northern Iraq.  Over 600 people from her village were murdered including Ms. Murad’s mother and six of her brothers and stepbrothers.  Ms. Murad was one of more than 6,700 Yazidi women and girls taken prisoner by the Islamic State in Iraq. She successfully escaped from her captors and was taken in by a neighboring family who was able to smuggle her out of the Islamic State controlled area, allowing her to make her way to a refugee camp in northern Iraq.

In 2016, Ms. Murad was named the first Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human trafficking of the United Nations (UNODC).  To help survivors rebuild their lives, she plays a central role in developing the Fund for Survivors of Conflict Related Sexual Violence, recently endorsed by the UN Secretary General and adopted by the UN Security Council (Resolution 2467).  Since 2015, she has been working to bring ISIS before the International Criminal Court on charges of genocide and crimes against humanity.

In 2018, Ms. Murad received the Nobel Peace Prize and also was the recipient of the Václav Havel Human Rights Prize and the Sakharov Prize.

Dr. Nesbitt was born on Chicago's West Side, has spent more than five decades as an educator, activist, and speaker on Africa, foreign policy, and racism. Prexy's career has also included extensive consulting and training on class, race, multiculturalism and diversity. A teacher and lecturer for many years all over the USA, he additionally has worked as a "red cap," social worker, union organizer, special assistant to Chicago’s Mayor, the late Harold Washington, and a senior program officer with the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago. Over the course of his career, Prexy has made more than one hundred trips to Africa, including trips taken in secret to apartheid-torn South Africa. A product of the University College of Dar Es Salaam and Antioch College, he was active in the USA, Canada and Europe in the struggle to end apartheid and worked to end colonialism in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe (former Rhodesia) and Namibia (former Southwest Africa). From 1979-1983, he worked worldwide as the Program Director of the World Council of Churches Program to Combat Racism based out of Geneva, Switzerland. In the late 80's he served as senior consultant to the Mozambique Government organizing in North America to prevent the apartheid-backed rebel movement, RENAMO, from gaining official support from the Reagan administration and its allies. Prexy has lectured and written widely, both in the United States and abroad, publishing one book and articles in some twenty-five international journals. He was interviewed in the 1993 documentary about police brutality in Chicago, "The End of the Nightstick;" appears prominently in the 2014 documentary "Soft Vengeance" on the life of South African High Court Justice, Albie Sachs, and also served as a cowriter on the 1999 BBC/PBS production of The People's Century film series segment, "Skin Deep," a documentary about racism in the United States and South Africa. For thirty-three years, he taught African history courses at Chicago's Columbia College and took people on educational, cultural and political tours to various 'Third World' countries, regions and situations, both abroad and in the United States. One recent trip, through the organization he founded, MAKING THE ROAD, was to Brazil, Mozambique, Namibia and South Africa, June-August, 2013. One of his most signal lifetime achievements, according to those who know him well, is that he has had the honor of knowing and working for the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Eduardo Mondlane, Samora Machel and Mayor Harold Washington, Additionally, he has worked closely with Amilcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, Nelson Mandela, and Graca Machel.

Dr. Perloff is Sadie D. Patek Professor of Humanities Emerita at Stanford University. She is also Florence Scott Professor Emerita of English at the University of Southern California.

Marjorie Perloff teaches courses and writes on twentieth and now twenty-first century poetry and poetics, both Anglo-American and from a Comparatist perspective, as well as on intermedia and the visual arts. Her first three books dealt with individual poets--Yeats, Robert Lowell, and Frank O'Hara. She then published The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981), a book that has gone through a number of editions, and led to her extensive exploration of avant-garde art movements in The Futurist Moment:Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986, new edition, 1994), and subsequent books (13 in all). Wittgenstein's Ladder brought philosophy into the picture and Perloff has recently published her cultural memoir The Vienna Paradox (2004), which has been widely discussed. Her most recent book Differentials: Poetry,Poetics, Pedagogy won the Robert Penn Warren Prize for literary criticism in 2005 as well as Honorable Mention for the Robert Motherwell Prize of the Dedalus Foundation. She is a frequent reviewer for periodicals from TLS and The Washington Post to all the major scholarly journals, and has lectured at most major universities in the U.S. and at European, Asian, and Latin American universities and festivals. Perloff has held Guggenheim, NEH, and Huntington fellowships, served on the Advisory Board of the Stanford Humanities Center, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is currently Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California. Perloff was the 2006 President of the Modern Language Association.