Long-standing WCSA member and Poet Laureate of Oklahoma, Jeanetta Calhoun Mish, is one of thirteen recipients to have received the newly-created Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship in support of this spring’s national poetry programming theme of Poetry & Democracy offered by the Poetry Coalition, an alliance of more than 20 organizations working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. She received a BA and an MFA in English from the University of Texas-Permian Basin and a PhD in English from the University of Oklahoma. Mish is the author of What I Learned at the War (Lamar University Press, 2015) and Work Is Love Made Visible: Collected Family Photographs and Poetry (West End Press / University of New Mexico Press, 2009), winner of the 2010 Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry. The fellowship provides funding to present poetry workshops for students in public schools in underserved communities and/or rural areas across Oklahoma.