Claire Holt is an accomplished portrait photographer and photojournalist whose work has been featured in many publications, including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, New York Newsday as well as the Associated Press. She has also taught photography as an adjunct professor at the Columbia School of Journalism, her alma mater. The driving force in Claire’s work is, in the words of artist Alice Neel “to assert the dignity and eternal importance of the human being.”
Her latest fine art project, UNBOUND: Celebrating Women Writers, consists of a diverse spectrum of portraits of over 40 women writers of all genres. Holt’s unique approach engages the photographer and the writer in an interactive collaboration to conceptualize and create each portrait. The resulting images are as much about the play and interaction of the creative process as they are about the writers. Among the participants are Pulitzer Prize winners Margo Jefferson and Stacy Schiff, bestselling authors Jodi Picoult and Meg Wolitzer, renowned poets Marie Howe and Rachel Hadas, and celebrated writers Sigrid Nunez, Dani Shapiro, and Ruth Ozeki.
Claire also works commercially and uses her passion for words, literacy, and the arts by partnering with charitable foundations and universities whose focus is on education and access to the arts.
Claire lives with her family in NYC.
Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow. Her third collection of poems, There are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, is forthcoming from Free Verse Editions, 2024. Her previous book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Elizabeth lived in Miami Beach for ten years and now resides part of the year in Lake Worth Beach.
Denise Duhamel’s most recent books of poetry are Second Story (Pittsburgh, 2021) and Scald (2017). Blowout (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She and the late Maureen Seaton co-authored five collections, the most recent of which was CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected, Uncollected, and New) (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfiction publications include The Unrhymables: Collaborations in Prose (with Julie Marie Wade, Noctuary Press, 2019). A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, she is a distinguished university professor in the MFA program at Florida International University in Miami.