30 Poets in 30 Days

Douglas Manuel was one of the poets we had on our list when we headed to Seattle for the AWP conference. His book "Trouble Funk" was released at AWP and his publisher, Kate Gale at Red Hen Press, had sung his praises to us weeks before the release. We knew we wanted to have him be a part of our 30 Poets. Douglas was born in Anderson, Indiana and now resides in Long Beach, California. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University, an MFA in poetry from Butler University, and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. His first collection of poems, Testify, won an IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award for poetry, and his poems and essays can be found in numerous literary journals, magazines, and websites, most recently Zyzzyva, Pleiades, and the New Orleans Review. He has traveled to Egypt and Eritrea with The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program to teach poetry. A recipient of the Dana Gioia Poetry Award and a fellowship from the Borchard Foundation Center on Literary Arts, he is a Bayard Rustin Fellow at Whittier College and teaches at Spalding University’s low-res MFA program.