The Hive Poetry Collective

Ruba Ahmed joins Julie Murphy to read "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewski and talks about his imperative to see the beauty in the world that lies right beside the horrors. She also reads from her new book Bring Now the Angels and shares her struggle in coming to forgiveness and grief and joy. Ruba also shares some great insights on the power of repetition as well as the importance of Keat's concept of negative capability.

Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pittsburg Poetry). Her debut book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has taught with Swarthmore College, Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers.
Find her classes & consultations on her website. She's also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Roxi Power talks with Brenda Hillman, winner this month of the Northern California Book Reviewers’ Fred Cody Award  for Lifetime Achievement, about her 11th book of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later.   We discuss her new trans-genre tetralogy about time: how to find calm during the Anthropocene by being in time in multiple ways: sinking into the micro-minutes; performing micro-activism; and celebrating the microbiome. We explore her influences–from Blake to Bergson, Clare to Baudelaire, as well as the less celebrated moss, owls, and wood rats that appear frequently in her eco-poetry.  Alive with humor, witness, creative design and punctuation–what Forrest Gander calls “typographical expressionism”--Hillman’s poetry teaches us how to abide in crisis from Covid to California fires, living in paradox as a way to transcend despair.

Brenda Hillman shares the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award with with Isabel Allende, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Pollan, Ishmael Reed, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Alice Walker and others. Winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Griffin Poetry Prize (for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, 2013), the Northern California Book Award (for Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, 2018) and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975.  

She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, and co-edited and co-translated several books.  She is director of the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and is on the regular poetry staff ad Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman just retired from teaching in the MFA Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA.  She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, grandmother, and is married to poet, Robert Hass. 

Photograph by Robert Hass.

You can purchase the book here: https://www.getyourfaceinabook.com/book/9781642970463

And you can learn more about Gary Gach here:

http://garygach.com/

Rick Lupert zooms into The Hive. We read Robert Creeley’s poem “I Know a Man,” and shamelessly display our ignorance about the great Robert Creeley, who did indeed, sometimes wear an eyepatch, and who was a powerful and engaging reader. Rick Lupert reads some fruit poems from his current book, I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii,  inspired by his vacation with his family to Hawaii. 

Rick Lupert has been involved in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990.  He is the recipient of the 2014 Beyond Baroque Distinguished Service Award for service to the Los Angeles poetry community. 

His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, including The Los Angeles Times, Rattle, Chiron Review, and others.  He edited the anthologies A Poet’s Siddur Ekphrastia Gone Wild, The Night Goes On All Night – Noir-Inspired Poetry and, A Poet’s Haggadah: Passover through the Eyes of  Poets, and is the author of 27 books, including: Paris: It’s The Cheese, I Am My Own Orange County, Mowing Fargo, I’m a Jew. Are You?, Stolen Mummies, I’d Like to Bake Your Goods, A Man With No Teeth Serves Us Breakfast, We Put Things in Our Mouths, Sinzibuckwud!, Death of a Mauve Bat (Ain’t Got No Press), and more.

He also writes the Jewish poetry blog From The Lupertverse for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal.

Rick created and maintains the Poetry Super Highway, an online resource and publication for poets.

He lives in Newhall, California with his wife Addie, son Jude, and 3 cats.

A conversation between Geneffa Jahan and the Youth Poet Laureates of Watsonville, Eva Sophia Martinez Rodriguez (pictured) and Rachel Huerta, appointed to serve a two-year term from 2023 – 2025. The Watsonville Public Library created this position to recognize a youth under the age of 20 for their literary achievements, passion for promoting awareness of poetry and whose work demonstrates a commitment to social justice, equity, and diversity. In this hour, these teens share their journey, talk about their craft, and recite poems that showcase their individual styles. (Click the link for photos and bios of both poets).

i am mixed.
the soil of strawberry fields
and the blush of cherry blossoms
run wild in my blood.

(From "mixed" by Rachel Huerta)

Rooja Mohassessy buzzes into the Hive to talk about her new book, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine. She also reads a Sylvia Plath poem "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." ⁠

Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere.

Sean F. Munro: seanfmunro.com

Rodrigo Toscano: https://rodrigotoscano.com/

Courtney Le Blanc reads from her latest book, ⁠Her Whole Bright Life and also the poem, ⁠"Where No One Says Eating Disorder⁠" by ⁠Kelly Grace Thomas⁠ from Thomas's collection ⁠Boat Burn ⁠ ⁠

Courtney LeBlanc⁠ is the author of the full-length collections ⁠Her Whole Bright Life; Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart; and Beautiful & Full of Monsters.⁠ She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate, a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning. 

Dion plugs the podcast Maintenance Phase, an excellent source of information on fat shaming, bogus diets, and our society's screwed up attitudes toward body size and food.

Joan Kwon Glass zooms into the Hive to talk about her new book. We also read and discuss Laura Apol's poem "Instructions for the Friends Who Are Sorting my Daughter's Things this Afternoon."

Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean American author of Night Swim (Diode Editions, 2022), and three chapbooks (How To Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy, If Rust Can Grow on the Moon, and Bloodline). She serves as poet laureate for Milford, CT, Editor in Chief for Harbor Review and is a Brooklyn Poets Mentor. Joan is an instructor on the faculty of various writing centers including the Hudson Valley Writers Center, Brooklyn Poets & Corporeal. Her poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, The Slowdown and elsewhere. She is available for manuscript consultations, readings and workshops.

Content warning: Discussion of suicide.

Lana Hechtman Ayers joins host Julie Murphy to read from her two recently published books, Overtures and When All Else Fails. Join us as Lana reads a poem by Ellen Bass and talks about the healing powers of poetry, how the awareness of death brings compassion and finding joy in difficult times.

Join us as Gail Rudd Entrekin reads poems from her book Walking Each Other Home, an homage to the bittersweet journey of love, life, and parting. Gail is editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary (www.canarylitmag.org) and holds an M.A. in English Literature/Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. She has taught both subjects for over 25 years. Her poems have been finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize, won the Women’s National Book Association Award and were First Runner-Up for the Steve Kowit and Catamaran Poetry Prizes.  Her sixth poetry book, Walking Each Other Home (Longship Press, 2023), was a finalist for the Blue Light and Richard Snyder Prizes, and her chapbook The Mother/Daughter Papers was finalist for the Comstock and Poetry Box Chapbook Prizes in 2023. Walking Each Other Home is available here from Longship Press.

Geneffa Jahan hosts San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil as he shares how he became an organizer after the 2007 bombing of Al Mutanabbi Street, the famed booksellers’ street of Baghdad. They discuss his global movement, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, with annual readings worldwide to commemorate the bombing, and his anthology of poems and prose by survivors and witnesses, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (2012). Beausoleil reads two poems, written as letters to Iraq, and one poem he wrote for his collaborative photojournalism project, Shadow & Light, honoring the 324 Iraqi Academics murdered between 2003 and 2012. With 57 participants from Jordan to Egypt, Iran, the US, the UK, and Canada, the project ensures that “the protest does not go home,” to quote Beausoleil, “but lives on as a project of witness, memory, and solidarity.”

Beau Beausoleil is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently, Another Way Home (Bluelight Press, 2022) and two chapbooks: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023).

Jamaica Baldwin zooms into The Hive to talk about her new book, Bone Language. We read some Vievee Frances and talk about the radical acceptance that poetry can bring. Jamaica, a Santa Cruz native, will be in town to read at The HiveLive! on July 18th at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Reading with her, will be the fabulous Francesca Bell. 

Jamaica Baldwin’s debut collection is Bone Language (YesYes Books 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor’s prize, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Her writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, Aspen Words, Storyknife, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica is currently the associate editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln where she is pursuing her PhD in English with a focus on poetry and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is originally from Santa Cruz, CA.

Join Tim Lindner, editor of The Book of Life After Death (Tolsun Books, 2023) with Farnaz Fatemi as they discuss this forthcoming book which explores how the dead might be remembered in poems & essays. We are joined by four more poets--Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña, Xioaly Li, Hunter Hazelton, and Jen Karetnick--reading selections from the book.

"We're all going to die. What's worse is that once we do, we don't have a chance to explain ourselves for everything we've done. Once we're ghosts, our identities are defined by the places and things we leave behind. When we're the ones left behind, we decide what's of value and how our ghosts should be remembered. Sometimes, people become something entirely different than when they were here. And perhaps that's the point. Maybe it's not our fear of dying that drives us but rather that our lives after death aren't our lives at all."

Earl Hines and Dion O'Reilly talk about earning an MFA at Pacific University, read and discuss the fabulous poem, "Shrike," by Henri Cole​, and read and talk about Hines latest book Any Dumb Animal. 

AE Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, and I-70 Review. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Writing at Pacific University.

Listen to this free-wheeling conversation with acclaimed poet, memoirist, screenwriter and educator Jimmy Santiago Baca. We talk about the gift of saying 'no,' the unexpected byproducts of incarceration, his upcoming writers retreat, and hear him read several of his poems from his 50-year writing career. You can learn more about Jimmy on his website, at the Poetry Foundation, and find out about his upcoming writers retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico here. The documentary based on his novel "A Place to Stand" can be seen on YouTube. You can also watch the film directed by Taylor Hackford, Bound by Honor, based on Jimmy's life here.

Vincent Rendoni and Dion O'Reilly engage in a wide-ranging and lively discussion of life and poetry. He reads Monica Rico's  "Poem in Consideration of My Death" from an anthology that, due to its representation of Latino life, influenced Vincent's decision to be a poet, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4, LatinNext. 

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, which was the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. Previously, he was a 2022 Jack Straw Cultural Center Fellow and winner of the 2021 Blue Earth Review Flash Fiction Contest. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. His work appears in The Sycamore Review, The Texas Review, The Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Lisa is the author of two poetry collections: Stem, winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize and Guide to the Exhibit winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Colorado Review and The Literary Review among other places. She is co-translator with Sara Rivera of The Blinding Star, selected poems of the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, a book which won the 2021 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation.

Farnaz talked with Jennifer Franklin, whose third book, If Some God Shakes Your House, has just been published by Four Way Books in March 2023.  We discuss If Some God Shakes Your House, in which Franklin has “reimagined Antigone for our times--where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance.” Franklin's work is honest and riveting, and full of insight about what it means to be a woman. We discuss persona poems, writing about difficult material, ecopoetry, and more.

Buy the book⁠ and support poets and publishers.

Find out more about Tree Lines (Grayson Books, Edited by Jennifer Barber, Jessica Greenbaum and Fred Marchant), mentioned in the episode. 

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. A proponent of collaboration, she and Maureen Seaton have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is 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.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the first Tibetan woman to publish poetry in English. She joins Julie Murphy to read new and favorite poems, as well as the poem ⁠When it rains in Dharamsala⁠ by Tenzin Tsundue. They talk about exile, impermanence, and how poems take us from image to mystery.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of the poetry books, My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday, and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley) and three chapbooks. Dhompa's first non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet was published in the US by Shambhala Publications in 2016 and by Penguin, India in 2014. She was born in India and raised in the Tibetan refugee communities in India and Nepal. Dhompa has a PhD in Literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches in the English Department at Villanova University.

When it rains in Dharamsala by Tenzin Tsundue. 

Tsering Wangmo Dholpa on Intagram

Listen as Caridad reads poems from her book Tortillera, a work in three parts addressing the journey of a woman claiming her own voice. We talk about desire, the Cuban-American experience, coming out, artist Ana Mendienta...among other things. Tune in! Caridad's website is here: http://www.caridadmoro.com/about-me.html#/ You can purchase both the soft and hardcover copies of Tortillera here: https://www.tamupress.com/book/9781680032444/tortillera/ And you can find out about Ana Mendieta here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ana_Mendieta

Gregory Orr buzzes back into the Hive to talk with Dion O'Reilly about his newest book, Selected Books of the Beloved. We talk about John Keats's "Lines Supposed to Be Addressed to Fanny Braun," the difference between epic and lyric poetry, and the dangers of the false Beloved. 

Gregory Orr was born February 3, 1947 in Albany, New York. He grew up in the rural Hudson Valley. At the age of twelve, he was responsible for the death of a younger brother in a hunting accident, an event that powerfully influenced his ideas about trauma, silence and poetry. When he was fourteen, his family moved to Haiti, where his father worked as a doctor at the Hospital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles. The family returned to the States a year later, after his mother’s sudden death. In 1965, at the age of eighteen, he worked as a civil rights volunteer in Mississippi. During that time, he was kidnapped at gunpoint in rural Alabama and held for a week in solitary confinement in the town of Hayneville. These events of his youth form the basis of his memoir, The Blessing, which tells the story of his childhood and how he came to poetry.

The author of more than 10 collections of poetry and several volumes of essays, criticism, and memoir, Gregory Orr is a master of the short, personal lyric. His poetry has been widely anthologized and translated into at least 10 languages. Observes critic Hank Lazer, “From Burning the Empty Nests (1973) to the present, Orr gradually developed the ability to fuse his incredible skill at visual precision—the signature of his image-based work in his very first book—with an insistent musical quality, joining visual precision with a beauty of sound.”

In this week’s episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, Rodrigo Toscano joins Roxi Power to read work from The Charm and the Dread (Fence Books, 2022) and The Cut Point (Counterpath Press, 2023).  We hear about his work in the fields of labor organizing, as well as how his work within Latinx, New Orleans, and experimental poetry communities influence his poetics.

Jim Moore has been writing poetry for more than four decades. Before Prognosis from Graywolf in 2021, he wrote, Invisible Strings, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the work in that book. Underground: New & Selected Poems is available now from Graywolf Press.

He has won the Minnesota Book Award for his poetry four times. Jim has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Boards, the Loft Mcknight and in 2012 from the Guggenheim Foundation.  His poems have appeared three times in Pushcart Prize Editions as well as in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Harper’s The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and Water-Stone Review.

Jim lives in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy with his wife the photographer JoAnn Verburg. He teaches in the Hamline University MFA Program in St. Paul, Minnesota and is often a Visiting Professor at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He works online individually with poets from around the country.

Jim reads and discusses one of his favorite poems, "We must Praise the Mutilated World," BY ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

Editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke discuss their upcoming compilation of Dolly poems, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology from Madville Publishing, due to be released on January 19th, 2023 on Dolly Parton's 77 th Birthday. 

Dustin and Julie attended their first Dolly concert in August 2011. Ten years later, they  joined forces to co-edit a Limp Wrist Dolly issue in 2021 to honor Dolly’s 75th birthday, and on January 19th, they will release an anthology of poems paying tribute to the great singer-songwriter and cultural icon, Dolly Parton.

Dustin and Julie  will also launch an accompanying podcast to the anthology to be available by summer 2023. Be on the lookout for their new podcast, Just Because We’re Dolly Fans.

Join Julia Chiapella in conversation with award-winning Santa Cruz poet Charles Atkinson. We talk about his recent release, New and Collected Poems, life reflected in poetry, and his clear-eyed embrace of a diagnosis of lewy body dementia. You can purchase the book at Bookshop Santa Cruz or Two Birds Books. Chuck is joined in the conversation by his wife, writer and educator Sarah Rabkin.

Ellen Bass talks about her experience having Ann Sexton as a teacher in the '70s at Boston University. Then, Francesca Bell zooms in, and we read and discuss a few of Sexton's poems. I mention Sexton's fabulous biography by Diane Middlebrook. If you are interested in reading Sexton's poems, a good place to start is her collected poems or also her selected poems.

Paola Bruni chats with Dion O'Reilly about the collaborative book, How do you Spell the Sound of Crickets, written with the late Jory Post.

Jory Post was an educator, writer, and artist who lived in Santa Cruz, California. He and his wife, Karen Wallace, created handmade books and art together as JoKa Press. Jory was the co-founder and publisher of phren-Z, an online literary quarterly, and founder of the Zoom Forward reading series.

His first book of prose poetry, The Extra Year, was published in 2019, and was followed by a second, Of Two Minds, in 2020. His novel, Pious Rebel, also appeared in 2020. His novel, Smith: An Unauthorized Fictography, was published in 2021.

His work has been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, The Sun, and elsewhere. 

Paola Bruni is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize judged by Ellen Bass, as well as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. Her short plays have been produced by Actors Theater, Santa Cruz as well as short-listed for play festivals around the globe. 

Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator. He is the author of three books of poetry, Reaper's, Peregrine Nation and, most recently, Curare , just released from C&R press.

John Sibley Williams is the author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Book Award, 2021), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2021),  As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019),  Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013).

A twenty-eight-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors' Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. Previous publishing credits include: Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Colorado Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.

Listen in to New York Times best-selling author Javier Zamora read poems from his book Unaccompanied and talk about the process that led him to write the wildly popular memoir Solito. You can find copies of Unaccompanied and Solito on Amazon. Read the New York Times article about Javier here.

Join Julie Murphy as she talks with renown poet David Baker about his new book Whale Fall.  We read Stanley Plumly's In Passing and talk about the how poems are one of the most connective things we have as humans, how a lyric moment opens from the pastoral to the sublime in the midst of a story, and about the solace of poetry.  Known from his early days as a nature poet, Baker's work has evolved into Ecopoetry where nature becomes the whole subject field of the poem from his back yard in the midwest to the glaciers in Iceland to the depths of the ocean.

https://www.mattsedillo.com/

https://www.lataco.com/best-american-political-poet-matt-sedillo/

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/proletarian-poetry-returns-review-of-matt-sedillos-city-on-the-second-floor

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/11/i-like-you-am-made-of-stars-matt-sedillos-mowing-leaves-of-grass/

Listen to new poems from Victoria Bañales, Julia Chiapella, Farnaz Fatemi, Julie Murphy and Dion O’Reilly in this special group episode.

Join Dion O'Reilly as she chats with Gregg Shapiro about his new book Fear of Muses. We read The Skokie Theater by Edward Hirsch and talk about the power of poetry to change us, the uses of the lyric, the poet Denise Duhamel, and Shapiro's life in poetry.

Farnaz Fatemi, an Iranian American poet and member of the Hive,  reads from her debut book, Sister Tongue, that won the 2021 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize (selected by Tracy K. Smith). Julie Murphy and Farnaz Fatemi discuss longing, language, loss, identity and sisterhood as they weave through the remarkable poems in this collection. Farnaz's poetry and prose appear in Poets.org (Poem-a-Day), Pedestal Magazine, Grist Journal, Catamaran Literary Reader, Crab Orchard Review, SWWIM Daily, Tahoma Literary Review,Tupelo Quarterly, phren-z.org, and several anthologies (including, most recently, Essential Voices: Poetry of Iran and its Diaspora, My Shadow Is My Skin: Voices of the Iranian Diaspora and The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me). She was awarded the Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman Fellowship by Djerassi and has been honored by the International Literary Awards (Center for Women  Writers), Poets on the Verge (Litquake SF), Best of the Net Nonfiction, and Pushcart. She is a member of the Community of Writers. Farnaz taught Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1997-2018. www.farnazfatemi.com

Listen to or read Farnaz’s poem Farnaz, selected for a Poem-a-day in March 2022 by guest editor Brenda Shaughnessy.

Gregory Orr reads from his book Last Love Poem I will Ever Write. Dion O'Reilly and Gregory Orr discuss the "threshold," the boundary between the tolerable and intolerable and how poetry crafts disorder, revealing tools to survive or, even better, to discover the Beloved. We discuss the lyric poem, the villanelle, and how moments of bliss and pain turn us into poets and lovers of poetry, bringing deeper meaning to our lives. Greg has a new book, Selected Books of the Beloved, that came out in August 2022.

For more information about the author’s books or to purchase copies, contact Naomi Helena Quiñonez at naomiquinonez@yahoo.com

 Rebecca Foust and Susan Cohen. are longtime friends and have attended the same writing group for years. In this interview with Dion O'Reilly, they both read from their new books: Susan Cohen's Democracy of Fire and Rebecca Foust's ONLY. 

Cate Kennedy chats with Dion O'Reilly and reads from her book, The Taste of Water.

Cate Kennedy is the author of two short story collections, a novel, three poetry collections and a memoir.  Her awards include the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Poetry for her collection “The Taste of River Water” (Scribe, 2011) and the NSW People’s Choice Award for her novel “The World Beneath” (Scribe 2009, published Australia, the U.S.A, the U.K, France and Hong Kong). Her short story collections are both on the Australian school syllabus as study texts.  She teaches widely both in Australia and the U.S., and has just completed her PhD in Creative Writing.

Kemi Alabi reads and discusses poems from her book Against Heaven which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the 2021 Academy of American Poets First Book Award. Find more about Kemi on her website and at the Academy of American Poets website. Against Heaven can be purchased on Amazon.

The Things We Take With Us is available in Santa Cruz at Bad Animal Books and Bookshop Santa Cruz and by contacting him at timfitz@ucsc.edu. That way the book is free with a contribution to the Prison Arts Project at williamjamesassociation.org.

Please join poets and writers Charles Atkinson, Ellen Bass, Jack Foley, David Swanger, Hannah Sward and Ken Weisner celebrate the life and work of Santa Cruz's beloved poet Robert Sward who died this past February. Hosted by Julie Murphy, this episode includes readings and discussions of the guests' favorite poems of Robert's and their remarkable remembrances of him. Robert was a gifted poet, prolific writer, beloved friend, father and husband with a great sense of humor and deep insights. 

Francesca Bell and Dion O'Reilly read some of their favorite poets and a few of the own. She reads from her next book What Small Sound and her previous collection, Bright Stain. Dion reads from her debut collection, Ghost Dogs, and from her upcoming collection Sadness of the Apex Predator. They also read a little Maggie Smith and a few other favorites.