The Hive Poetry Collective: Recent Episodes
The Hive
Airing on KSQD 90.7 FM most Sundays at 8:00, the Hive Poetry Collective is a buzz of poets in Santa Cruz, California— a swarm of radio conversations, public readings, and writing workshops.
Find us at hivepoetry.org And https://www.facebook.com/hivepoetry
Sally Ashton, former Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, drops into the Hive to talk with Farnaz Fatemi about her most recent book of poems, Listening to Mars. She shares poems which explore the sadness and surreal world of lockdown, what space exploration says about humans, and more.
Sally Ashton is a poet, writer, Editor-in-Chief of the DMQ Review, San José State University professor emerita, lecturer, blogger, and workshop presenter who has taught over 100 workshops. She was appointed the second Santa Clara County Poet Laureate, 2011-2013. She has collaborated with both visual artists and musicians. She is Assistant Editor of They Said: A Multi-Genre Anthology of Contemporary Collaborative Writing, Black Lawrence Press, 2018. Her work is included in many anthologies.
Listening to Mars is her fifth book of poems.
We discuss a poem by Rachel McKibbons and several from Blanco's fabulous new book, Homeland of My Body.
Selected by President Obama as the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in U.S. history, Richard Blanco was the youngest, the first Latinx, immigrant, and gay person to serve in that role. In 2023, Blanco was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Biden from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami in a working-class family, Blanco’s personal negotiation of cultural identity and the universal themes of place and belonging characterize Blanco’s many collections of poetry, including his most recent, Homeland of My Body, which reassess traditional notions of home as strictly a geographical, tangible place that merely exist outside us, but rather, within us. He has also authored the memoirs FOR ALL OF US, ONE TODAY: AN INAUGURAL POET’S JOURNEY and THE PRINCE OF LOS COCUYOS: A MIAMI CHILDHOOD. Blanco has received numerous awards, including the Agnes Starrett Poetry Prize, the PEN American Beyond Margins Award, the Patterson Prize, and a Lambda Prize for memoir. He was Woodrow Wilson Fellow and has received numerous honorary degrees. Currently, he serves as Education Ambassador for The Academy of American Poets and is an Associate Professor at Florida International University. In April 2022, Blanco was appointed the first-ever Poet Laureate of Miami-Dade County.
Chopsy Gutowski talks with Roxi Power about her powerful poems freshly submitted for her MFA thesis. As friends who have been writing together in Santa Cruz for years, Chopsy and Roxi laugh and dig in, plumbing the lyrical depths of Gutowski's eco-poetry, elegies, and political poetry. Mining the difficult moves in Jorie Graham's book,To 2040, Gutowski invites us to inhabit the present moment, however painful, to find healing and joy. She believes poems have a life of their own with a potential to honor and change the course of our lives as they conjure what is possible for our future.
Chopsy Gutowski is a poet, improv artist, and early childhood specialist who is completing her MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific University. She lives in Santa Cruz in themidst of redwoods and seasonal visits from Swainson’s thrushes. In the past month, she has read for the Poetry and Music in the Parks series in Santa Cruz County and the annual Santa Cruz "In Celebration of the Muse" reading. Her muse instructs her: “excavate what’s hidden beneath the everyday, peer into things until they give up their ghosts, then go further.”
The Body! In all its pain and glory! Listen to this discussion with editors Pichchenda Bao, Nicole Callihan, and Jennifer Franklin as they read and talk about poems from their anthology Braving the Body. Delving into the body's experiences, from sex to motherhood to cancer and beyond, Braving the Body culls the best poetry featuring, as Whitman wrote, “head, neck, hair, ears... mouth, tongue, lips . . . bowels sweet and clean . . . brain in its folds inside the skull frame . . . heart valves.”
Braving the Body can be purchased at Small Habor Publishing or on Amazon.
Editors Pichchenda Bao, Nicole Callahan, and Jennifer Franklin provide candid insights into creating the anthology and read poems illustrating the breadth of content and craft on this timeless subject.
On April 10th, 2024, Santa Cruz County's first ever Youth Poet Laureate honor was given to Dina Lusztig Noyes at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, CA. SC County Youth Poet Laureate finalists include Gregory Souza, Simon Ellefson, Madeline Aliah, and Sylvi Kayser. These poets read their work in conversation with Farnaz Fatemi, Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate.
More info about the program here.
Follow the program on Instagram @youthpoetlaureatesantacruz
Join me for this special episode of poetic witness for Palestine, featuring Faris Sabbah and Beau Beausoleil. Listen as Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools, Dr Faris Sabbah, shares movingly about his Palestinian background and reads a poem he penned for his late father. We discuss a poem from Beau Beausoleil's latest volume, WAR NEWS--a collection of poems written daily since October 2023 to witness the effects of hearing news out of Gaza. Beau himself then joins me to read from this collection and discuss these very necessary poems.
AGITATE! Journal has partnered with the poet to provide WAR NEWS as a free digital download.
They write,
War News is a collection of 90 poems written everyday by Beausoleil since 8th October, 2023. The poems in the collection reflect on what it means to bear witness to war, killing, and destruction in Gaza, Palestine. It asks, what it means to be alive at a time when even the death and suffering of children fails to elicit a response strong enough to end the war. This collection of 90 poems is a witness testimony from afar. It is an archive of grief, mourning, and solidarity. It is an accounting of the cost of war. Through these powerful and devastating poems Beausoleil reminds us that we cannot turn away. In the poet’s own words, “[O]ur humanity, our collective morality, requires that we bear witness and then take some kind of action" (agitatejournal.org).
The entire volume may be downloaded as a PDF or read online, providing a useful reference as you listen to this thought-provoking episode.
Beau Beausoleil is a poet and activist based in San Francisco, California. His two most recent chapbooks are: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023). These poems also appear in the online Moving Parts Press Digital Poetry Series as Poems for George Floyd and In Ukraine: Poems. He is the founder of Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a global arts response to the car-bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street (the street of the booksellers) in Baghdad, Iraq in 2007. It is a project of witness, memory, and solidarity with the Iraqi people by poets, artists, and writers. A selection of 24 poems from War News was also published by Moving Parts Press
(Bio, AgitateJournal.org).
"Over the past decade or so, nobody has done more for the Pacific Northwest than Paul Nelson." --Sam Hamill. Paul E. Nelson talks with Roxi Power about his forthcoming book, DaySong Miracle (Past 62) from Carbonation Press. The two poet friends laugh, talk, and even sing some of Nelson's lyrical lines in his long investigative and spiritual poems.
Ever the teacher and professional interviewer, Paul elegantly unpacks how his poetic ancestors--"antepesados"--from Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, and Brenda Hillman--among the many poets he has interviewed, have influenced his Projective, Organic, and Poetic Cosmology involving Spiritual Ecology, bioregionalism, and connection to place.
Poet/interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. He founded the Cascadia Poetics LAB & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Books include Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023) (2024), Haibun de la Serna (2022), A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020) American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) & American Sentences (2015, 2021). Co-Editor of Cascadian Zen Volume I: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now (2023, WatershedPress), Make it True meets Medusario (2019) (Spanish & English) and other anthologies. He’s Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill and lives in Rainier Beach, alongside dəxʷwuqʷed Creek.
https://paulenelson.com/
https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/
Image by Roberta Hoffman
Join Dion O'Reilly as she talks with Ed Hirsch about 100 Poems to Break Your Heart.
Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, has published ten books of poems, including The Living Fire, Gabriel: A Poem. and Stranger by Night. He has also published six prose books about poetry, among them, How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, a national bestseller, 100 Poems to Break Your Heart, and The Heart of American Poetry. He is president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Don't miss this enlivening and inspiring episode of the Hive Poetry Collective on KSQD. Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with spoken word poets Tara Bracco and Suzen Baraka. They read work newly published in the debut anthology, Poetic People Power and talk about their motto-- Art + Action= Change. This anthology draws from twenty years of live performances of Poetic People Power, poetry for social good. Their work explores social and political topics as well as their personal journeys.
Tara Bracco is founder and producing artistic director of Poetic People Power. She’s created, produced, and performed in 20 spoken word shows about the social and political issues of our time. She is a recognized leader in the field of art and social change and has been featured in O, The Oprah Magazine, Time Out New York, Brooklyn Rail, and HuffPost for her visionary leadership of Poetic People Power. She has spoken about art and activism at colleges, festivals, and theaters, and she is the recipient of 20 competitive grant awards. She is also the recipient of the 2015 Images and Voices of Hope Award. Her work as a journalist has been published by Cosmopolitan, American Theatre, Condé Nast Traveler, BUST, and Clamor. In 2009, she cofounded the international nonprofit The Project Solution, which serves 30,000 people in 14 countries. You can find Tara on Instagram and Facebook.
Suzen Baraka is a two-time Emmy Award-winning poet and SAG-AFTRA actor. With a passion for performance ignited over 17 years ago, Suzen has graced stages nationwide, captivating audiences with her magnetic presence and powerful spoken word. A true advocate for the transformative power of the arts, Suzen served as an artist in residence at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, using poetry and performance to inspire and uplift underprivileged youth in Irvington and Newark. Her commitment to social justice extends beyond the stage, as evidenced by her role as the writer and face of Theraflu’s Right to Recover Campaign, championing women's access to paid sick leave. Her work has been recognized with two regional Emmy Awards for her PSAs, titled: VOTE 2020 and My Asian. As an American actress, poet, and proud woman of Black and Korean descent, Suzen Baraka seeks to build bridges, spark conversations, challenge norms, and pave the way for a future where art and activism converge in powerful harmony. You can contact Suzen on her website, Instagram, and Two Stop by David Johann Kim by the Ensemble Studio Theater at Atwater Village.
Lee Herrick in conversation with Farnaz Fatemi. Lee Herrick is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower, finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead; and This Many Miles from Desire. His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the San Francisco Bay Watershed, Indivisible: Poems of Social Justice with a foreword by Common, HERE: Poems for the Planet, with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, and Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, among others. Herrick serves on the advisory board of Terrain.org and Sixteen Rivers Press. He co-founded LitHop in Fresno. Born in Daejeon, Korea and adopted as an infant, Herrick lives with his family in Fresno, California. He served as Fresno Poet Laureate from 2015-2017 and teaches at Fresno City College and in the low-residency MFA program at University of Nevada Reno at Lake Tahoe. He is the 10th California Poet Laureate, and the first Asian American to serve in the role.
As mentioned in this episode, Lee Herrick's signature project as California Poet Laureate is "Our California," with more information here.
Dorianne Laux’s sixth collection,Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men, was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems, Facts About the Moon, won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. Laux is also the author of Awake; What We Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest collection is Life On Earth was released in January of 2024.
Bellingham poet Elizabeth Vignali buzzes in to read from her newest book and also to read and discuss Dorianne Laux's poem "Facts about the Moon.
Elizabeth Vignali is the author of the poetry collection House of the Silverfish (Unsolicited Press 2021) and three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Endangered [Animal] (Floating Bridge Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Willow Springs, Cincinnati Review, Poetry Northwest, Mid-American Review, Tinderbox, The Literary Review, and others. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, where she works as an optician, produces the Bellingham Kitchen Session reading series, and serves as poetry editor of Sweet Tree Review.
"This weirdness swims up..." Alexandra Regalado talks to Farnaz Fatemi about teeth as relics, finding inspiration in visual artists, attempting to say the unsaid, writing things in poems that might never get said aloud--and more serious and not-so-serious preoccupations. Our conversation focuses on Regalado's second book, the National Poetry Series publication Relinquenda, from Beacon Press.
Alexandra Lytton Regalado is a Salvadoran-American author, editor, and translator. She is the author of Relinquenda, winner of the National Poetry Series (Beacon Press, 2022); the chapbook Piedra (La Chifurnia, 2022); and the poetry collection, Matria, the winner of the St. Lawrence Book Award (Black Lawrence Press, 2017). Alexandra holds fellowships at CantoMundo and Letras Latinas; she is winner of the Coniston Prize, and her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, poets.org, World Literature Today, Narrative, and The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog, among others. Her translations of contemporary Latin American poetry appear in Poetry International, FENCE, and Tupelo Quarterly and she is translator of Family or Oblivion by Elena Salamanca. She is co-founding editor of Kalina, a press that showcases bilingual, Central American-themed books and she is assistant editor at SWWIM Every Day an online daily poetry journal for women-identifying poets. www.alexandralyttonregalado.com
"I Am a Woman of Almost 62 Years Old / of no special bravery."
With this poem, Carla Rachel Sameth begins her hour on The Hive Poetry Show, reading from her first full-length collection, Secondary Inspections, released in January 2024, as well as newer poems. For a voice both introspective and self-aware, Sameth's writing pours itself into the people around her--her biracial Black son, a mother succumbing to dementia, siblings, lovers, and her wife going through the process of transitioning into her husband.
As Eduardo C. Corral notes about Carla's work, "Blossoming and decay are the twin forces in these powerful poems. Addiction, death, raising a child blessed with more than one story, and queerness are the threads woven throughout the book, but they also vibrate with their own particular music." Particular, yes, but always leaning into the shared experience, several of these poems, such as "Love Letter to a Burning World," and "June 2020," decipher the intersecting perplexities of the pandemic, the intensification of racial unrest, and the fires--literal and figurative--that raged around us during that season. Sameth's gaze shrinks from none of the distress but does not linger in the emotions, arresting us instead with a captivating image or wry undertone. She says of her family, "We used to argue over the hearts and gizzards; now no one wants those parts."
"Secondary Inspections invites us to take a second look at what we thought we knew and shows us how things are not always what they seem—identity can be questioned, provoke danger, and leave us impacted by how others see us; the bedrock of a family can be forever shifting and we too shift along with it. Through powerful narrative and vivid imagery, Sameth’s poetry travels, searches, stumbles, and ultimately, returns. Even amidst heart-staggering moments, she reveals a rich cultural life that is both within, and that is further made possible by deeply being in the places you love with the people you love" (carlasameth.com).
Carla Rachel Sameth is the co-poet laureate of Altadena (2022-2024) and a Poet Laureate Fellow with the Academy of American Poets. Her chapbook, What Is Left was published in December 2021 with Dancing Girl Press. Her memoir, One Day on the Gold Line was reissued by Golden Foothills Press in December 2022. Her work has been selected three times as Notable Essays of the Year in Best American Essays. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee. a Pasadena Rose Poet, a West Hollywood Pride Poet, and a former PEN Teaching Artist, Carla has taught creative writing to high school and university students, incarcerated youth and other diverse communities.
Listen to Carla read her poems and talk candidly with Geneffa about the experiences that informed them--a conversation relatable to those who are mothers or have otherwise had to learn to embrace while letting go.
Secondary Inspections is now available for order.
The first poem in Katie Farris' new book of poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, ends with the stanza Why write love poetry in a burning world?/ To train myself, in the midst of a burning world/ to offer poems of love to a burning world. This poem, an arrow that sails though each poem in the collection, begins Farris' unflinching look at the details of her own cancer treatment and marriage in the midst of social and political unrest. The poems, intimate and immediate, tackle difficult subjects yet they're full of tenderness and humor. Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with Katie Farris about the poems, poetry and about her journey To train myself to find, in the midst of hell/ what isn't hell. Katie Farris’s most recent book, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive, from Alice James Books (US) and Liverpool University Press (UK), was shortlisted for the 2023 TS Eliot Prize and was listed as Publisher’s Weekly’s Top 10 Poetry Books for 2023. She’s also the author of the hybrid-form text boysgirls (Marick Press, 2011; Tupelo Press 2019), and the co-translator of many works, including A Country in Which Everyone’s Name is Fear, which was one of World Literature Today’s Notable Books of 2022. She’s a Pushcart Prize winner. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.
Love in all its blissful, blistering forms provides the foundation for lyrical poet Sarah Levine's new book, Each Knuckle with Sugar. A Massachusettes poet, the conversation runs from love to craft to loss. These surprising poems are made more memorable by the way Levine has skillfully built a world to hold them. You can find Levine's book at Driftwood Press: https://www.driftwoodpress.com/product-page/each-knuckle-with-sugar
You can read her poem, "Forgotten Things," in the Paris American here: https://www.theparisamerican.com/sarah-levine-poetry.html
Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections, Mirrorforms (Parlor Press) and Deviants (SFASU Press). A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from Southwest Review, the River Styx International Poetry Prize, and The Columbia Review Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and the Persea anthology of self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon. He teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University.
We read Charles Wright's "Future Tense."
Dion O’Reilly chats with Roxi Power about her new book, The Songs that Objects Would Sing, diving deep into a work that that “is aflame, both with the literal wildfires ravaging the American West and with the slower smolder of personal grief. Power’s response to loss and disaster is a quirky plangent song…shot through with humor and underpinned by a rippling ostinato of lyric power” (Mark Scroggins).
With ease and humor, Dion and Roxi draw on postmodern and Buddhist theories, debating whether the presences that sing within the objects of Power's lines are “essences.” “I feel you in the glint of objects sometimes. That’s all I know.” The white "ghost piano" on the book's cover, painted by her sister Sky Power, summons her mother’s musical influence within the titular elegiacal poem. Power conjures and “unpaints” the psycho-geography of Texas and Wyoming, filled with the "ghost-scratchings" of memory that, like de Kooning's paintings, peak through to the surface of the “cinematic fictions she sews from scratch." She bends time in poems such as "The Aftermath of Future" where “Now is just one fold in the snake skin of time.”
Dion and Roxi discuss Power’s trans-genre work and why she has been drawn to recombinant forms since her MFA work at Cornell University that include music, visual art, and film. Power has taught for 25 years at the University of California, Santa Cruz where she founded and edits the trans-genre anthology, Viz. Inter-Arts. Her next book is forthcoming from Carbonation Press in 2024.
Power organizes national “Trans-Genre Cabarets,” and her own trans-genre work includes Live Film Narration (Neo-Benshi) performances of original scripts across the country, including the Tennessee Williams Festival, the New Orleans Poetry Festival, REDCAT, and St. Mark’s Poetry Project. Her next Neo-Benshi performance is Feb. 22 at Satori in Santa Cruz.
Power organizes events and makes podcasts for The Hive Poetry Collective. Her most recent podcast is with Brenda Hillman.
Farnaz Fatemi writes: “With both musical and emotional intelligence, not to mention a linguistic virtuosity, Power conjures hope amid her sonic discoveries—while still bearing lucid witness to personal and community grief.”
C.S. Giscombe writes, “The first line of Roxi Power’s incredible burst of poems lays down the law with one hand and sets things in motion with another—that is, she writes as if to remark on the coming noise made by fire, death, love…The many motions of this music, of these songs that objects would sing, will brush thereader with a difficult and worthy and joy.
You can order her book here.
Andrea Hollander, author of six poetry books, moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for fifteen years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for twenty-two. Hollander’s newly released sixth full-length collection is And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023). Her fifth, Blue Mistaken for Sky, was a finalist for the Best Book Award in Poetry from the American Book Fest; her fourth, Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982- 2012, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; her first, House Without a Dreamer, won the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize and was recently reissued, along with The Other Life, Hollander’s second full-length collection, by Red Hen Press in its Story Line Legacy series. Her poems and essays appear widely in anthologies, college textbooks, and literary journals, including a recent feature in The New York Times Magazine. Other honors include two Pushcart Prizes (in poetry and literary nonfiction), two fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the 2021 49th Parallel Award in Poetry. After teaching for two literary centers in Portland for six years, in 2017 she initiated the Ambassador Writing Seminars, which she conducted in her home until the pandemic, and now via Zoom.
Emily Ransdell's debut collection, One Finch Singing, was awarded the 2022 Lewis Award and was published in 2023 by Concrete Wolf Press. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Emily divides her time between Camas Washington and Manazaita Oregon, where she teaches poetry workshops through the Hoffman Center for the Arts.
Farnaz Fatemi and Julia Chiapella read poems by Palestinian poets and those of Palestinian heritage to amplify and bear witness to the range of their perspectives and the richness of these voices. We found the reading of these aloud to each other to be profoundly moving. Please see the extensive show notes for links to the poets, their books, many more we couldn’t include on the show and other recent resources.
In this order--Fadwa Tuqan, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, Zeina Azzam, Mahmoud Darwish, Mosab Abu Toha, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat, Noor Hindi, Naomi Shihab Nye were featured on the show.
We mentioned the following anthologies during this hour: We Call to the Eye & the Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage (Zeina Hashem Beck and Hala Alyan, editors); & Modern Arabic Poetry (Salma Khadra Jayyusi, editor).
Since recording our episode a week ago, the Palestinian academic and poet Refaat Alareer was killed in Gaza; we want to bring attention to the story of this poem, his last.
We additionally want to highlight the work of Deema K Shehabi, George Abraham, Nathalie Khankan, and Fady Joudah (also see Joudah’s recent “meditation”), among many, many others. For one additional resource about poets, see the Instagram account, The Palestinian Poetry Project, poetrypalestine.
The LA Review of Books recently published a small folio of writing from poets of Palestinian heritage.
We recommend Palestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide.
Vox Populi published a “ceasefire cento” solicited from poets globally. You can read it here.
Listen in as Robin Gow and Farnaz Fatemi discuss Robin’s book Lanternfly, their experience writing a hyper-focused collection, the value of persona poems, defiance, cross-species empathy and more.
Robin Gowis a trans poet and YA/Middle Grade author from rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of several poetry collections including, most recently, Lanternfly August, from Driftwood Press, & Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy. Gow also writes queer YA/Middle Grade novels such as Ode to My First Car, A Million Quiet Revolutions, and Dear Mothman. He manages community programs at Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, building celebratory spaces for the local LGBTQ+ folks. As an autistic person, Robin feels passionate about celebrating neurodivergent folks in the queer community. They live in Allentown, Pennsylvania, with their partner, best friend, and pugs, Gertrude and Eddie.
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 Angelsand 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.
Dion O'Reilly and Pacific Northwest poet, Jeannine Hall Gailey, talk about science, science fiction, and poetry. Jeannine reads from her new book Flare Corona.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of six books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, which was a finalist for the 2012 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal and a winner of a Florida Publishers Association Presidential Award for Poetry, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her sixth poetry book, Flare, Corona, is upcoming from BOA Editions. She’s also the author of PR for Poets: A Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. She has a B.S. in Biology and an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati, as well as an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Pacific University. Her poems have been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and on Verse Daily; two were included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. In 2007 she received a Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant and in 2007 and 2011 a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.
To kick off Trans Week of Awareness (Nov. 13 - 19), Geneffa Jahan sits down with local youth poet, Madeline Aliah (age 17) to hear how poetry has given her hope and a voice. Madeline reads from her chapbook of poems, This Is My Body: Poems by a Teen Trans Fem, forthcoming from Jamii Press (2024), and additional works that take her poetry beyond identity politics. She speaks of her activism through the Queer Trans Youth Council and shares advice for allies, reminding us through her wit and wisdom that Queer kids are still just kids.
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.
What do the Sufis, Zen Buddhists, and Catholics have in common? Listen in and find out as Gary Gach brings the poetry of Persian poet Hafiz to The Hive! We talk about the new book, Hafiz's Little Book of Life, he and translation collaborator Erfan Mojib have put together with a forward by Ari Honarvar.
“How to translate into English what, until now, has justifiably been called the ‘untranslatable’ Persian verses of Hafiz? From its epigraph onward, Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach have given us the answer. Hafiz’s Little Book of Life breathes new life into the world of the Sufi poet’s 14th-century words, making those words new again.”
—Stephen Ratcliffe, author Conversation and Listening to Reading
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 Poetryand,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.
Poets Bill Lavender, Sean F. Munro, and Rodrigo Toscano talk with Roxi Power about the wildly successful annual April event they organize: The New Orleans Poetry Festival. In the second half of the show, they read their own poems; the political poetics of each poem buzzes with national and global currents. Festival co-founder Bill Lavender reads from his opus-in-progress that he began writing on the day of the January 6 insurrection: City of God, inspired by Augustine of Hippo's book of the same name.
Rodrigo Toscano: "We're not impresarios of poetic labor. We're here to build relationships. Atomization is what most Americans are experiencing. Alienation to the hilt. There's no better culture than New Orleans to attack that alienation...through the joyful celebration of the art that we've devoted our lives to: poetry."
Find out more at https://www.nolapoetry.com/. Proposals for the April 18-21, 2024 New Orleans Poetry Festival are due December 15.
Bill Lavender: https://www.lavenderink.org
Sean F. Munro: seanfmunro.com
Rodrigo Toscano: https://rodrigotoscano.com/
Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders
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.
Public interest in Emily Dickinson continues strong, evidenced by recent pop culture hits like Apple TV’s Dickinson, and the movie, Wild Nights With Emily, starring Molly Shannon. Dickinson herself was influenced by 19th century popular cultural forms, including crime novels. Tune in to hear two poets have fun trying to solve some puzzles, while appreciating the mystery, in her enigmatic poems and life.
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.
One of the original Hive members, Lisa Allen Ortiz, joins us to talk about her Idaho Prize-winning poetry collection, STEM, a book which asks, among other questions, "where in the body does aliveness reside?" Our conversation plumbs more of these easy-to-answer inquiries.
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.
Barbara Bloom, who recently relocated to Bellingham, Washington, shares poems about the deep connection she finds in nature, especially in Santa Cruz, where she lived for over 30 years. Barbara studied poetry with Santa Cruz poets, Joe Stroud and Morton Marcus and taught in the English Department of Cabrillo College for nearly 30 years. In this episode, Barbara reads and discusses poems of departure and the reassurance of perpetual presence in the natural world--a theme that permeates her Santa Cruz poems as well as those about her teenage years with her family on a coastal homestead in British Columbia, Canada. She is a member of the local Hummingbird Poetry Collective and has two volumes of poetry: On the Water Meridian (2007) and Pulling Down the Heavens (2017), both published by Hummingbird Press.
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.
Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with Janice Lobo Sapigao about how the intimate details of our lives are the best way to address big themes in poetry such as immigration, community, connectedness, colonization, and loneliness. Janice reads new works as well as the poem "Swerte" by Alyza Taguilaso.
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
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.
Join Julie Murphy as she speaks with Daniel Summerhill, Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action & Composition at CSU Monterey Bay and is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County. Daniel reads a Danez Smith poem and talks about the duty of a poet to tell the truth. His poems look closely at how things really are with beauty, lyric grace and hope.
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.
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.
Join Farnaz Fatemi as she talks with Lucian about the planet's creature, clouds, climate change and curing ham--and the poems Lucian writes invoking all of these things.
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 Passingand 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.
Matt Sedillo takes on the Western canon, discussing how many of the literary giants, such as Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, disparaged Mexico/Mexicans. In his poems, Matt reclaims Chicanx/Latinx/Indigenous literary traditions and histories.
Matt Sedillo has been described by critics as the "best political poet in America" as well as "the poet laureate of the struggle." Sedillo was the recipient of the 2017 Joe Hill Labor Poetry award, a panelist at the 2020 Texas book festival, and a participant in the 2011 San Francisco International Poetry Festival and the 2022 Elba Poetry Festival. Sedillo has appeared on CSPAN and has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, Axios, and the Associated Press among other publications. Sedillo has spoken at Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba, at numerous conferences and forums, such as the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, the National Conference on Race & Ethnicity in American Higher Education, the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies, the Left Forum, the US Social Forum, and at over a hundred universities and colleges, including the University of Cambridge, among many others. Matt Sedillo is the author of Mowing Leaves of Grass (FlowerSong Press, 2019) and City on the Second Floor (FlowerSong Press, 2022). Sedillo is the current literary director of The Mexican Cultural Institute of Los Angeles.
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/
Join all the members of the 2022 Hive Poetry Collective.
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.
Celebrated Chicana poet Naomi Helena Quinoñez reads and discusses poems that thematize divine feminine power, women’s spirituality, racial oppression, social justice, and more.
Naomi Helena Quiñonezis a poet, educator and activist, and author of three collections of poetry, Exiled Moon, The Smoking Mirror, and Hummingbird Dream/Sueño de Colibri. Quiñonez edited several critical and literary publications including Invocation L.A: Urban Multicultural Poetry Anthology, which won the American Book Award, Decolonial Voices, and Caminos Magazine. She holds a Ph.D. in American History and contributes to the scholarship of Latino/as and women of color. Quiñonez has been featured throughout the country, including the Los Angeles Writers Festival, the Nuyrican Café, the De Young Museum, and the Miami Book Festival. She has shared the mic with Quincy Troupe, Octavia Butler, Luis Rodriguez, and Ana Castillo. Her work has appeared in the Colorado Review, Infinite Divisions, Voices of our Ancestors, and Maestrapeace. Recently Quiñonez received the Teyolia Community Award from the San Francisco International Flor Y Canto Festival. She’s also an honoree of the San Francisco Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, a recipient of the Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Award in poetry, a Rockefeller Fellowship, the American Book Award, and a California Arts Grant. She is featured in Notable Hispanic Women and the Dictionary of Literary Biography. She currently lives in Oakland.
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 Fireand 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.
Hear Tim Fitzmaurice talk about and read from his book of poems, The Things We Take With Us: New and Selected. We talk about writing, poodle personas, Santa Cruz, and community in poetry. Bonus tracks: Tim singing and playing guitar!
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.
You can find Tim on IG @tim.fitzmaurice1 and on Facebook
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.
Journal X poets Carla Schick, Claudia Ramírez Flores, and GusTavo A. Guerra Vásquez read and discuss their poems, touching upon themes of racial oppression, jazz, homophobia, border violence, culture, ancestry, “Watsón(ville)”, and more. Journal X, also known as Xinachtli Journal, is a literary/arts magazine focusing on social justice issues. To read or submit to the journal, visit https://www.cabrillo.edu/journal-x/.
About the poets:
Carla Schick is a Queer activist for liberation, educator and union activist, lover of jazz and language. They have worked for an education system that empowers our students. Published in SF City College’s Forum, Milvia Street, Sinister Wisdom, Earth’s Daughters, and online, at The Write Launch and A Gathering of the Tribes, they received their Certificate in Creative Writing/Poetry from Berkeley City College.
Claudia Ramírez Flores is a poet, fearless writer and Mexican immigrant who highlights crucial social issues in our world by writing about immigration, mental health, death and healing. She seeks to give a voice to the thousands of missing people in México. She has studied at Cabrillo College, UC Berkeley and Yale University.
GusTavo Adolfo Guerra Vásquez (he/him) is a multimedia artist whose work has been featured in La Raíz, Fingir, Arte Latino Now, The Coiled Serpent, and The Wandering Song. A GuatemaLAngelino, GusTavo facilitates artistic workshops on poetry and social justice through his consulting work on inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility leadership. You can see his work at IDEALbridges.com or follow him on instagram as @poetartista. You can subscribe to his YouTube channel at gMeing. GusTavo lived in Santa Cruz and Watsonville during the 1990’s where he organized cultural events like “Noche de Artistas” and the “Sabor a Chocolate” art exhibit.
Join host Julia Chiapella and guest teacher, writer, and poet Patrice Vecchione as they chat about grief, feminism, and reckoning with a parent’s death. Julia will also share poems by students participating in the Young Writers Program’s Word Lab.
For Patrice's website and information on upcoming classes:
patrice@patricevecchione.com
For information on the Catamaran Writing Conference where Patrice will teach a nonfiction class this summer:
https://catamaranliteraryreader.com/nonfiction-with-patrice-vecchione
Many of Patrice's books can be found on Amazon, including her anthologies, writing guide books like "My Shouting, Shattered, Whispering Voice, and her own poetry collections.
https://www.amazon.com/My-Shouting-Shattered-Whispering-Voice-ebook/dp/B07TQK8PBZ
For information on the Young Writers Program:
https://youngwriterssc.org
Joe Millar chats with Dion O'Reilly about the value of emotion and feeling in poetry. He reads from his fabulous new collection Dark Harvest.
Kelli Russell Agodon Chats with Dion O'Reilly about her newest book, Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) and her previous book Hourglass Museum Finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Julie Suk Prize. They discuss eco-poetry and read one of Kelli's favorite poems, Small Kindnesses by Danusha Laméris.
Please listen to this episode of the Hive with Rick Barot interviewed by Julie Murphy. Rick reads a poem by Joy Harjo's as well as several of his new poems. Join our conversation of poetry as elegy, the power of image and metaphor, and writing in difficult times.
Shara McCallum reads from and discusses her book No Ruined Stone, a finalist for the 2022 Rilke Prize. Join us as we explore this riveting alternate history that spans Scotland and Jamaica, colonialism and self-determination, the literary tradition and the individual poet. Hear Shara’s wonderful stories about the making of her sensitive and searching new collection.
Reading from her debut poetry collection, Earth, My Witness, Magdalena Montagne discusses the power of poetry and nature in her healing journey as a survivor of child sexual abuse. “When I despaired, Earth held me,” she writes in her eponymous poem. Magdalena also shares recent poetry about BLM and social oppression.
A long-time facilitator of drop-in writing workshops, Magdalena Montagne has collaborated with libraries throughout northern California to bring her Community Poetry Circles to participants of all ages. She has also worked with elders in assisted living facilities for almost a decade, bringing her WisdomVerse curriculum to those with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive and physical impairments. Magdalena has worked with California Poets in the Schools, Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Council Santa Cruz County, and more. Her poetry has been published in literary journals and her first book, Earth, My Witness, was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press.
To order the book: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/earth-my-witness-by-magdalena-montagne/
Website: https://www.poetrycirclewithmagdalena.com/
To be added to her email list for announcements and teaching schedule: magdamontagne@gmail.com
Listen in to as Shelley Wong reads from and talks about her debut collection, As She Appears, out May 10 from Yes Yes Books. Shelley talks with Farnaz Fatemi about the making of the book, building your own canon of self-love, and how poems help when the world erases or distorts. Find out why Electric Lit has called Shelley Wong "the poet-queen the world needs right now."
Shelley Wong is the author of As She Appears (YesYes Books, May 2022), winner of the 2019 Pamet River Prize. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, Kenyon Review, and New England Review. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Kundiman, MacDowell, and Vermont Studio Center. She is an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts and lives in San Francisco.
Ken Weisner chats with Julie Murphy about odes, owls and homages. Ken has published three volumes of poetry with Santa Cruz’s own Hummingbird Press, including Anything on Earth in 2010 and Cricket to Star in 2019. Ken edits Red Wheelbarrow through De Anza College, where he also teaches. Ken coordinates, with Poetry Center San José, the annual Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize—this year’s final judge, Juan Felipe Herrera. In an earlier stage of life, Ken earned a doctorate in comparative literature from UC Santa Cruz and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. He also teaches poetry writing at Salinas Valley State Prison, currently using remote lesson plans. Please join us to hear poems from Ken's new manuscript and a lively conversation.
Perhaps our most appropriate guest ever on The Hive: former Santa Cruzan Erica Gillingham discusses her debut poetry chapbook, The Human Body Is a Hive, a rich collection about queer love and queer family-making. Listen to Erica read from the book and share her pursuit of telling lesbian love stories in poems, "making a baby with science," and other revealing topics. With a guest cameo from her newborn son.
For U.S. orders, check out bookdepository.org
Follow Erica on IG or Twitter @ericareadsqueer
Listen to poet, printmaker, teacher, and translator Gary Young read his poems and discuss his fascination with Japanese poetry, Confucianism, and the body as erotic epicenter.
About poet Gary Young
That's What I Thought from Persea Books
Even So: New Selected Poems from Amazon
American Journal of Poetry feature
Precious Mirror: Poems by Kobun Chino Otogawa translated by Gary Young
Sally Ashton chats with Dion O'Reilly about prose poetry. Sally Ashton is a writer, teacher, and editor in chief of DMQ Review, an online journal of poetry and art. Publishing in three genres, she’s the author of 4 books including her latest The Behaviour of Clocks, WordFarm. She won first prize in the international Fish Flash Fiction contest and work appears inProse Poetry: An Introduction, and in A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Actually Flies: Commentaries from 80 American Poets on their Prose Poems. She taught at SJSU for ten years in the undergraduate creative writing and composition programs and continues to teach workshops locally, Zoom and in person. Specializing in brief forms across genres and collaborations with artists, she has also taught multi-genre workshops at Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon.
Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with Kathryn Pertuccelli about loving language and life's unexpected journeys. Kitty reads from her manuscript God of Sea. God of Salt. Her poems are full of images of the natural world, surprising turns and fresh language as they explore relationships, loss, and the deep life.
Listen to poets from theWriters of Color-Santa Cruz County Collective read & discuss their poems, touching upon themes of ancestry, culture, death, trauma, and healing. The group talks about their Día de los Muertos poetry event (Nov. 2021), during which they were targets of a racist Zoombombing. Featured poets include Sonya Pendrey, Shirley Flores-Muñoz, Claudia Ramírez Flores, Vivian Vargas, Chloe Gentile-Montgomery, Bob Gómez, and Victoria Bañales.
Sonya Pendrey is a soon-to-be graduate from UC Santa Cruz, who loves to hike and write. She hopes to help people and the planet through her work. Her writing is dedicated to fellow strong-minded women and her sweet pup, Lily. Instagram: @sobido
Shirley Flores-Muñoz teaches in the women’s studies and history department at Cabrillo College. She has been a champion of gender equity and has established programs that encourage and support social justice.
Claudia Ramírez Flores is a mother, poet and a Yale Writers’ Workshop Alumni. She seeks to empower her community with her stories and poetry.
Vivian Vargas is a Chicanx writer and photographer living in Santa Cruz, CA. She founded The Heidelberg Writers Group and is a member of Writers of Color-Santa Cruz County Collective. Webpage: www.writersofcolorsantacruz.org; www.vivianvargas.com; Email: info@writersofcolorsantacruz.org
Chloe Gentile-Montgomery is a Black poet and teacher based in the Bay Area. She grew up in Santa Cruz and is honored to be sharing her poetry and new book with her community. Webpage: www.chloegentilemontgomery.com/; Facebook: www.facebook.com/ChloeRGM; Twitter: @ChloeRGM
Bob Gómez, songwriter, singer, guitarist and poet, is a long-time resident of Watsonville, and worked as a Migrant and Bilingual Resource Teacher in the Pájaro Valley. He was recently named Watsonville’s first Poet Laureate.
Victoria Bañales is a Chicanx writer, teacher, mother, and activist based in Watsonville, CA. She is the editor of Journal X and a member of the Hive Poetry Collective. Webpage: www.cabrillo.edu/journal-x/
Dion O'Reilly chats with Dustin Brookshire, the editor of Limp Wrist Magazine, and Denise Duhamel, his co-editor of the upcoming issue, which will feature poems about BARBIE! Listen to poems from the all-Barbie issue, including poemsbyDorianne Laux, Gregg Shapiro, Caridad Moro-Granlier, and also a couple by both Denise and Dustin. The inspiration for this issue was Denise's 1997 book, Kinky--a collection of poems all about the Mattel superstar.
Award-winning poet Julia Levine joins host Julie Murphy and reads from her most recent collection of poem Ordinary Psalms. Julia's poems are full of startling images and metaphors. Please join this lively conversation about loss of vision, affliction, transformation and learning to trust.
Join host Erin Redfern as she talks with Kelly Cressio-Moeller about Kelly's first book, Shade of Blue Trees (Two Sylvias, 2021; Wilder Prize finalist). Enjoy the lush images of Kelly's poems and hear thoughts on grief and the poem as portent, train rides in Germany and her approach to form, painting and music as creative spurs, and heeding what in us "is making the most noise" to get our creative attention.
Watsonville native & poet Olga Rosales Salinas discusses and reads from her book, La Llorona: Poetry & Prose. In this stunning collection in which La Llorona's presence looms large, Rosales Salinas tackles the violence of deportation, being first gen, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, religion, mental illness, assimilation, & more. To purchase her book, go to https://www.olgars.com/ All proceeds from book sales go to the Rosales Sisters' Scholarship, which benefits PVUSD Latinx students.
rsscholarship.com & @rosalessistersscholarship (instagram), @RosalesSistersScholarship (facebook)
olgars.com & @olgarosalessalinas (both insta/facebook) @olgitarosales (twitter)
Dion O'Reilly interviews Susan Browne, who reads new poems and old ones from her book Just Living. They talk about Jim Moore's poem, "Whatever Else," a poem that studies the lyric beauty in a difficult world. She quotes Robert Hass who says, "Every line of your poem needs something interesting in it." Obviously true! But just try to do it!
Hosted by Julia Chiapella, Hive members share poems to focus our collective consciousness on imagining a new world. From Yeats to Jessica Jacobs to Roger Reeves. Julia is joined by guests Julie Murphy and Farnaz Fatemi.
Poems from the episode:
Yeats The Second Coming
Marie Howe What The Silence Said
Sharon Olds A Song Near the End of the World
Roger Reeves For Black Children at the End of the World—and the Beginning
Jessica Jacobs: In the Village of My Body, Two People appeared in Copper Nickel, Issue 33
Ellen Bass How to Apologize https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/03/15/how-to-apologize
Jim Harrison Bridge
Join host Julie Murphy as talks with Jessica Jacobs about solitude, revelation and inspiration. Jessica read's and discusses Ellen Bass' poem God and the G-Spot s well as poems from each of her books, including her forth coming collection of poems in conversation with the Book of Genesis.
Jessica Jacob's website
SunJune Literary Collaborative
Free SunJune generative writing sessions
Dion O'Reilly talks with Michael Kleber-Diggs about his new collection of poems, Worldly Things.
Come spend time with Leonora Simonovis and our new favorite poetry book, Study of the Raft, which won the 2021 Colorado Prize and was published November 2021. Hear the poet read poems which explore what it means to be exiled from a place and culture, and also what she carries with her—fiercely and lovingly.
Buy Study of the Raft here.
photo: IG @meterphoto
Victoria Bañales interviews poet Violeta Orozco, who discusses and reads from her forthcoming book, The Broken Woman Diaries. Violeta's poems are a bold exploration of love, loss, displacement, and dismemberment, and the ways in which broken bodies can be healed and stitched back together.
Violeta Orozco is a bilingual author and spoken word artist from Mexico City. The Broken Woman Diaries is her third book and debut full-length poetry collection in English.
Violeta Orozco:
Instagram: @vletra
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/florpurpura.azul
Poet, translator, essayist, editor, and journalist Stephen Kessler returns to the Hive to chat with Dion O'Reilly. They read from his new book, Last Call and also a poem by the author Jack Gilbert.
In this week's episode, Jessica Cohn and Nancy Miller Gomez join host Farnaz Fatemi in the Hive to read new work and talk about their poetry lives. We hear about the extraordinary Santa Cruz poetry community, and about finding joy during the pandemic, facing self-doubt. Above all, we hear some fantastic poems.
(In individual segments: Jessica Cohn, part 1 and Nancy Miller Gomez part 2.)
Julie Murphy hosts this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective along with Farnaz Fatemi, chatting with Santa Cruz poet laureate David Allen Sullivan. David reads from his new book Black Butterflies Over Bagdad as well as new work. He also reads and talks about Inventing the Orange Peel , a poem by Meng Hui. They discuss community, compassion, and the power of sharing poetry across cultures as well as the Agents of Change Project for artists and poets.
David Sullivan
Agents of Change Project
Bookshop Santa Cruz
Dion O'Reilly interviews Donika Kelly about her recently published collection, The Renunciations. Donika also reads "The Animal Spell" by Zachary Schomburg, one of her favorite poets.
Tune in for a conversation that covers a lot of ground: a Keetje Kuipers poem, ice cream insights, and plenty of Camille's poems that work to illuminate the intersections of motherhood, history, race, and the body in space and time.
https://camilledungy.com
Join Farnaz Fatemi for this week’s very special show with the two poet-translators of just-published The Blinding Star (Tolsun Books), poems by the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela. Talk with and hear Sara Daniele Rivera and Lisa Allen Ortiz read Varela’s poems in both the original Spanish and their English translations. It’s a ride through the inner life of this wildly contemporary poet.
https://tolsunbooks.com/shop/the-blinding-star
Dion O'Reilly interviews Diane Seuss about her fabulous new book Frank: Sonnets. Diane also reads a poem by the poet Frank O'Hara--an inspiration behind her book.
The Hive Poetry Collective S3 E27: Julie Murphy Interviews award winning poet July Westhale. July reads "The Presence In Absence"by Linda Gregg as well as her own poems from Via Negativa and Moon Moon, and discusses the importance of negative capability in life as well as poetry.
July Westhale
Linda Gregg
Listen to Nikia Chaney interview the editor and poets of ESSENTIAL VOICES: POETRY OF IRAN & ITS DIASPORA. Christopher Nelson, editor, is joined by Persis Karim, Armen Davoudian, the Hive's Farnaz Fatemi, and Arash Saedinia to read their poems and translations from the anthology (Sept 2021, Green Linden Press).
Show links:
www.greenlindenpress.com
Christopher Nelson
Armen Davoudian
Farnaz Fatemi
Persis Karim
In this conversation I talk to the poet, Katerina Canyon about her work and inspiration for her upcoming book: Surviving Home. Hear her read and few poems and be just as moved as I was. For more information about Katerina or to buy her book: https://www.poetickat.com
Julie Murphy interviews Laure-Anne Bosselar. They talk about love, loss, and longing for authenticity. Laure-Anne reads poems from her recent book These Many Rooms and talks about upcoming classes.
Laure-Anne Bosselaar Website
Laure-Ann Bosselaar - Academy of American Poets
Laure-Anne's Books at Four Way Books
SUNJUNE Collaborative
Victoria Bañales interviews Santa Cruz-based Latinx poet Adela Najarro.
Adela Najarro is the author of three poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over and My Childrens, a chapbook that includes teaching resources. With My Childrens she hopes to bring poetry into the classroom so that students can explore creative writing, identity, and what it means to be Latinx in US society. Every spring semester, she teaches a “Poetry for the People,” workshop at Cabrillo College where students explore personal voice and social justice through poetry and spoken word. More information about Adela can be found at her website: www.adelanajarro.com.
Círculo de poetas & Writers:Sign up for Círculo's 2021 online (Zoom) conference: Sat, August 14th, 10:30 am - 3:00 pm. Writing workshops, friendship, and open mic. Go to https://circulowriters.com/ to register.
Links to videos of five poems from My Childrens:
My Childrens
Lorca's Rain
Las Mujeres
Chicanos in a Museum
An Ambiguity
S3:E21: Dion O'Reilly interviews Carl Phillips. They talk about regret, college reunions, Henry James, and Carl's latest book Pale Colors in a Tall Field. He also reads one of his favorite poems by Li Po and references the song "Wild is the Wind," the title of which he borrowed for the name of one of his books (Wild is the Wind).
Farnaz Fatemi and Erin Redfern hear and talk to Jen Siraganian about her poems and her work with various poetry organizations.
Jen is the newly appointed Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. She is a writer, educator, and literary organizer. She has served as Managing Director for Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, been nominated for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize, earned scholarships from Community of Writers at Squaw Valley and Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, and authored a poetry chapbook titled “Fracture.” Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets 2016, Cream City Review, Mid-American Review, Smartish Pace, Barrow Street, Southwest Review, Not Somewhere Else But Here: A Contemporary Anthology of Women and Place, and other literary journals and anthologies.
https://jensiraganian.com
https://www.losgatosca.gov/2298/Poet-Laureate
Dane reads from his new book The World Is God’s Language and the poem “Origin" by Sarah Lindsey.
Dion O'Reilly interviews Guggenheim Fellow Mark Wunderlich. He reads a poem by his friend and mentor Lucie Brock-Broido. He reads a poem by his friend and mentor Lucie-Brock Broido and from his latest book God of Nothingness
A critical mass of six Hive members buzz in to this episode to share new poems.
Victoria Bañales teaches English at Cabrillo College, is founder and editor of Journal X, and a member of the Writers of Color Collective-Santa Cruz County. Her writing has appeared in various anthologies and journals, including The Acentos Review, Cloud Women’s Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, and more. She is the recipient of the 2020 Porter Gulch Review Best Poetry Award and 2017 EOPS Instructor of the Year Award. She lives in Watsonville, CA.
https://www.cabrillo.edu/journal-x/
http://writersofcolorsantacruz.org/
Nikia Chaney is the author of us mouth (University of Hell Press, 2018) and two chapbooks, Sis Fuss (2012, Orange Monkey Publishing) and ladies, please (2012, Dancing Girl Press). She has served as Inlandia Literary Laureate (2016-2018). She is founding editor of shufpoetry, an online journal for experimental poetry, and founding editor of Jamii Publishing, a publishing imprint dedicated to fostering community service among poets and writers. She has been published in the Portland Review, Welter, Vinyl, Saranac Review, Kweli, 491, and Apogee. She teaches at Cabrillo College in Santa Cruz.
http://www.nikiachaney.com
Julia Chiapella’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Avatar Review, I-70 Review, The MacGuffin, Midwest Quarterly, Perceptions Magazine, phren-Z and The Wax Paper. She is the retired director of the Young Writers Program, which she established in 2012, opening an after-school writing lab and adjacent gallery at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History. She received the Gail Rich Award in 2017 for creative contributions to Santa Cruz County.
Farnaz Fatemi’smanuscript, Sister Tongue, was a finalist for the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize and the Catamaran Literary Reader Poetry Prize, and is out in the world finding its long-term home. You can find her work in several anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3: Halal If You Hear Me and How to Love the World: Poems of Gratitude and Hope, and numerous journals. Farnaz taught Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for over 20 years.
http://www.farnazfatemi.com
Julie Murphy’s poems appear or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, The Buddhist Poetry Review, CALYX, Massachusetts Review, The Louisville Review, and The New Ohio Review Online among other journals and anthologies. A licensed psychotherapist, Julie developed Embodied Writing™. She hosts radio programs for the Hive Poetry Collective on KSQD. She is a founding member of the Right to Write Press and teaches poetry, as a volunteer, at Salinas Valley State Prison. Julie lives in Santa Cruz County, California.
www.juliemurphy.org
Dion O'Reilly’s prize-winning debut book, Ghost Dogs, was published in February 2020 by Terrapin Books. Her work appears in American Journal of Poetry, Cincinnati Review, Narrative, The New Ohio Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Letters, Rattle, The Sun, and other literary journals and anthologies. She teaches ongoing workshops on Zoom, and soon, maybe, in her artsy messy house.
dionoreilly.wordpress.com
Farnaz Fatemi and Victoria Bañales interview poets and discuss Journal X, a new literary/arts journal focused on social justice. With poems from Victoria Bañales, Josslyn Glenn, hector son of hector, Geneffa Jahan, and Thomas Anthony Connor.
Journal X:
https://www.cabrillo.edu/journal-x/
email: xinachtlijournal@gmail.com
Victoria Bañales
http://writersofcolorsantacruz.org/
Josslyn Glenn:
Facebook: Josslyn Glenn
Twitter: Funky_Nurd
Email: josslyn.glenn@gmail.com
Julie Murphy interviews award winning poet Nickole Brown. Nickole reads from her stellar chapbook The Donkey Elegies and speaks passionately about donkeys, language and what is holy. If you haven't heard Nickole read, you're in for a real treat!
Nickole Brown teaches at the Sewanee School of Letters MFA Program and the Great Smokies Writing Program at UNCA. She lives with her wife, poet Jessica Jacobs, in Asheville, NC, where she periodically volunteers at several different animal sanctuaries. A chapbook of called To Those Who Were Our First Gods won the 2018 Rattle Chapbook Prize, and a long sequence called The Donkey Elegies was published as a chapbook by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2020.
Nickole Brown's Website
SunJune Literary Collaborative
Dion O'Reilly interviews the poet Erin Belieu. Erin reads from her new book Come Hither Honeycomb. She also reads and discusses the poem "Kindly," by Ashley Capps.
Julia Chiapella interviews this year's county contestants in the Poetry Out Loud competition. Hear our local high school students' experiences and listen to the poems they selected to be recited at the event.
Don't miss Ellen Bass on The Hive Poetry Collective. Please join Ellen and host Julie Murphy in a lively discussion of Ellen's work and hear Ellen read poems from Indigo and more!
Ellen Bass' Website
Buy Ellen's books here.
Dion O'Reilly chats with Leah Naomi Green about her recent award--The Lucille Clifton Award. They also read from her new book, The More Extravagant Feast, winner of the Walt Whitman Award. Hear the recorded Lucille Clifton Award event here (with Li-Young Lee).
Listen in to hear Vanessa Angélica Villareal read from her poems and talk deeply and passionately about the development of her book, Beast Meridian. We were moved by her rigorous, precise, and poetic mind and we know you will be too. If you’ve already read Beast Meridian, you will love hearing Villareal dive into portions of it. If you haven’t yet, you’re going to want to.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, Akrilica Series 2017), a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award nomination, and winner of the John A. Robertson Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters. She is a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellow, and has appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, The Boston Review, Poetry Magazine, and elsewhere. She is working on a poetry and essay collection while raising her son in Los Angeles.
http://vanessaangelicavillarreal.com/
Purchase: http://vanessaangelicavillarreal.com/shop/beast-meridian
Dion O'Reilly interviews author, editor, and translator Zack Rogow. He reads from his new book Irreverent Litanies.
Dion O'Reilly chats with a new member of The Hive Poetry Collective, Nikia Chaney. We talk about her poetry and the new African-American literature class she is teaching at Cabrillo. We read some Ross Gay and Lucille Clifton.
Dion O'Reilly interviews Robert Stewart, long-time editor of New Letters, about his career as a writer and editor. He reads from his new book Working Class.
Join hosts Julie Murphy and Julia Chiapella for the Hive Poetry Collective's Valentine's Day Special. We’ll read and discuss poems by Natalie Diaz, Jack Gilbert, Dorothy Parker, Tim Seibles and more...
Natalie Diaz
Jack Gilbert
Tim Seibles
Beth Ann Fennelly
Dorothy Parker
Robert Wrigley
Dorianne Laux
S3: E4 Dion O'Reilly interviews Alison Luterman about her new book In the Time of Great Fires.
Poets read their poems about fire and talk to host Farnaz Fatemi about writing them. With Lisa Ortiz, Carmen Fought, Terri Drake, Nicelle Davis, Maggie Paul, Roxi Power Hamilton, and Charles Atkinson. Let us know what you think at https://hivepoetry.org
Lisa Allen Ortiz
https://lisaallenortiz.com
Mychorrhiza:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/02/magazine/tree-communication-mycorrhiza.html
Bonny Doon video with Lisa’s poem:
https://www.facebook.com/100000462274944/videos/4903937866298241/
Carmen Fought can be reached at: cfought@pitzer.edu
Maggie Paul
https://maggiepaulpoetry.com
Nicelle Davis
http://www.nicelledavis.net
Terri Drake’s poetry collection is called At The Seams, published by Bear Star Press
Charles Atkinson can be reached at atkinson@ucsc.edu
Roxi Power can be reached at roxipower@ucsc.edu
Julie Murphy interviews Kim Scheiblauer about her forthcoming book of poems "The Visitant" with a guest appearance of fellow Bee Dion O'Reilly! Don't miss these great poems and lively conversation about myth, place and the ineffable.
The Visitant by Kim Scheiblauer. Published soon by Hummingbird Press
Billy Butler introduces a range of poets who contribute poems about 'The End' — the end of the year, the end of good and bad things, times of transitions, and more.
Contributing poets in the order they appear:
Colin Drohan
Elliott Sky Case
José Diaz
Prince Bush
Joumana Altallal
Nathan Blansett
Kim Harvey
Dana K
Mac Axton
Nathan Xavier Osorio
Kevin Bertolero
Isaac Williams
Billy Butler
Tim Dlugos (archival audio recording)
The Poetry Project's New Year's Day Marathon:
https://www.poetryproject.org/marathon
Archival audio recording of Tim Dlugos provided by PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Dlugos.php
New York Diary by Tim Dlugos forthcoming from Sibling Rivalry Press in January: https://siblingrivalrypress.bigcartel.com/
Background audio track:
"Rising Tide" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
To stay connected with the Hive Poetry Collective, you can visit hivepoetry.org
Dion O'Reilly interviews prolific poet Alexis Rhone Fancher about her many books and current projects.
Dion O'Reilly talks with poet Francesca Bell about her life in poetry and her new book, the prize winning Bright Stain.
Farnaz Fatemi and Lisa Allen Ortiz celebrate the political work that poetry can do. In the shadow of our recent election, they read poems by Rick Barot, Lorna Dee Cervantes and Gary Copeland Lilley; they also discuss Farnaz’ own work and parse out what it means to define a poem as political.
Julie Murphy interviews award winning poets Ellen Bass and Cynthia White about their poems and the work of Jericho Brown and Paul Tran included in the new gender-inclusive anthology Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing. Please join us as we read stunning poems and engage in a lively discussion of the power of poetry, how to write about difficult subjects, art and healing, and more.
From the Grabbed website:
"The editors asked writers and poets to add to the conversation about what being “grabbed” means to them in their own experience or in whatever way the word “grabbed” inspired them. What they received are often searing, heart-rending works, ranging in topic from sexual misconduct to racial injustice, from an unwanted caress to rape, expressed in powerful, beautifully crafted prose and poetry.
This book is for everyone who has ever felt alone in their experience of being grabbed, violated, overlooked, and silenced. This anthology is their voice. It is their war cry. It is their plea to be heard and be seen. We want this volume to provide hope to those who have yet to harness the power of their own story. Years in the making, the stitching together of this important narrative chronicles a moment in time which is, unfortunately, also timeless."
Grabbed: Writers and Poets on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing edited by Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, Nikki Moustaki, and Elisa Albo
Grabbed Website
Ellen Bass
Cynthia White
The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse 20th Anniversary Edition by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis
I Never Told Anyone by Ellen Bass
Listen to the buzz of the Morton Marcus annual event!
Award-winning poet, essayist, and novelist Morgan Parker will be the featured guest at the 11th annual Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading, which takes place this year as a virtual event on November 12. Danusha Lameris and Dion O'Reilly dive deep into Morgan Parker's poetry.
The Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading is held each year to honor poet, teacher, film critic, and Santa Cruz cultural icon Morton Marcus (1936-2009). It was created to continue Marcus’s tradition of bringing acclaimed poets to Santa Cruz County, to acknowledge the significant role poetry has played in the community's history, and to help preserve poetry's influence in the county's culture.
This community event is presented by the The Humanities Institute and co-sponsored by Bookshop Santa Cruz, the Cabrillo College English Department, Cowell College, the Living Writers Series, Ow Family Properties, Poetry Santa Cruz, the Porter Hitchcock Modern Poetry Fund, and Porter College.
Dion O'Reilly interviews fellow Terrapin Poets Karen Holmes and Ann Fisher-Wirth. We hear a few poems from their books, The Bones of Winter Birds, by Ann Fisher-Wirth and No Such Things as Distance, by Karen Holmes.
Listen here for the first episode dedicated to The Healing Powers of Poetry. Julie Murphy, LMFT interviews therapists and teachers Rob Fisherand Hu Ting Ting. Please join us as we read poems and share experiences with poetry in therapeutic settings. The Hive Poetry Collective: The Healing Powers of Poetry..
Rob Fisher Website
Ting Ting Website (in Mandarin)
Ellen Bass: If You Knew
The Hakomi Institute of California
The Hakomi Institute of China
Diane Louie joins Farnaz Fatemi from her home in Paris, France, to talk about and read from her new book (October 2020) from
University of Georgia Press, Fractal Shores.
https://ugapress.org/book/9780820357904/fractal-shores/
https://www.dianehlouie.com/work
Dion O'Reilly interviews poet Elaine Nussbaum who reads from her latest book Jesus Christ Made Seattle Under Protest. She talks about her teacher, Allen Ginsberg, and her experience on the Great Peace March.
Please join me for a lively conversation with award winning poet Traci Brimhall. Traci will read poems from her new book "Come the Slumberless to the Land of Nod" and share her thoughts about love, vulnerability, death and writing. Aired on KSQD 90.7 FM Sunday September 27! The Hive Poetry Collective: Julie Murphy interviews Traci Brimhall. Season 2, Episode 26.
Farnaz Fatemi talks to Hive members Billy Butler and Dion O’Reilly about poetry in the seeming end times. Listen in to conversation about wildfires, the 2020 election, hair product, facing uncertainty, friendship, and more.
Billy Butler read from his essay, the Finer Points of Being an Anxious Person When Bad Things Happen, https://thebolditalic.com/what-you-have-when-you-may-lose-everything-2efa304c827c
Dion O’Reilly read a poem soon to appear in Anti-Heroin Chic,
http://heroinchic.weebly.com
Poets/Poems mentioned in the show
William Bronk https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-bronk
Francine J Harris https://poets.org/poet/francine-j-harris
Keith Wilson Ode to the Police https://aprweb.org/poems/ode-to-the-police4
Pamela Hart American Mother https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2020/05/15/385-american-mother?fbclid=IwAR05La9QntqdGs2f0585kk20c3zhrk7oxZ3s5DUmyTzLLudGUZZyoRvo4Qs
In these sad and broken days, let's not forget delight and what it's made of— rage and rapture. Lisa Allen Ortiz hosts an episode of PROSETRY on the Hive that celebrates Ross Gay's poetry and prose and features Gay reading excerpts from his Book of Delights. Buzz in for a listen and discover that joy is powerful medicine.
Dion O'Reilly talks with poet Cynthia White and fellow Bee Julie Murphy about our favorite poems. We read Diane Seuss, Lucille Clifton, Robert Frost, Tracy K. Smith, and Frank Gaspar.
Listen here for a great conversation and great poems. Julie Murphy interviews Cynthia White and Maggie Paul, Santa Cruz poets, who read new work and talk about nature, metaphor, and who inspires them.
Maggie PaulWebsite Facebook:
Cynthia WhiteFacebook:
The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben
A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman
A conversation between the beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye and Danusha Laméris at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, marking the occasion of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award.
Dion O'Reilly interviews Bay Area poet Meryl Natchez. You can find her newest book Catwalk right HERE.
Join host Julie Murphy and Santa Fe poet, Barbara Rockman, as they share poems and talk about about her award winning book to cleave. The conversation weaves through themes of marriage, loss, aging, and spirituality.
Honey from the Flashback Hive —Poet and Fiction Writer Meg Freitag talks with Lisa Allen Ortiz about fiction, boxes, God, mirrors and of course poetry written to dead parakeets named Edith.
Dion O'Reilly interviews Seattle poet, editor, and teacher Jeanne Morel. You can find her newest chapbook HERE.
The Hive was thrilled to host Armen Davoudian and hear poems from his forthcoming book, Frost Place Chapbook contest winner Swan Song (Bull City Press). Farnaz Fatemi talked to Armen about translation as metaphor, James Merrill, listening to poems in foreign tongues, growing up Armenian in Isfahan, and how "the sonnet is perfectly engineered to talk about immigration.”
"Alibi" (in The Offing)
"Wake-Up Call" (Poetry Daily)
Summer is almost here! Join host Julie Murphy and fellow Hive Poetry Collective members Farnaz Fatemi and Dion O’Reilly as they read and discuss poems inspired by the season.
“We Were Happy During the War” appears in Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky. “Crabs” appears in Telling the Bees, by Faith Shearin. “From Blossoms” appears in Rose by Li-Young Lee. “First Blues” appears in Disappearing Act by Saundra Rose Maley. “After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard” appears in Chickamauga by Charles Wright. “A Small Needful Fact” byRoss Gay. “How Batteries Work” by Lisa Allen Ortiz.
Dion O'Reilly talks with fellow Terrapin Books poets Kory Wells and David Graham.
Find information on Kory here:
https://korywells.com/
on Wells's writing with incarcerated women:
https://boropulse.com/2018/10/inmates-write-of-hard-times-and-hope/
and Wells's NPM videos mentioned in our conversation:
https://korywells.com/npm2020/
For information on David Graham:
Graham's website: www.davidgrahampoet.com
Graham's column "Poetic License" accessible through the Verse-Virtualhomepage: http://www.verse-virtual.org/
Graham's Instagram: www.instagram.com/doctorjazz/
Julie Murphy interviews fellow teachers of the Salinas Valley State Prison Poetry Workshop—Rose Black, Lisa Charnock and Ken Weisner. Please join our lively conversations about the poetry workshop, our experiences teaching, and be ready to hear some amazing poems written by the workshop participants! Broadcast Sunday, May 24th on KSQD 90.7 Santa Cruz.
Links:
For those interested in learning more or being involved:
A Few California Arts in Corrections Websites:
https://williamjamesassociation.org/prison_arts/\
William James Foundation
Newsom’s proposal (before the Corona Virus hit!)
http://arts.ca.gov/news/prdetail.php?id=295
Lobby these people:
https://abgt.assembly.ca.gov/sub5publicsafety
Great local Advocate for Arts in corrections: Assemblyman Mark Stone (who is on the arts committee)
https://a29.asmdc.org/
California Lawyers for the Arts (instrumental in advocacy for arts in corrections
https://www.calawyersforthearts.org/
Another great rehabilitative program to support:
https://avpcalifornia.org/
Proven tio reduce recidivism, waiting lists for workshops
Started by Quakers after Attica, great curriculum, led by outside facilitators and experienced inmates
Here’s the National Site for AVP:
https://avpusa.org/
Literature:
Red Wheelbarrow:
De Anza College literary journal pub wishes both a student edition and a national edition annually.
Work by inmates is featured each issue alongside work of poets & writers from around the region and the country.
https://www.deanza.edu/english/creative-writing/red-wheelbarrow.html/
https://www.pw.org/literary_magazines/red_wheelbarrow
Right to Write Press:
Publishes limited edition chapbooks by prisoners for their families, friends
https://righttowritepress.org/
Chapbooks:
Scroungy by Joseph Weldin
https://smile.amazon.com/SCROUNGY-Joseph-Weldin/dp/1090962533/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=scroungy&qid=1587105625&s=books&sr=1-1
Baca Films:
A Place to Stand directed by Daniel Glick
https://aplacetostandmovie.com/
Bill Moyers Language of Life
https://billmoyers.com/series/the-language-of-life-with-bill-moyers-1995/
This episode, hosted by The Hive’s Farnaz Fatemi, is in two segments. The first, "Why Do Iranians Love Poetry," was produced by Shabnam Piryaei. Part two is an interview with artist Mara Poliak about dance, movement, poetry and poems.
Links to material mentioned:
Shabnam Piryaei
Forrugh Farrokhzad translated by Sholeh Wolpe
The Captive Bird by Jazmin Darznik
Revolutionary Letter #1 by Diane diPrima
New and Selected poems Cecilia Vicuña
Intervenir/Intervene. Dolores Dorantes and Rodrigo Flores Sánchez, trans. from the Spanish by Jen Hofer.
Zoom Forward! Reading Series
Catamaran Literary Reader Events
Danusha Lameris and Armando Alcarez read from Healing the Divide: Poems of Kindness edited by James Crews.
Dion O'Reilly interviews the prolific poet, Paul Hostovsky. We talk about deafness, blindness, harmonica playing, cocoanuts, and, of course, poetry. Learn more about Paul at: http://www.paulhostovsky.com/
Julie Murphy hosts Hive Poets Dion O'Reilly, Farnaz Fatemi, and Lisa Allen Ortiz in a discussion of loneliness and the power of poetry. The Hive poets share favorite poems of inspiration and consolation for sheltering in place and talk about what it means to be a poet at this time.
Dion O'Reilly interviews Ken Weisner, De Anza College Community College English teacher and editor of Red Wheelbarrow, the DeAnza literary journal. He coordinates, with Poetry Center San José to hold the Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. For fifteen years, Ken edited Quarry West out of Porter College, UCSC. Ken has published three volumes of his own poetry with Santa Cruz’s Hummingbird Press, including Anything on Earth in 2010. and his most recent, Cricket to StarKen’s poems have appeared most recently in Perfume River Poetry Review, Catamaran, Caesura, Nine Mile, Porter Gulch Review, and Phren-Z. Ken also teaches poetry writing at Salinas Valley State Prison.
Filmmaker Iva Radivojevic joins Hive host Farnaz Fatemi in this episode of Poetry in the World to talk about how poems—their visions, the process of making them, the poets who write them—are integral to her art. This episode is a meal full of poems, prompts, artistic vision. Sink your teeth in!
Mentioned in our conversation:
Woman, Native, Other by Trinh T. Minh-Ha
Cecilia Vicuña (Language is Migrant)
Roland Barthes "I like, I don’t like"
Roberto Bolaño Antwerp
Bolaño quotes https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/7350263-amberes
Nicanor ParraAntiPoems
In this episode, Julie Murphy interviews Kerrin McCadden about her chapbook Keep This to Yourself, winner of the 2020 Button Poetry Prize. Don’t miss Kerrin's beautiful, honest poems and this soulful conversation about family, addiction, and loss. Aired March 22, 2020 on KSQD 90.7 FM. Keep This to Yourself will be released March 24, 2020!
LINKS
Kerrin McCadden:
Twitter @kerrinmccadden
Los Angeles Review
Keep This to Yourself:
Button Poetry
Amazon
Addiction & Substance Use Disorder Resources:
Websites:
santacruzhealth.org
www.samhsa.gov
24 hour Help Line:
1-800-662-HELP
On this episode of the Hive, Billy Butler talks with local Santa Cruz-area poet Chestina Craig about her book Daughter of Salt, forthcoming from Picture Show Press later this March. Topics include: marine biology, the best worst reality TV shows, the joy and unbearable weirdness of being in Santa Cruz, finsta accounts, and more. Chestina will be reading poems from her new book on an Instagram livestream (@chesseea) on March 19 at 7pm PST.
You can stay updated with the Hive Poetry Collective at our website: hivepoetry.org or look for the Hive Poetry Collective on Facebook and Twitter. You can check out other programming at KSQD by going online to ksqd.org or tuning in to 90.7FM in Santa Cruz.
Northern California poet Rebecca Foust Skypes into the Hive to join host Dion O’Reilly for a conversation. Find her chapbook Unexploded Ordnance Bin HERE.
Julie Murphy interviews San Francisco poet Gail Newman about her award winning book Blood Memory.Gail, a daughter of Polish Holocaust survivors, talks about her poetry, memory, and faith.
Links:
On Being
Ellen Bass: Truth and Beauty with Marie Howe
Two Sylvias Press
Li Young Lee
Lisa Allen Ortiz travels to La Honda to talk to David LeCount about his 45 year haiku habit, living with nature and how he met his teacher, James Hackett. Ortiz also presses the mute button for the second half of the field interview— ah, but the episode is saved by Farnaz Fatemi who comes by the hive to read haiku by Hackett and LeCount. And-- for your further delight-- here is LeCount's poem that won the 1989 Japanese Haiku Society Grand Prize:
captured firefly--
a child's fingers
hatch the moon
Dion O'Reilly talks with poet David Sullivan about his long poem, "Nightjars," about the friendship between an Iraqi interpreter and a US soldier. With Arabic speaker, Aisha Charves, David reads a section from the opening of the poem.
Dion O'Reilly interviews Finn V. Gratton, LMFT about their poetry, their work as a somatic psychotherapist, and their book, Supporting Transgender Autistic Youth and Adults.
Danusha Laméris talks to Dion O'Reilly about her new book, Ghost Dogs which is available for pre-order from Bookshop Santa Cruz also available at Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
The rainy night conversation includes tasty tidbits about compost piles, waking up with a new face, and the parables of Jesus Christ!
Learn more about Dion O'Reilly, including upcoming appearances and ongoing workshops at her website.
Our feature is a lively and thoughtful interview with writer Ploi Pirapokin about poetry in her world--how it influences her prose, her teaching, and her days. She talks to Farnaz about emotional turns, point of view, images and more, and reads from some of her favorite poems. Mentioned in this conversation:
For the Taking, Linda Gregerson
Crush, Richard Siken
BBHMM, Tiana Clark
Aubade with Burning City, Ocean Vuong
Dion O'Reilly interviews poet Cynthia Neely and reviews John McCarthy's amazing collection of poems, Scared Violent Like Horses.
Find Cynthia Neely 's book HERE.
Find information on John McCarthy HERE.
Find McCarthy's Scared Violent like Horses HERE.
Co-hosts Farnaz Fatemi and Dion O'Reilly discuss the virtuosic poet Patricia Smith. Let Smith’s poetry alter your mind (as poetry should!) with her intense subject matter and comforting beats. Hear poems and discussion from her books Incendiary Art and Blood Dazzler, and explore poetry forms like the Golden Shovel, invented by Terrance Hayes after a Gwendolyn Brooks poem, and used by Smith in Incendiary Art.
http://www.wordwoman.ws
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/patricia-smith
Poet Lee Rossi stops by the Hive to chat with Lisa Allen Ortiz about his new book Darwin’s Garden and about fleeing seminary commitments, the Eden of back yards, climate change, true love and knee caps. Lee Rossi is the author of three books of poetry and a regular contributor toSun Magazine, reviewer for Pedestal and a contributing editor toPoetry Flash.Keep up with all the buzz at www.hivepoetry.org.
The first in a series, Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Danusha Laméris and poet Dion O’Reilly host a show featuring poems about Santa Cruz. Included is work from Ellen Bass, Joseph Stroud, Gary Young and also a few written by the hosts.
Events:
Joseph Stroud’s book launch for his latest collection Everything That Rises will be December 8th, 2019 at 3:00 pm at the beautiful Cabrillo College Horticulture Center.
Also, the Patricia Smith reading is on December 8th, 2019 7:00pm at MAH. For information and to RSVP: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/patricia-smith-at-the-mah-december-8-tickets-77655350243?aff=ebdssbdestsearch
When history and poetry collide-- Colorado poet Kierstin Bridger buzzes into the Hive. Find out more about Bridger or order her books at https://kierstinbridger.com/books/
Did you miss our Halloween show on KSQD due to the power outage. Listen here as a podcast. Dion O'Reilly hosts Wilma Marcus and The Willing Armchair Theater reading poetry by Edgar Allen Poe.
Learn more about the Willing Suspension Armchair Theater HERE.
Learn more about Edgar Allen Poe HERE.
Three hive members buzz about poems and poets they’ve been reading, and what to make of it all. Tune in to hear a poem by our new U.S. Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, from the most recent Pulitzer winner, Forrest Gander, and more.
The autumn episode. Jump into the crispy leaf pile tonight with host Farnaz Fatemi. Highlights include Farnaz reading seasonally-appropriate poems to help soften the blow of the leap into fall; an interview with Andrew Sivak of newcomer Bad Animal Books in Santa Cruz about their visions for poetry and poetry-related events at the store; Dion O’Reilly on the poet Edgar Kunz, and a full cornucopia of the local poetry calendar to make note of.
Some Autumn Poems:
Didi Jackson https://poets.org/poem/fall-1
Emily Jungmin Moon https://poets.org/poem/between-autumn-equinox-and-winter-solstice-today
Emily Dickinson https://poets.org/poem/besides-autumn-poets-sing-131
Bad Animal Books
Edgar Kunz, Tap Out
Danusha Laméris and Armando Alcaraz in conversation with the poet Zubair Ahmed. We learn about his journey here from Bangladesh and about poetry as saving grace. Find his work at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/zubair-ahmed.
Danusha Lameris and Dion O'Reilly read their poems from the anthology A Constellation of Kisses. They also talk craft and the backstories behind the poems. The book is available here:
https://www.amazon.com/Constellation-Kisses-Diane-Lockward/dp/1947896172
Dion O'Reilly interviews poet and publisher Diane Lockward about her poetry, Terrapin Books, and the anthology Constellation of Kisses. Find out more about Diane Lockward and read her poems here: http://www.dianelockward.com/
Learn about Terrapin Books here: https://www.terrapinbooks.com/
Sam Roxas-Chua touches down at the Hive to talk with Lisa Allen Ortiz about his book Saying Your Name Three Times Underwater, asemic writing, alligator crabs, poems that write poets and other secret things.
Dion O'Reilly interviews San Francisco poet, teacher, and bee keeper Amanda Moore. Find out more about Amanda and read more of her wonderful work at https://amandapmoore.com/about.
This episode features a conversation between Farnaz Fatemi and choreographer, dancer and writer, Raja Feather Kelly, about the intersection of poetry and his art and life. And another fabulous installment of Lisa Allen Ortiz's Prosetry, in which she examines the work of Charles Simic.
More about Raja can be found on Instagram: @rajafeatherkelly, and at: http://thefeath3rtheory.com/
This week’s Hive: Danusha Lameris talks with poet and winner of last year’s Morton Marcus Prize, Veronica Kornberg. Hear more of Veronica’s poems, a few of Mort’s, and learn more about this Central Coast writer.
Dion O’Reilly interviews Julia Chiapella of The Young Writers Program, a program sponsored by the Santa Cruz County Office of Education which brings poetry to 4th-12th graders in Santa Cruz City Schools. Three students and a teacher speak passionately on the benefits of poetry for school age children. Find more about this program including how to volunteer at https://youngwriterssc.org
Danusha Lameris and Dion O’Reilly interview Santa Cruz poet William Ward Butler, aka Billy Butler. We hear some of his poems and talk high school poetry slams, falling trees, Frank O’Hara and more.
Dion O’Reilly interviews Julia Levine. Julia B. Levine has won numerous awards for her work, including the Northern California Book Award in Poetry for Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight. She has three other books: Ditch Tender, Ask, and Practicing for Heaven. She received a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University. She lives and works in Davis,California.
Also, Farnaz Fatemi reads from Flècheby Mary Jean Chan and Halal If You Hear Me: The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 3, edited by Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo
Susan Browne, winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize, reads from her new book, Just Living, which was chosen as the Catamaran Poetry Prize winner. Catherine Segurson, editor and chief of Catamaran, talks about the Catamaran Literary Reader and all of Catamaran's many contributions to the literary scene in the Monterey Bay.
In three segments, this Hive episode is dripping with fresh nectar, and chock full of an exploration of what poetry can mean. Lisa Allen Ortiz introduces a new segment called “Prosetry.” Her subject this episode is Mary Ruefle. Farnaz Fatemi is joined by the visual artist Marnie Briggs on her segment, “Poetry In The World.” Armando Alcaraz and Danusha Laméris read poems in Spanish and English by Luis Cernuda.
Mentioned in the show:
http://maryruefle.com
https://marniebriggs.com
Marnie Briggs on Instagram: @mar_nie
Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Danusha Lameris in conversation with some of the members of the local Hummingbird Poetry Press. Guests include: Wilma Marcus Chandler, George Lober, Maggie Paul, Chuck Atkinson, and Angie Boissevain.
More info about the press at: https://dasulliv1.wixsite.com/hummingbirdpress
The Hive premieres a new segment, hosted by Farnaz Fatemi, called Poetry in the World. Farnaz talks with the multi-disclipinary artist, Christian Berman, about why writing poetry matters and how it informs his art practice (image courtesy Christian Berman). Dion O’Reilly talks about Who and What she is reading. Also includes the local poetry calendar for June.
Find more about Christian at http://www.cruizberman.com and @cruizberman
Beloved Palo Alto poet Esther Kamkar joins Lisa Allen Ortiz and the Hive Poetry Collective this Sunday at 8pm on KSQD 90.7, Santa Cruz. Esther will read from her new book "of such things."
A conversation between Danusha Laméris and Jory Post. Talking about Phren-z, Santa Cruz Writes, health, illness and the prose poem. Includes Jory’s recent work.
Celebrate the 2019 issue of Porter Gulch Review with editor David Allen Sullivan and a panel of this year’s contributors: Victoria Bañales, Jennifer Lagier, Travis DeYoung, Kate Avraham, and Robin White Turtle Lysne as they read poems from the issue.
Lisa Allen Ortiz hosts this episode of The Hive.
Farnaz Fatemi and Dion O'Reilly interview local Santa Cruz poet and songwriter, Laurence White. We hear Laurence read and sing and talk further about both. Episode also includes a segment from The Hive called, Who Are We Reading?
LINKS:
From the Laurence White interview:
Follow Laurence at @caravaggioboy
Listen to Laurence’s music:
· https://shallowdiverecords.bandcamp.com/track/homesick-- this is the track you heard on our show.
· https://chaoticfutch.bandcamp.com/releases--this is the “bedroom EP” Laurence refers to.
More info on Word Church can be found here
Farnaz mentioned a movie which takes place at Transylvania U in Kentucky. It is American Animals.
In the “Who Are We Reading” segment:
Dion read from Ploughshares; she also mentioned New Ohio Reviewand New England Review.
Farnaz read from Halal If You Hear Me: Breakbeat Poets vol 3, newly released.
Poetry Calendar:
Monday, May 6 @ Word Church: Billy Butler, Featured Poet
Thursday, May 9 @ Peace United: Brenda Shaughnessy and Ellen Bass
Poet Laureate Danusha Laméris talks about her life, her writing, and her role as poet laureate. She reads a few poems from her first book The Moons of August and also some new ones from her second book-- Bonfire Opera-- which will be available in spring 2020.
Singer/ songwriter Sarah Cruse leads a discussion with other members of In Her Shoes, a local event that features African-American women sharing their experiences through poetry/ spoken word.
Host: Sarah Cruse
In this episode of the Hive Poetry Hour, Meg Frietag, author of the award winning collection Edith, reads poems and discusses parakeets, love, childhood, teeth, consciousness and the pitfalls of calling fiction fiction.
Host: Lisa Allen Ortiz
Following the interview is the Hive poetry calendar.
Santa Cruz Poet Laureate Danusha Laméris and Dion O’Reilly discuss Tony Hoagland– his contribution to American letters, his life, and controversial work.
Farnaz Fatemi and Dion O’Reilly interview Wilma Marcus Chandler and In Celebration of the Muse poets. We hear about the history of The Muse celebration in Santa Cruz, and also the poets read their work. Featuring Danusha Lameris, Carol Brensel, Jessica Cohn, Nancy Gomez, Rosie King, and Maggie Paul.
As part of our Community Outreach Series, we meet Watsonville-based poet, writer, and teacher Christopher Soriano who speaks to us about his life and work. Find him on Instagram and Twitter @chsoripalma and at christophersorianowrites.wordpress.com
Episode Hosts: Farnaz Fatemi and Dion O'Reilly