Who We Are
Officers
Nancy White
President
Nancy White has served as co-editor-in-chief since 2008 and president since 2010.
Her first book, Sun, Moon, Salt, won the Washington Prize in 1992 shortly after she earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence. Stints at MacDowell and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown supported her early work as well, while a career in teaching (Saint Ann’s School, Bennington College, and currently at SUNY Adirondack) provides another kind of inspiration.
Her second book, Detour, came out in 2010 from Tamarack Editions. Ask Again Later, her third, was published by Tiger Bark Press in 2017. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals, from Ploughshares to Nimrod, from Black Warrior Review to Quarry West, Kin, Massachusetts Review, Beloit, New Letters, and many more.
Karren L. Alenier
Board Chair
Karren LaLonde Alenier was the first poet published (1975) by The Word Works. Karren is author of eight poetry collections, including Looking for Divine Transportation, winner of the 2002 Towson University Prize for Literature, The Anima of Paul Bowles, 2016 top staff pick at the Grolier Bookshop (Boston), and how we hold on (Broadstone Books, 2021).
In 1986, she became the second president and chairperson of the board of directors after founder Deirdra Baldwin moved from the Washington, D.C. area. Over the years she innovated many programs for The Word Works: the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series (1979-2022 ); Poet’s Jam (1984-1985); the Young Poets Competition (1988- )—later named the Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Competition; the Capital Collection (1989- )—later named the Hilary Tham Capital Collection; Arts Retreat in Tuscany, Italy (1996-2001); and Café Muse (1999- ). She is editor or co-editor of two Word Works anthologies: Whose Woods These Are and Winners (with Hilary Tham and Miles David Moore).
Her poetry and fiction have been published in the Mississippi Review, Jewish Currents, and Poet Lore. Her opera Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On with composer William Banfield premiered in New York City, June, 2005. Visit her blog at alenier.blogspot.com.
JoAnne McFarland
Board Member
JoAnne McFarland is both poet and visual artist. In addition to her board duties, she curates our brand new Multimedia page, presenting poems and collaborations that would fade in print, but flourish online.
She has served as Artistic Director of the Artpoetica Project in Brooklyn, and as Director of Exhibitions and Operations, as well as on the board of directors for the A.I.R. Gallery, also in Brooklyn.
Her one-woman shows include “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Girl,” “Acid Rain,” “Views from a Puddle,” among others, and she has exhibited widely. Her collaborations with other artists include “SALLY,” “Sediment,” “Carnival of Connectivity,” and “L’Attitude.”
JoAnne has also published numerous poetry collections: Identifying the Body, Stills, Acid Rain, Loose Horse in the Valley, and others, including collaborations and multimedia projects.
Says McFarland: “The heart of my practice is working beyond fear; more specifically, living outside the fear–state that is the centrifugal force of much of American culture. This state is induced by the proliferation of violent public images and language, narrowly defined scripts for relationship, silences around racial and gender aggression, and a stunning disrespect for the natural world.
“My mission as an artist is to tell the sometimes brutal truth about what I see around me, and to honor and celebrate my own and others’ ability to thrive, sometimes in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles.”
Jacqueline Johnson
Board Member
Jacqueline Johnson is a multi-disciplined artist creating in poetry, fiction writing, and fiber arts. She is the author of A Woman’s Season (Main Street Rag, 2015) and A Gathering of Mother Tongues (1997), winner of the Third Annual White Pine Press Poetry Award.
She recently edited About Place Journal – Works of Resistance, Resilience (October 2020), which featured the work of 83 writers and artists.
Her work has also appeared in Show Us Your Papers (Main Street Rag, 2020), “Revisiting the Elegy in the Black Lives Matter Era” (Routledge, 2020), and The Slow Down (American Public Media, October 16, 2019).
Ms. Johnson has taught poetry at Pine Manor College, City University of New York, Poets House, Very Special Arts, Imani House, the Frederick Douglass Creative Arts Center, and African Voices.
She has won residencies or awards from the Black Earth Institute, VONA / Voice of Our Nations, Brooklyn Public Library Artist Residency, MacDowell Colony for the Arts, Hurston Wright Foundation, Middle Atlantic Writers Association Award, Blue Mountain Arts Colony, and the New York Foundation of the Arts.
She is a graduate of New York University and the City University of New York. A native of Philadelphia, PA., she now resides in Brooklyn, New York.
Brad Richard
Board Member & Editor
Brad Richard is the author of Habitations, Motion Studies, Butcher’s Sugar, Parasite Kingdom, and Turned Earth and serves as Series Editor for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection here at The Word Works. His chapbook In Place was chosen for the Robin Becker Series from Seven Kitchens Press. He has taught creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, The Willow School (whose creative writing program he founded and directed), Louisiana State University, and Tulane University, and for New Orleans Writers Workshop. Series editor of the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, he lives, writes, and gardens in New Orleans.
Susan Pearce
Designer
Susan has worked with The Word Works designing book covers since 2011.
She is a freelance graphic designer with over 25 years of experience. Intrigued by the play of words and images, as a teen she loved to make books by hand. Years later, she followed her talent and earned a BFA in Graphic Design from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. She continues to work with writers, editors, artists, museum and gallery directors, and small business owners to create books, catalogs, logos, websites, and more. The final result of each project is never the same. The process of finding endless ways to combine words and images keeps her at it.
Editorial Board
Karren L. Alenier
Nancy White
Co-Editors-in-Chief
From its inception in 1975, The Word Works has adhered to a philosophy of inclusion: all voices, all styles, all poetics, all excellence.
From the formal to the experimental, from the lyric to the narrative, books that further the beauty and depth of our exploration of language and human experience have been at the center of the organization’s mission.
Nils Michals
Washington Prize Series Editor
Nils Michals is the author of four collections of poetry. Collections include Lure (Pleiades, 2004), Come Down to Earth (Bauhan, 2014), Room (Sting & Honey, 2020), and Gembox, winner of the 2018 Washington Prize from The Word Works.
His work has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, [PANK], Catamaran Literary Reader, Posit, and others.
Michals lives in Santa Cruz, CA and teaches at West Valley College.
Brad Richard
Hilary Tham Capital Collection Series Editor
Brad Richard is the author of four books of poems (Habitations, Motion Studies, Butcher’s Sugar, Parasite Kingdom) and three chapbooks (The Men in the Dark, Curtain Optional, Larval Songs), and has published poems and reviews in many journals, including Green Mountains Review, New Orleans Review, Plume, Guernica, American Letters & Commentary, Prairie Schooner, The Iowa Review and Massachusetts Review.
He has taught creative writing at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) and Lusher Charter School, and is a faculty member of the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for Teachers.
Richard received his B.A. in English from the University of Iowa and his M.F.A. in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis.
Richard was the 2002 winner of the Poets & Writers, Inc. Writers Exchange Award in Poetry; a 2002 Louisiana Division of the Arts Literature Fellow; 2010 winner of The Washington Prize, and 2011 finalist for The Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, both for Motion Studies; 2015 Louisiana Artist of the Year; and 2018 winner of The Tenth Gate Prize for Parasite Kingdom. He co-founded and directed the New Orleans New Writers Literary Festival (2007-2016), and also founded and directs the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards of South Louisiana (2008-2020). With poet Elizabeth Gross, he directs an occasional LGBTQ+ reading series, The Waves.
Barbara Goldberg
International Editions Series Editor
Barbara Goldberg is author of seven prize-winning books of poetry (including the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize). She has received two fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, two PEN Syndicated Fiction Project Awards, grants from the Maryland Arts Council, the Armand P. Erpf Award from Columbia University’s Translation Center and the Valentin Krustev Award in Translation.
She was the first winner of the Word Works Prize in 1981 and has contributed to the press ever since. As Editor-in-Chief (1986-1996), she recommended that The Word Works be international in scope. The Word Works has published three of her books: Berta Broadfoot and Pepin the Short; The Stones Remember: Poems by Native Israelis (winner of the Witter Bynner Award); and Scorched by the Sun: Poems by Moshe Dor. Her Breaking & Entry: New and Selected Poems is forthcoming.
For the last nine years, she has served as Series Editor of the Word Works International Editions, publishing work from the Kurdish, Croatian, Spanish, Mapuzungun, French, and Ancient Greek, among other languages.
Goldberg has presented readings/panels at the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), Associated Writing Programs (AWP), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Folger Shakespeare Library, and The Jimmy Carter Center for International Peace.
Former executive editor of Poet Lore magazine, Goldberg has taught at Georgetown University; the Writers Center in Bethesda, Maryland; and in the MFA program at American University. She lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.
Jennifer Barber
Tenth Gate Prize Series Editor
Jennifer Barber’s previous poetry collections are The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made, Works on Paper, Given Away, and Rigging the Wind. Her work appears in several anthologies, and she is a co-editor of the anthology Tree Lines: 21st Century American Poems and of Blood Moon, a posthumous collection of poems by Carol Dine. Barber founded the literary journal Salamander in 1992 and was its editor in chief through 2018. She served as poet laureate of Brookline, Massachusetts, from 2021 to 2025.
Board of Directors, Staff, Advisory Board
The Board of Directors
Karren L. Alenier, Chair
Jacqueline Johnson
JoAnne McFarland
Brad Richard
Nancy White
Staff
Martin Dickinson, Corporate Agent
Susan Pearce, Designer
Café Muse Directors
Ellen Cole
Henry Crawford
Renee Gherity
Majda Gama
Luther Jett
Claire McGoff
Jacklyn Potter Young Poets Competition Director
Cathy Hailey
Advisory Board
Nathalie F. Anderson
J. H. Beall, Founding Director
Denise Duhamel
Joseph Goldberg
Fred Marchant