Santa Cruz poets making a weekly podcast and live poetry events
Author: dion lissner oreilly
Dion O'Reilly third book, Limerence, was finalist for The Floating Bridge Press John Pierce Chapbook Competition for Washington State Poets. She is the author of Sadness of the Apex Predator (Cornerstone Press 2024) and Ghost Dogs (Terrapin 2020). Her work appears in Cincinnati Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Tar River Poetry, and Rattle. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads private poetry workshops, and is co-editor of En•Trance Journal. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.
Listen here 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 Angels and shares her struggle in coming to forgiveness and grief and joy. Ruba also offers 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.
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.
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
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 was a powerful and engaging reader. Rick Lupert reads some 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.
A conversation between Geneffa Jahan and the Youth Poet Laureates of Watsonville, Rachel Huerta and Eva Sophia Martinez Rodriguez, 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 twenty for their literary achievements with a passion for promoting awareness of poetry and whose work demonstrates a commitment to social justice, equity, and diversity. In this hour, the teens share their journey, talk about their craft, and recite poems that showcase their individual styles.
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.”
Rebecca Foust and Susan Cohen. are longtime friends and have attended the same writing group for years. In this interview with Dion O’Reilly, they both read from their new books: Susan Cohen’s Democracy of Fire and Rebecca Foust’s ONLY.
The Hive Poetry Collective 