Dr. Lauri Scheyer is Professor of English and founding Director of the Presidentially Chartered Center for Contemporary Poetry and Poetics at California State University, Los Angeles and Xiaoxiang Scholars Program Distinguished Professor at Hunan Normal University.She was founding Curator of the nation’s only African American Poetry Archive, and founding Director of the UK’s first BA program in Creative Writing. She teaches all genres of creative writing, and is especially interested in global and culturally inclusive approaches to creative writing pedagogy. A widely published author who has received numerous literary awards, her most recent book is A History of African American Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 2019).