Browning: When I started at the nonprofit, I technically supervised the two co-founders of the program, who were actually my mentors in transformational learning. Everything that they did in the job-training program was designed to help participants navigate the changes needed to see, and gain confidence in, themselves as successful adult learners and professionals in new fields. So many times, I heard participants say to them things like “You saw potential in me that I couldn’t see for myself.” What a legacy they left — hundreds of dramatically changed lives of people who launched new and exciting chapters in their lives.
Johnson: I have a lot to learn about contemporary historical romance writers, so in my field — not yet. My modern influences come more from television series like “Upstairs Downstairs,” “Downton Abbey” and “Poldark.” Yet it’s those earlier authors whose works continue to inspire and move me, especially Dickens’ humanity and his desire to make the world a better place.
Berry: I don’t even know how to begin the list: H.D., Deborah Pope, Lucille Clifton, William Blake, Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Linda Pastan, Alicia Ostriker. Locally, Gary Lawless, Jeri Theriault, Annaliese Jakimides, Meghan Grumbling, Julia Bowsma, Clarie Millikan, John Rosenwald, Meghan Sterling, Saama Abdurraqib. In 2019, my local library ended up being a stop on Tracy K. Smith’s outreach tour as the U.S. Poet Laureate. I brought my daughter and ended up seated next to a poet who has become one of my dearest friends, and we found ourselves, not at the reading I expected, but basically getting a free class in poetry from Tracy K. Smith. She did so much for me in 40 minutes. She reminded me of forms I had forgotten. She inspired me with how one could teach a poetry class approachably and yet with brilliant insight. She reminded me to read every poem twice and then listen to someone else read it differently.
Myers: So many! I only applied to one MFA program in poetry — NYU — because I wanted to work with Sharon Olds. Her poems about motherhood, childbirth and female sexuality have inspired me to write more frankly (I’m thinking of a ghazel I published about charting my body temperature to get pregnant). She also taught me that there is no such thing as an apolitical poem. I’m currently working on my first full-length book of poems, tentatively titled “Sauna,” and my willingness to hold the smallest detail up to the light owes a lot to her work. I was Sharon’s full-time personal assistant for a year after I graduated, and she is just this wonderful person to be around. Her poem “My Son the Man” is maybe the best description I’ve ever read of how it probably feels to wake up one day and discover you no longer have a little boy who depends on you. Other poets who have influenced me: Emily Dickinson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Herman Melville (“Moby-Dick” is just one really long poem), Kevin Young, D.A. Powell, Anna Akhmatova (Jane Kenyon’s translations), Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Carson, Anne Sexton, Frank O’Hara, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jack Gilbert, and of course I love the work of my husband (poet Dan Rosenberg) and ’Croft alumni Katie Hagopian [Berry] ’95 and Brooke Baker ’99!