Events: April 7, 2026

Diamond Forde is a Black poet and the author of The Book of Alice (Scribner, 2026), winner of the 2025 James Laughlin Award, and Mother Body (Saturnalia Books, 2021), winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. The recipient of additional awards and fellowships from the Furious Flower Poetry Center, the College Language Association, Great River Review, Callaloo, and Tin House, she has served as a visiting poet for the Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. Forde's Book of Alice has been described by Scribner as "A powerful collection exploring the legacy of survival as seen through the life of a Black woman born in the Jim Crow South'. The Book of Alice won the Academy of American Poets' prestigious James Laughlin prize for a second book of poetry, for which the poet also received a week-long residency in The Betsy Writers Room at The Betsy Hotel in Miami Beach. Forde is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University and earned a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University.

Caridad Moro-Gronlier was born in Los Angeles to Cuban immigrant parents who relocated to Miami, Florida. She is the author of four books of poetry, including Through the Lens and As to Your Comment, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2026 and 2027, respectively; Tortillera (Texas Review Press, 2021), winner of the TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize; and Visionware (Finishing Line Press, 2009). She is also the editor of Grabbed: Poets and Writers Respond to Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). Moro-Gronlier serves as the senior editor for SWWIM Every Day, an online daily poetry journal for women-identifying poets, is the outgoing Poet Laureate of Miami Dade County (2024-26) and serves as The Betsy Hotel's Writers Room Poetry-Curator-at-Large. Widely recognized for her work in LGBTQ+ representation and community education, she was a 2025 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, and holds a graduate degree in English literature from Florida International University.

National Poetry Month was inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets (AAP) in April 1996. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world with schools, publishers, libraries, booksellers, and poets celebrating poetry's vital place in our culture. The Betsy Writers Room at The Betsy Hotel has partnered with The AAP for more than a decade, providing a residency and reading to the winner of the annual James Laughlin Prize.