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.
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.
Listen HERE as Shelley Wong reads from and talks about herdebut 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 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.
Gary Young has been awarded grants from the NEA and the NEH. He’s received a Pushcart Prize, and his book of poems, The Dream of a Moral Life, won the James D. Phelan Award. He is the author of several other collections of poetry including Hands; Days; Braver Deeds, winner the Peregrine Smith Poetry Prize; No Other Life, winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Pleasure; and Even So: New and Selected Poems. His most recent books are That’s What I Thought, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books, and Precious Mirror, translations from the Japanese. In 2009 He received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He teaches creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and was the inaugural poet laureate of Santa Cruz, California.
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.
Listen to poets from the Writers 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 Zoomboming. Featured poets include Sonya Pendrey, Shirley Flores-Muñoz, Claudia Ramírez Flores, Vivian Vargas, Chloe Gentile-Montgomery, Bob Gómez, and Victoria Bañales.
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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.
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/
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 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.
Victoria Bañales talks with Watsonville native and poet Olga Rosales Salinas, who 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, and more. All proceeds from book sales go to the Rosales Sisters’ Scholarship, which benefits PVUSD Latinx students.Olga Rosales Salinas is a content writer and freelancer who produces poetry, short stories, and essays. Her debut collection of poetry and prose, La Llorona was published in August of 2021 by Birch Bench Press. Her column, Thriving While Anxious at Jumble & Flow, speaks to a generalized anxiety disorder that has shaped much of her writing and content. She also writes columns and blogs for San Francisco Bay Area Moms; and was featured by Los Sotelos Podcast for her philanthropy and activism in starting a non-profit, benefiting first-generation and immigrant students; The Rosales Sisters’ Scholarship. She is passionate about all of her creative endeavors which include; motherhood, mental health, fitness, writing and wife-life.
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.”
The Hive Poetry Collective 