S7 E46: Matthew Nienow Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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We read from Matthew’s newest book and also the poem ⁠My Father’s Locker⁠⁠ by James Ciano⁠.

⁠Matthew Nienow⁠’s recently released collection, ⁠If Nothing⁠ (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

S7 E44: Winter Poems: Roxi Power, Julia Chiapella, and Parker Shabala talk about some of their favorites

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Three “bees” from The Hive Poetry Collective warm your minds with cozy—and existential––conversation about winter poems as we draw closer to the Winter Solstice.  

Roxi Power talks with Julia Chiapella and Parker Shabala about winter poetry ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnet to his beloved to Elizabeth Robinson’s new poetry about members of the unhoused community surviving frostbite. We talk about winter’s philosophical soundscapes  in Louise Glück’s “bone dice/of blown gravel clicking” and in the U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s “world of being [that] is like this gravel: you think you own a car, a house, this blue zig-zagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.”

Tune in and let us borrow an hour of your time to enjoy Kenneth Patchen’s spiritual and erotic snowscapes, laugh about Anne Sexton’s branches that “wear the sock of God,” and contemplate Wallace Stevens’  “mind of winter” that beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” 

S7 E43: Rising Voices Program with Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez

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Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez founded the Rising Voices Program, providing Santa Cruz County high school students with workshops led by local poets devoted to introducing poetry to teens. Hear some of the students read their poetry and learn from the teachers how the impact of poetry is affecting lives.

S7 E42: Jane Hirshfield and Dion O’Reilly

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Jane reads and discusses her newest book, ⁠The Asking: New and Selected⁠, which just came out in paperback.

Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator ⁠Jane Hirshfield⁠ is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023); Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004); and The Heart of Haiku (2011). 

S7: E41 16th Annual Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading with Ellen Bass

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Farnaz Fatemi and Maggie Paul preview this year’s Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading and discuss the history of this reading series, now in its 16th year. They also discuss the accompanying ⁠annual $1000 poetry prize⁠ now sponsored by The Hive! 

Hear poems from Morton Marcus and several of the past featured poets and prize winners. 

To read Maggie Paul’s interviews with several of the featured readers over the last 15 years, check out ⁠her website⁠.

For an archive of the series, check out ⁠⁠https://www.mortonmarcus.com/history-of-reading-orig⁠

S7: E40 Ruth Mota talks with Julia Chiapella and Hannah Tool

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Ruth Mota joins Julia and provisional Hive member Hannah Tool to read and discuss Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill and share selections from her debut chapbook, Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, which is available for pre-order here. You can hear more of Ruth’s poems on December 4th at “The Power of Her Voice,” a poetry benefit for Santa Cruz Community Health, at Temple Beth El in Aptos – tickets available here.

Ruth Mota currently lives in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, California after residing a decade in northeast Brazil and working as an international health trainer throughout Latin America and Africa. Now she devotes her time to writing poetry and facilitating poetry circles to groups in her community like veterans, seniors or men in jail. Her poem “The Sloth” is nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Connecticut River Review, and over sixty of her poems have been published in online and print journals. Her first chapbook, entitled Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, is available for pre-order now through Finishing Line Press.

S7: E39 Victoria Bañales in Conversation with Farnaz Fatemi

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Victoria Bañales joins the Hive Live! at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday, Feb 10, 2026 at 7pm. ⁠Event information here⁠. Join our ⁠non-spamming email list⁠ here to keep up with Hive events. 

⁠Victoria (Vicky) Bañales⁠ is the 2025-2027 Watsonville Poet Laureate. A Chicanx educator and writer, she is the author of the poetry collection, The Sun Will Not Harm You by Day, Nor the Moon by Night (Jamii Publishing, 2025), and the founder of Journal X, a social justice literary arts magazine, which was awarded the Superior Distinction by the National Council of Teachers of English. Her writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, Storyknife, Macondo, Vermont Studio Center, and other artist residencies. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from UCSC, and teaches composition and creative writing at Cabrillo College, where she also serves as the Faculty Senate President. More at ⁠vickybanales.com⁠.

S7 E38: Marie Howe and Dion O’Reilly

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Marie Howe buzzes into the Hive to read from her newest books and also to recite a little ⁠Juan Ramon Jimenez⁠.

Marie Howe⁠ is the author of ⁠New and Selected Poems ⁠(W. W. Norton, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; ⁠Magdalene⁠ (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by ⁠Margaret Atwood⁠ for the 1987 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Howe’s brother, John, who died of AIDS in 1989. In 1995, she coedited the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995).

S7 E37: Keetje Kuipers and Dion O’Reilly Chat 

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Keetje Kuipers⁠ and Dion read and discuss ⁠a poem⁠ by ⁠Ruth Schwartz⁠ and then read from Kuiper’s new book, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers.

.Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poetry, ⁠Lonely Women Make Good Lovers,⁠ was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.

S7:E36 Julie Murphy & Dion O’Reilly Share Some Favorite Poems

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Join Julie Murphy and Dion O’Reilly for a conversation that moves through love, loss, and wonder — from Yeats’s “The Wild Swans at Coole” to Andrea Cohen’s sharp humor in “Something“, Richard Siken’s quiet reflections in “Kitchen Window,” and the stargazing tenderness of Keith Wilson’s “there aren’t enough idioms about the stars.” We’ll also talk about Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s moving “Miss You. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love.” and the poignant beauty of  Connie Leung’s “Autumn in Prison.”  These poems remind us how language can hold both the ache and the brightness of being alive. 

S7 E35: Part 2: Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover talk with Roxi Power

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Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover talk with Roxi Power in this second part of our interview, revealing their mutual love of film and poetry inspired by it. From Chernoff’s surreal meditations on François Truffaut’s French New Wave film, Jules et Jim, to Hoover’s weaving of Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story into his dreamlike language, we look through lenses of other art forms—including the deep and unsettling Brazilian musical genre, Fado—to experience the strange and gorgeous interior worlds of these prolific and beloved Bay Area poets.

Maxine Chernoff is professor emeritus of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She is the author of 19 books of poetry and six of fiction, including recent collections from MadHat Press: Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (2023) and Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (2019). Peter Johnson called her the most important prose poet of her generation. She is a recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry and, along with Paul Hoover, the 2009 PEN Translation Award for their translation of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome. A former editor of New American Writing, she lives in Mill Valley.

Paul Hoover is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry; his most recent book of poetry is O, and Green: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2021). He has also published a collection of essays and a novel, and translated or co-translated a few books, including Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry. Founding and current Editor of the literary annual, New American Writing–now published by MadHat Press–and two editions of the indispensable Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Hoover teaches at San Francisco State University. He’s also won an NEA and numerous awards, including the Carl Sandberg Award in poetry which Chernoff has also won. 

S7 E34: Emilie Lygren talks to Farnaz Fatemi

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Emilie joins Farnaz Fatemi to discuss her new book, how poetry helps her stay in touch with “moments [she] felt truly like herself,” and giving oneself permission to be in the state–like butterflies in chrysalis–of goo. Moving, wise, and funny thoughts are everywhere when you’re talking with Emilie Lygren. 

Emilie discussed the Soul Bone/⁠Maharishi International University MFA⁠ in Creative Writing. ⁠Find out more. ⁠

⁠Emilie Lygren⁠‘s Once I Was a Stone is an intimate portrait of gender nonconformity rooted in the context of childhood and the natural world. Lygren grapples with the complexities of selfhood, power, and loss, offering a gentle yet unflinching look at what it means to be in relationship with place. 

Emilie Lygren is a nonbinary poet and educator whose work is grounded in curiosity and reverence. Her poems have appeared in over twenty literary journals and anthologies, and her first book of poetry, What We Were Born For, was selected as the Poetry Foundation’s monthly book pick in 2022. Currently, Emilie is a professor of creative writing, a poet in the schools, and at work on an anthology of poems on mental health for teens. For more of her work and words, visit: ⁠https://emilielygren.com/⁠ 

S7 E33: Kim Addonizio Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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We read and discuss ⁠[It is abominable, unquenchable by touch] by Diane Seuss⁠ and then read from Kim’s newest book ⁠Exit Opera. ⁠

⁠Kim Addonizio⁠ is the author of ⁠nine poetry collections⁠, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry, The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. She has received fellowships from the NEA and Guggenheim Foundation, Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and the essay, and her work has been widely translated and anthologized. Tell Me was a National Book Award Finalist in poetry. Her new poetry collection, Exit Opera, is out from W.W. Norton. She lives in Oakland, California.

S7 E32: Roger Reeves on ecstasy, simultaneity and more with Julia Chiapella 

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Poet ⁠Roger Reeves⁠, author of ⁠King Me⁠, ⁠Best Barbarian⁠ and ⁠Dark Days: Fugitive Essays⁠, is a National Book Award finalist, Griffin Poetry Prize Winner, Whiting Award winner and professor at UT Austin. His frank and gracious discussion of poetry, growing up in the Pentecostal church, parenthood, and the importance of silence, carves a path encouraging us toward the revelation that the life we want is already here, reaching out for our hand. 

S7: E31 Nicelle Davis in Conversation with Farnaz Fatemi

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Come talk about Penguin Noir, with Nicelle Davis and Farnaz Fatemi. Penguin Noir won the Changing Light Novel in Verse Prize from Livingston Press. The story follows a woman who repeatedly visits “The Sea of Wonders Amusement Park” after surviving an active shooter situation, finding comfort among Emperor penguins. In their artificial habitat, she imagines the thoughts and feelings of these creatures, confined to spaces that mirror her mental state. During an active shooter drill that goes wrong, she recalls the events that led her there, revealing links between her trauma and the broader ecological and economic crises affecting future generations.

Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Language of Fractions (Moon Tide Press 2023). The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011). Penguin Noir recently won the Changing Light Novel in Verse Prize from Livingston Press and will be released Summer of 2025. Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, MHA, Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center, Red Hen’s WITS program, and with MEP. She currently teaches Middle School in the High Desert of southern California.

S7 E30: Joe Millar Talks with Dion O’Reilly

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Joseph Millar⁠‘s first collection of poems, ⁠Overtime,⁠was a finalist for the 2001 Oregon Book Award. His second collection, Fortune, appeared in 2007, followed by a third, Blue Rust, in 2012. Kingdom was released in early 2017, and Dark Harvest, New & Selected Poems, was released in 2021. His latest collection, Shine, was published in October of 2024.

Millar grew up in Pennsylvania and attended Johns Hopkins University before spending 30 years in the San Francisco Bay area working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. It would be two decades before he returned to poetry. His work—stark, clean, unsparing—records the narrative of a life fully lived among fathers, sons, brothers, daughters, weddings and divorce.

He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in such magazines as DoubleTake, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, APR, and Ploughshares. Millar teaches in ⁠Pacific University’s low-residency MFA⁠ Program.

S7 E29: Susan Browne Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Susan Browne and Dion read from Susan’s new book, ⁠Monster Mash⁠⁠, and talk about Nicole Sealey’s poem Object Permanence

Susan Browne⁠ is the author of ⁠four poetry collections, ⁠including ⁠Monster Mash⁠ (Four Way Books, 2025) and Just Living (Catamaran Literary Reader, 2019), winner of the 2019 Catamaran Poetry Prize. She is a recipient of the Four Way Books Intro Prize, the James Dickey Poetry Prize and a Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She was an English Professor for 34 years and currently teaches poetry workshops online. She lives in Northern California. 

S7: E28 Waking Up: New Book from Teen Poets of Santa Cruz County

Julia Chiapella interviews the teen editors of the newly published anthology Waking Up (Sixteen Rivers Press). Editors Simon Ellefson and Sylvi Kayser are joined by project advisor, Farnaz Fatemi. The poets read and discuss contributions from the anthology, reflecting a range of themes which matter to young people in the current climate. 

Waking Up is an anthology of poetry from youth throughout Santa Cruz County, available now from  ⁠Sixteen Rivers Press⁠. 

“The world needs this collection of poems right now to help us wake up to the truth of the world as it exists and to imagine the change and growth our country so urgently needs. The teen voices in Waking Up have much at stake in our collective future, and they are rising to this need with the eloquence and nuance that poetry provides. “I know that once you hear these voices, you’ll agree.” (From Farnaz Fatemi).

Season 7: Episode 27 Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover Talk with Roxi Power

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Award-winning poets and founding editors of the groundbreaking journal, New American Writing, Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover talk with Roxi Power about their most recent books from MadHat Press and how poetry can reveal then reconstitute the brokenness of the world.  Hoover says of writing poetry, “You have to purposefully break a few dishes along the way. The brokenness and emotional force bring the pieces back together.”   

Chernoff, writing under the shadow of Covid, says, “We stand at the margins of this bustling, often cruel but beautiful world and, in a way, the poem writes itself because the world gives us conditions to think about at the same time—the ecology of the world, governments falling apart, etc.  It’s happening to all of us.  Part of being a writer is simply noticing the moment you’re in, personalizing and capturing it in a way that only your particular words at this particular time can do.” 

These beloved Bay Area poets collage philosophy, film, history, and—in Hoover’s newest work—Old Testament stories and cadences in poems that redesign rather than restore the shattered surfaces of the world in new forms—like poetic wabi-sabi.  

Peter Johnson recently called Chernoff the most important contemporary prose poet born during his generation. Marjorie Perloff wrote of Paul Hoover’s most recent book, “He’s at the top of his game.”  Tune into this interview with two of the most articulate poets about their own craft.  It’s part 1 of a two-part interview.  More to come!  

 Maxine Chernoff is professor emeritus of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She is the author of 19 books of poetry and six of fiction, including recent collections from MadHat Press:  Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (2023) and Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (2019).  She is a recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry and, along with Paul Hoover, the 2009 PEN Translation Award for their translation of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome. A former editor of New American Writing, she lives in Mill Valley. 

 Paul Hoover is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry; his most recent book of poetry is O, and Green: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2021). He has also published a collection of essays and a novel, and translated or co-translated a few books, including Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry.  Founding and current Editor of the literary annual, New American Writing–now published by MadHat Press–and two editions of the indispensable Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Hoover teaches at San Francisco State University.  He’s also won an NEA and numerous awards, including the Carl Sandberg Award in poetry which Chernoff has also won.  

Season 7: Episode 26 Geraldine Connolly Talks with Julia Chiapella

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How to access the mind’s expansiveness? Geraldine Connolly reads poems from her new book, ⁠Instructions at Sunset⁠, and talks about this as well as excavating the past, family, and how poetry serves as a means of interrogating the self. A two-time recipient of NEA fellowships and the author of four previous books of poetry, Connolly has taught workshops for the Maryland Poetry-in-the-Schools Program and the Graduate Writing Program at Johns Hopkins University in Washington D.C. Find out more about Connolly ⁠here⁠.

S7:E25  Leigh Sugar Chats with Julie Murphy

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In this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, host https://juliemurphy.org/about/ talks with http://leighksugar.com/ about her debut poetry collection FREELAND. Leigh’s poetry weaves memory, intimacy, and incarceration into lyric that’s as unflinching as it is tender.We chat about language, erasure, love under surveillance, and the ethics of naming. We’ll also discuss the poem https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/npm14-shane-mccrae-claiming-language/ a poet who continues to shape how many of us understand rupture and reclamation in American poetry.

Leigh Sugar (she/her) is a poet, editor, teacher, movement artist, and, most importantly, learner. Her debut collection, FREELAND (Alice James Books, 2025), was a finalist for both the Alice James Award and the Jake Adam York Prize, and she created and edited the anthology That’s a Pretty Thing to Call It: Prose and Poetry by Artists Teaching in Carceral Settings. (New Village Press, 2023). She has taught writing in various settings, including New York University, Hugo House, The Institute for Justice and Opportunity, and Michigan state prisons.  A disabled artist, Leigh lives with her pup in Michigan. Say hi on Instagram @lekasugar, or via her website at http://www.leighksugar.com/.

S7: E24: Youth Poet Laureate Program of Santa Cruz County with Farnaz Fatemi

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Meet Santa Cruz County’s 2025-26 Youth Poet Laureate, Finn Maxwell along with the four inspiring finalists who are part of this year’s cohort: Noemi Romero, Xander Shulman, Mason Leopold, and Sylvi Kayser.

Each of these teens from different corners of Santa Cruz County will share two poems and talk about their experiences with poetry.

To keep up with this year’s events and otherwise support these inspiring poets, follow the YPL program on Instagram @youthpoetlaureatesantacruz or the ⁠YPL website⁠ ⁠here⁠.

Noemi’s spoken word TikTok is available ⁠here⁠. 

S7:E23: War Poems with Addie Mahmassani and Dion O’Reilly

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Recorded in June 2025, during the 6th month of the Trump administration, while American bombs rained down on Iran, Addie and Dion read war poems. They read “We Lived Happily During the War,” by ⁠Ilya Kaminsky⁠,” Convergence,” by ⁠Joseph Stroud,⁠ “The People of the Other Village,” by ⁠Thomas Lux, ⁠“Anywhere you Look,” ⁠Jane Hirshfield⁠, ⁠Samuel Hazo⁠‘s “Intifada,” and ⁠Khải Đơn⁠‘s “Daughter of Many Wars.”

S7:E22: Francisco Aragón Speaks with Julia Chiapella

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Francisco Aragón, Director of Letras Latinas at Notre Dame University, talks about his most recent book, After Rubén, and the queering of iconic Nicaraguan poet, Ruben Darío. Hear Francisco’s exquisite voice bring his own and Darío’s voice alive as we talk about the Neorealism movement, Federico Lorca, and giving new breadth and depth to Darío’s work. You can find After Rubén at ⁠Red Hen Press⁠. Read more about Francisco Aragón ⁠here⁠.

S7 E21: Dorianne Laux Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Dorianne Laux reads ⁠her poem “Fear” ⁠ as well as poems from her new craft book ⁠Finger Exercises for Poets⁠.

⁠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 of poetry is Life On Earth and was released in January of 2024. Finger Exercises for Poets, a book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets was released in July 2024. 

S7:E20 Cynthia White Talks with Julie Murphy

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In this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, host Julie Murphy talks with Santa Cruz poet Cynthia White about her award-winning chapbook Glossogenesis. The show begins with Cynthia’s reading of Susan Firer’s poem, Transubstantiation. They explore how language shapes experience, how poetry holds memory and transformation, and what it means to write with clarity and care. A rich conversation on craft, intimacy, and the power of the poetic voice. From intimate images of family life to meditations on wonder and memory, this episode is a deep dive into the craft and heart of contemporary poetry as exemplified in Cynthia’s spare and startling poems. Cynthia White is a poet based in Santa Cruz, California. Her poems have appeared in Adroit, Massachusetts Review, ZYZZYVA, Southern Poetry Review, New Letters, Poet Lore and Plume among others. Her work can be found in numerous anthologies, including leaning toward light: Poems for gardens and the hands that tend them from Storey Press. She was a finalist for Nimrod’s Pablo Neruda Prize and the winner of the Julia Darling Memorial Prize from Kallisto Gaia Press. Her poem “She Said Stop Here” was recently included in the preface to “Alma Mater” by London playwright Kendall Feaver. Cynthia is a screener for Red Wheelbarrow’s annual poetry prize.
July 14, Glossogenesis will be released by Sundress Publications. Download here for free!

S7: E19 Be En•Tranced by Poems from En•Trance Journal

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Julie Murphy⁠, ⁠Addie Mahmassani⁠, and ⁠Dion O’Reilly⁠ read poems from ⁠En•Trance Journal⁠ , a journal dedicated to altered states and the lyric moment. We read and discuss poems by Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Julie Murphy, Deborah Gorlin, Emily Ransdell, Jessica Cuello, and Jim Moore.

There are fifteen fabulous poets in the the first issue of ⁠Entrancejournel.net⁠. We wish we could have discussed them all at length, but we had less than an hour to plumb the depths of pure being!!!

To read the rest of them go ⁠here⁠.

The first issue of En*Trance Journal also features art by ⁠Frank Galuszka⁠ and a podcast component, where poets read and discuss their poems. 

S7: E18 Nin Andrews Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Nin and Dion read from her new book ⁠Son of a Bird,⁠ now available from Etruscan Press. They also read and discuss “Unrest,” by Emily Fragos.

Nin Andrews⁠ is the author of the s⁠ix chapbooks and ten full-⁠ ⁠length poetry collections⁠ including The Last Orgasm (2020),
Miss August (2017), and Why God is a Woman (2015). She is
the recipient of two Ohio individual artists grants, the Pearl
Chapbook prize, The Wick Chapbook Prize, and the Gerald
Cable Award. Her collection, Why God is a Woman won the
Ohiona Prize for Poetry in 2016. Her work has been featured
in numerous journals and anthologies including
Ploughshares, Agni, The Paris Review, four editions of Best
American Poetry, Great American Prose Poems from Poe to the
Present, and The Best American Erotic Poems. Her poetry has
been translated into Turkish, performed in Prague and
anthologized in England, Australia, and Mongolia.

S7: E17 Denise Duhamel Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Dion and Denise chat about her new book, ⁠Pink Lady.⁠ We also read and discuss “⁠His Terror” by Sharon Olds.⁠

Denise Duhamel has published numerous collections of poetry, including Second Story (2021), Scald (2017), Blowout (2013), which was a finalist for a National Books Critics Circle Award, Ka-Ching! (2009), Queen for a Day: Selected and New Poems (2001), all of which were published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Kinky, published by Orchises Press in 1997. Citing ⁠Dylan Thomas⁠ and Kathleen Spivack as early influences, Duhamel writes both free verse and fixed-form poems that fearlessly combine the political, sexual, and ephemeral.

She co-edited, with ⁠Nick Carbó⁠, Sweet Jesus: Poems about the Ultimate Icon (The Anthology Press, 2002), and, with ⁠Maureen Seaton⁠ and ⁠David Trinidad⁠, Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (Soft Skull Press, 2007). Duhamel has also collaborated with Seaton on several poetry collections, including Caprice (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015), Little Novels (Penguin, 2002), Oyl (Pearl Editions, 2000), and Exquisite Politics (Northwestern University Press, 1997).

Duhamel’s honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Her work has been included in several volumes of Best American Poetry, where she was a guest editor in 2013, and has also been featured on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Bill Moyers’s PBS poetry special Fooling with Words.

A distinguished university professor at Florida International University, she lives in Hollywood, Florida.

S7: E16 Kirk Glaser Talks with Julia Chiapella

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Kirk Glaser’s book, The House That Fire Built, has been 25 years in the making following a suspicious house fire and the characters both prior to and following the incident. Join us as we talk of ghosts, poet James Murray, and the many ways fire exists as metaphor. You can find the House That Fire Built at ⁠Mad Hat Press⁠.

S7: E15: Adela Najarro Chats with Farnaz Fatemi

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Adela Najarro‘s fifth poetry collection, Variations in Blue, was selected by the Letras Latinas/ Red Hen Collaborative for publication in March, 2025. The California Arts Council recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region, appointing her as an Individual Artist Fellow. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area.

Adela is the Board President for ⁠Círculo de poetas and Writers⁠ and works with the Latinx community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. ⁠Adelanajarro.com⁠

More about ⁠Letras Latinas here⁠. 

S7 E14: Rubén Quesada Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Rubén and Dion kick of the show by reading “⁠Eating Together,” by Li-Young Lee⁠.

Then they read from Rubén Quesada’s new book, ⁠Brutal Campanion.⁠

Ruben Quesada, Ph.D is an award-winning poet and editor. He edited the groundbreaking anthology Latinx Poetics: Essays on the Art of Poetry, winner of the Gold Medal from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. His poetry and criticism appear in The New York Times Magazine, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, Harvard Review, and American Poetry Review. He has served as poetry editor for AGNI, Poet Lore, Pleiades, Tab Journal, and as a poetry blogger for The Kenyon Review and Ploughshares. He currently teaches as Affiliate Faculty in the MFA in Creative Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles.

Brutal Companion is a haunting and visceral collection of poems that explores themes of identity, sexuality, loss, and personal transformation. Drawing from his own experiences as a gay man, the poet delves unflinchingly into memories of desire, trauma, and self-discovery against the backdrop of an often unforgiving world. From intimate encounters and dreamlike visions to searing societal critiques, the poems paint a complex portrait of navigating life at the margins. Deeply sensory and evocative, Brutal Companion is a fierce meditation on survival and a testament to poetry’s ability to wrest meaning and resilience from even the darkest places.

We mention ⁠The Blessing by James Wright.⁠

S7:E13 Christy Prahl Chats with Julie Murphy

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Join Julie Murphy and Chicago poet, Christy Prahl, as they read and discuss Kwame Dawes‘ poem Sea and Rain from his book Nebraska. Then they dive into Christy’s We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press), a gorgeous collection of midwest poems that take a daring look into relationships, identity, pleasure, loss, and more. Sprinkled though the conversation is bits of craft, stories and laughter. The show concludes with an imaginative poem from Christy’s new manuscript. 

Christy Prahl is an Illinois Arts Council grant recipient and the author of the poetry collections We Are Reckless (Cornerstone Press, 2023), With Her Hair on Fire (Roadside Press, forthcoming fall 2025), and Catalog of Labors (Unsolicited Press, forthcoming fall 2026). A Best of the Net and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has been featured in Poetry Daily as well as many national and international journals, including the Asheville Poetry Review, CALYX, Louisville Review, Penn Review, Sugar House Review, Salt Hill Journal, Tar River Poetry, and others. She splits her time between a small workers’ cottage in Chicago and refurbished Quonset hut in rural southwest Michigan.  

S7 E12: Roxi Power and Dion O’Reilly: Poets Respond to 2024 Election, Pt. 2. Winter In America (Again.

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Roxi Power chats with Dion O’Reilly about a new anthology, Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election that Power co-edited. With their usual mix of irreverence and in-depth close readings, they showcase the wide range styles in this collection of 100+ poets published by Carbonation Press. This urgent book was assembled by 8 editors between election and inauguration day and captures feelings about this critical election in compassionate, courageous poems.

Poets discussed on the show include Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Bill Lavender, Aby Kaupang, Mark Nowak, Stacey Jones, Cherie Brown, and Veronica Eldredge–several of whom are featured in upcoming readings including April 26 and 27, 2pm PST (5pm EST) on Lit Balm: An Interactive Livestream Reading Series here: ⁠us04web.zoom.us/j/461603228. ⁠

⁠More information about readers here. ⁠

⁠Find out more about the book project here⁠: , and ⁠here.⁠

⁠Order Winter in America (Again here. 

S7:E11 Karen Marker Talks Visionaries with Julia Chiapella

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Cassandra, Hildegard of Bingen, Virginia Woolf, Ann Sexton…the link between visionary minds and what classifies as ‘mental illness’ is key to opening doors of perception. Join Karen Marker as she talks with Julia Chiapella about her new book, Under the Blue Umbrella, and a family history of schizophrenia as both stigma and chimera. Beneath the Blue Umbrella can be found ⁠here⁠.

Karen Marker has been honored with awards from the Friendswood Library Ekphrastic Poetry Contest, the Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition and the Ina Coolbrith Circle. Her work has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including The MacGuffin, The Monterey Poetry Review, The Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, Wingless Dreamer, Slant Poetry, and wordpeace. Her poetry can also be found in the Kent StateUniversity May 4^th Special Collections and Archives and has been incorporated into the liturgy of Jewish prayer services. Her first book of flash memoir and poetry, Beneath the Blue Umbrella, was published by Finishing Line Press, and explores issues of sibling loss and mental illness

S7:E10 Nancy Miller Gomez Talks with Julie Murphy

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Please join Julie Murphy as she chats with Santa Cruz County’s new Poet Laureate, Nancy Miller Gomez, about poetry in the jails and her plans to bring poetry to our community. Nancy reads Ruth Stone’s poem, Another Feeling, and talks about the importance of paying attention and how daily observations, memories and current events can ease the challenge of facing a blank page. Listen to Nancy read poems from her stunning debut collection Inconsolable Objects.

Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, LitHub, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Jentel Foundation. Gomez co-founded Poetry in the Jails, an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, the Juvenile Hall and as part of Cornell University’s Prison Education Program. She earned a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego and a Master in Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University. Originally from Kansas she now lives with her family in Northern California and is thrilled to have recently been appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. She is currently working on a second collection of poems and a collection of personal essays.

Don’t miss the Poet Laureate Celebration at Bookshop Santa Cruz featuring Nancy Miller Gomez and Farnaz Fatemi. April 14, 7-9 PM. 

Bonus: Addie Mahmassani and Dion O’Reilly Read Irish Poetry for St. Patrick’s Day

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Santa Cruz poet, journalist, and author, Addie Mahmassani, buzzes into the Hive to talk Irish poetry with Dion O’Reilly. We read ⁠William Butler Yeats⁠, ⁠Seamus Heaney, ⁠S⁠amuel Beckett⁠ and ⁠Eamon-Grennan⁠

Addie Mahmassani is originally from the East Coast, where she completed a PhD in American Studies. This spring she is finishing an MFA in poetry at SJSU. She covers Arts & Entertainment for Metro Silicon Valley and other Bay Area papers and served as poetry editor of Reed Magazine, Issue 156. Her first book, a feminist history of the American folk revival, is forthcoming with University of Iowa Press.

S7: E7 Dustin Brookshire and Dion O’Reilly read from When I Was Straight, A Tribute to Maureen Seaton

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 Dustin Brookshire⁠ has gathered an impressive array of poetic emulations in ⁠When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton.⁠ They include free verse gestures, couplets, tercets, and prose poems. Maureen’s influence shines, though is never blinding—each of the poets in this anthology takes her title and makes the poem that follows their own.

(From the forward by ⁠Denise Duhamel⁠)

We read poems from: ⁠Kelli Russell Agodon⁠, ⁠Sarah Cooper⁠, ⁠Aaron DeLee⁠, ⁠Caridad Moro-Gronlier,⁠ Diamond Forde, and ⁠Addie Tsai⁠.

⁠Dustin Brookshire ⁠(he/him) is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, 2025) and the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To The One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Love Most Of You Too and Never Picked First For Playtime were finalists in the Poetry Chapbook category of the American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Poet ⁠Maureen Seaton⁠ earned an MFA from Vermont College in 1996. She is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Subways (1991), winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize; The Sea Among the Cupboards (1992); Furious Cooking (1996), winner of both the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Little Ice Age (2001); Venus Examines Her Breast (2004), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award; and Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (2009).

Using collage techniques to create delight and dissonance, Seaton’s poetry has been described as unusual, compressed, and surrealistic. Seaton has explored the possibilities of collaboration throughout her career, writing poetry with Denise Duhamel in such collections as Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000), and Little Novels (2002). She also collaborated with Samuel Ace on Stealth (2011) and with Neil de la Flor on Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (2011). Seaton, Duhamel, and David Trinidad edited an anthology titled Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007).

Seaton is the author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir Sex Talks to Girls (2008), in which she addresses motherhood, sobriety, and sexuality. She teaches at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

(from the Poetry Foundation)

S7:E6 Jessica Cohn Talks with Julie Murphy

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Julie Murphy and Jessica Cohn discuss Jessica’s debut book of poems Gratitude Diary, exploring themes of nature, family, loss, and yes, gratitude. Cohn reads Jane Hirshfield’s poem My Debt and the poets discuss amazement and appreciation of beauty and nature, but also gratitude for the more challenging and difficult aspects of life.

A Michigan native, Jessica Cohn has made homes in Illinois, New York, and most recently, Aptos, California, where she started a poetry practice with the support of the Santa Cruz community of writers. In GRATITUDE DIARY, her first poetry collection, Cohn marks a path through our post-truth world with rocks, feathers, and observations in verse. This long-time editor and nonfiction author revels in the way poems say what cannot otherwise be said. For more, please visit jessicacohn.net or  jescohn@bsky.social.

Reading Poems Together information here.

S7:E5 Naomi Shihab Nye Talks with Julia Chiapella

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Tune in as treasured poet ⁠ Naomi Shihab Nye⁠ reads her poetry, talks of her Palestinian father and ancestors, and recalls the challenging event that led to her popular poem, “Kindness”. She also shares a poem by Palestinian poet ⁠Mosab Abu Tofa⁠ from his book ⁠Forest of Noise⁠. Listen to Naomi read poems from her books ⁠The Tiny Journalist⁠,⁠Fuel⁠,⁠Transfer⁠, and ⁠Everything Comes Next⁠.

S7 E4: Roxi Power, Julia Chiapella, & Dion O’Reilly discuss Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election. 

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With Julia Chiapella and Dion O’Reilly, Roxi Power discusses the just-published anthology she co-edited, Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (Carbonation Press 2025) with 100+ amazing poets. This urgent, lightning-fast book was a collaborative effort by 8 editors between election and inauguration day to create a gathering of poems that responded to this critical election in compassionate but courageous language. 

Editors Katie Sarah Zale, Paul E. Nelson, allia abdullah-matta, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Robert Lashley, Roxi Power, CChristy White, and Theresa Whitehill chose a wide range of poems reflecting a diversity of style, region, identity, and issues affected by this historic election including immigration, reproductive rights, climate change, white supremacy, and more. Publisher Greg Bem made the project happen fast.

Along with our own poems, we discuss poems in the book written on election night “as the map turned red”, including “Election Night Blues” by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington; a poem about self-care and healing, “the-bigger-picture” by Dana Teen Lomax; and a poem by Martín Espada about freedom-seeking children playing soccer in detention camps. 

Order Winter in America (Again here. 

Listen to readings from our 1/19 and 1/20 launches on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, on Bibliocracy with Andrew Tonkovich on 4 Thursdays at 2:30, starting Feb. 5. 

Join us at our launch events in Seattle (Feb. 4, March 21, May 3) Tucson (Feb. 15, Gallery of Food;  San Francisco (March 1, Et Al and summer TBA, City Lights Bookstore), Los Angeles AWP (March 27, CSU-Los Angeles); Santa Cruz (April 1, Bookshop Santa Cruz and April 15, Inter Act, Satori Arts), Lit Balm Interactive Livestream (April 26 & 27 2pm EST), & more. 

S7: E3 Sarah Pape joins Farnaz Fatemi

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⁠Farnaz and Sarah Pape discuss the poet’s new book, Forgive the Animal,⁠ (Cornerstone Press), exploring questions of memory, vulnerability and revelation in her poems, along with the complexity of personal fallibility. Pape thinks and talks eloquently about the process of putting together the manuscript regarding a range of craft issues including point of view, form, and genre-crossing.

⁠Also mentioned in this interview: You Are No Longer in Trouble by Nicole Stellon O’Donnell

S7:E2 Dane Cervine Chats with Julie Murphy

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Julie Murphy and Dane Cervine discuss 

DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), Danes new book of contemporary haibun. The poems are rooted in a series of journeys— a pilgrimage— that culminates in the poet finding home in this fragile, yet resilient, world.

Dane Cervine’s recent books of poetry include DEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World (Saddle Road Press), The World Is God’s Language (Sixteen Rivers Press), Earth Is a Fickle Dancer(Main Street Rag), and The Gateless Gate – Polishing the Moon Sword (Saddle Road Press). Dane’s poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, the Atlanta Review, Caesura, and been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work appears in The SUN, the Hudson Review, TriQuarterly, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, Pedestal Magazine, among others. Dane lives in Santa Cruz, California. Visit his website here. 

S7: E1: Miller Oberman and Dion O’Reilly 

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Miller Oberman and Dion O’Reilly read and discuss ⁠Omotara James’s “My mother’s nerves are shot,”  ⁠and then do a deep dive into Oberman’s newest collection, ⁠Impossible Things⁠⁠.

⁠Miller Oberman⁠ is the author of ⁠Impossible Things⁠, forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2024 and ⁠The Unstill Ones⁠, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017.He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Poems from Impossible Things have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, and Foglifter. Poems from The Unstill Ones appeared in Poetry, London Review of Books, The Nation, Boston Review, Tin House, and Harvard Review.

Miller is an editor at ⁠Broadsided Press⁠, which publishes visual-literary collaborations and teaches at and serves on the board of ⁠Brooklyn Poets⁠. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in Queens, New York.

S6:E40 Tim Seibles Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Tim Seibles reads and discusses Lucille Clifton’s poem ⁠”Hag Riding.⁠” Then he reads from his newest collection ⁠Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems.⁠

Tim Seibles was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow. His seven books of poetry include Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. This was followed by One Turn Around the Sun in 2017. His latest collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems was released by Etruscan Press in 2022. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Furious Flower Poetry Center in 2024.

S6:E39  Christopher Buckley Chats with Julie Murphy

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SPREZZATURA, Christopher Buckley’s 30th book, is due from Lynx House Press, January 2025. The sense of place in these poems– whether its the foggy cliffs above the sea or the street of Fresno– is vivid and immediate.  Buckley examines friendship and the inevitability of change as he braids grief, love, and hope in these poems, many of which are dedicated to the great Fresno poets including Phillip Levine, Larry Levis and Peter Everewine.  Chris opens the show with two Everwine poems and discusses the book of interviews and essays he edited, “Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets.”

Christopher Buckley’s work was selected for Best American Poetry 2021; he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, and four Pushcart Prizes.  Recent books are—One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press book Prize for 2022—Agnostic (Lynx House Press), The Pre-Eternity of the World (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and The Consolations of Science & Philosophy (Lynx House Press). Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. 

He has edited over a dozen critical collections and anthologies, most recently NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (with Gary Young) Alcatraz Editions, 2008; with Alexander Long, A CONDITION OF THE SPIRIT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LARRY LEVIS. Again co-edited with Gary Young, Lynx House Press published, One for the Money: the Sentence as a Poetic Form.  With Jon Veinberg, he edited MESSENGER TO THE STARS: A LUIS OMAR SALINAS NEW SELECTED POEMS & READER, published by Tebot Bach in 2014.

S6: E38 Cintia Santana joins Farnaz Fatemi in the Hive

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“Words: They give and give and give.” Cintia Santana joins the Hive to read from her Northern California Book Award-winning poetry debut, The Disordered Alphabet. Hear several poems and a conversation with Farnaz Fatemi about Cintia’s views on words as magic, paying attention, ekphrasis and more.

Cintia Santana ⁠teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and English at Stanford University. Santana’s poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, among many others! Her debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet published by Four Way Books in 2023) was short-listed for the 2023 California Independent Booksellers Alliance “Golden Poppy” Award, received the 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal, the 2023 North American Book Award’s Silver Medal, and just this fall won the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Poetry.  

S6:E37: Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes Hosted by Dion O’Reilly

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Chris Abani⁠ and ⁠Kwame Dawes⁠ chat with Dion O’Reilly about ⁠KUMI: New-Generation African Poets: A Chapbook Box Set ⁠

THE LIMITED-EDITION BOX SET is a project started in 2014 to ensure the publication of up to a dozen chapbooks every year by African poets through Akashic Books. The series seeks to identify the best poetry written by African poets working today, and it is especially interested in featuring poets who have not yet published their first full-length book of poetry.

The nine poets included in this box set are: Nurain Oládèjì, Sarpong Osei Asamoah, Claudia Owusu, Nome Emeka Patrick, Qhali, Connor Cogill, Feranmi Ariyo, Dare Tunmise, and Adams Adeosun.

KWAME DAWES is the author of numerous books of poetry and other works of fiction, criticism, and essays. His most recent poetry collection is Sturge Town which was published by Peepal Tree Press in the UK and W.W. Norton in the US. Dawes is a George W. Holmes University Professor of English and Glenna Luschei Editor of Prairie Schooner. He teaches in the Pacific MFA Program and is the series editor of the African Poetry Book Series, director of the African Poetry Book Fund, and artistic director of the Calabash International Literary Festival. He is a Chancellor for the Academy of American Poets and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Dawes is the winner of the prestigious Windham/Campbell Award for Poetry and was a finalist for the 2022 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. In 2022, Kwame Dawes was awarded the Order of Distinction Commander class by the Government of Jamaica, and in 2024, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Jamaica. 

CHRIS ABANI’s prose includes The Secret History of Las Vegas, Song for Night, The Virgin of Flames, Becoming Abigail, GraceLand, and Masters of the Board. His poetry collections include Smoking the Bible, Sanctificum, There Are No Names for Red, Feed Me the Sun, Hands Washing Water, Dog Woman, Daphne’s Lot, and Kalakuta Republic. He holds a BA and MA in English, an MA in gender and culture, and a PhD in literature and creative writing. Abani is the recipient of a PEN USA Freedom to Write Award, a Prince Claus Award, a Lannan Literary fellowship, a California Book Award, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, a PEN Beyond Margins Award, a PEN/Hemingway Award, and a Guggenheim fellowship. He won the prestigious 2024 UNT Rilke Prize and was a finalist for the 2024 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Born in Nigeria, he is currently on the board of trustees, a professor of English, and director of African Studies at Northwestern University.

S6:E36 Maw Shein Win Chats with Julia Chiapella

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Burmese American poet Maw Shein Win’s new book, Percussing the Thinking Jar, is a liminal elegy to health issues, relationships, and more while navigating the isolation of the pandemic. Hear Maw read poems from the book that’s been called by author John Yau, “diaphanous comfort” while we are at “the chaos party.” You can find Maw’s book at ⁠University of Chicago Press⁠. For more on the poet visit ⁠http://www.mawsheinwin.com⁠.

S6:E35 Pt. 2 Marc Vincenz talks with Roxi Power

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In Part 2 of our interview, Marc Vincenz—author of over 40 books of poetry—talks about his book of poetry, The Pearl Diver of Irunmani (White Pine Press, 2023). We dive into the deep waters of a consciousness preparing for death. During a health crisis, Vincenz came into a new language informed by this encounter, finding footing in “the heart of a word” and his own fearless observations. “See the island in your mind/or you will always be lost.”

Vincenz takes us into “the theater of fear”…”when the audience leaves and you’re left only with yourself.” The poet and the reader emerge changed. Like a cyborg prophet, Marc now writes from the seam between worlds—life and death, nature and “the machinery of the world” (Borges)—mitigating oppositions with deep music. “The traffic doesn’t slow/the bling navigates/like porpoises’ eyes/ in the windows,/those deep dangling metaphors/in a city tangled up in its own industrial age.”

You can hear Pt. 1 of our interview which aired 10/6/24 on KSQD. We discuss Marc’s book, The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars (Lavender Ink, 2024).

Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, publisher, musician and artist. His latest poetry collections are A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. His latest translation is An Audible Blue: Selected Poems (1963 – 2016) by celebrated Swiss poet and novelist, Klaus Merz, which won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. His forthcoming poetry collections are Spells for the Wicked (Unlikely Books 2025) and No More Animal Poems with White Pine Press in 2026. Marc’s work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French, Icelandic, and Chinese. Marc is the publisher for⁠ MadHat Press ⁠and New American Writing. He produces and hosts the biweekly reading series on Zoom, ⁠Lit Balm.

S6:E34 Luke Johnson hosted by Dion O’Reilly

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Luke and Dion ⁠read some Larry Levis⁠ and then take a deep dive into Luke’s latest book.

⁠Luke Johnson⁠ is the author of ⁠Quiver⁠ (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize, the Vassar Miller Award, The Levis Prize and the Bittingham. It was recently named a finalist for the California Book Award, winner announced in May. His second full length Distributary is forthcoming Fall 2025 from Texas Review Press. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. 

S6: E33 Ellen Bass joins Maggie Paul and Farnaz Fatemi

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Ellen Bass ⁠joins the Hive in anticipation of her appearance at UCSC for the Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading on November 7. Poems by Ellen which she reads in this episode: ⁠Laundry⁠, ⁠Because⁠, ⁠Black Coffee⁠, ⁠Any Common Desolation⁠, and Bringing Flowers to Salinas Valley State Prison

Ellen Bass is a Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent book, ⁠Indigo⁠, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Other poetry collections include ⁠Like a Beggar⁠ (Copper Canyon Press, 2014)—which was a finalist for The Paterson Poetry Prize, The Publishers Triangle Award, The Milt Kessler Poetry Award, The Lambda Literary Award, and the Northern California Book Award—⁠The Human Line⁠ (Copper Canyon Press, 2007), and ⁠Mules of Love⁠ (BOA Editions, 2002), which won The Lambda Literary Award. She co-edited (with Florence Howe) the first major anthology of women’s poetry, No More Masks! (Doubleday, 1973).

Her poems have frequently appeared in The New Yorker and The American Poetry Review, as well as in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Sun and many other journals and anthologies. She was awarded Fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts and The California Arts Council and received the Elliston Book Award for Poetry from the University of Cincinnati, Nimrod/Hardman’s Pablo Neruda Prize, The Missouri Review’sLarry Levis Award, the Greensboro Poetry Prize, the New Letters Poetry Prize, the Chautauqua Poetry Prize, and four Pushcart Prizes.

Her non-fiction books include Free Your Mind: The Book for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual Youth (HarperCollins, 1996), I Never Told Anyone: Writings by Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (HarperCollins, 1983), and The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse(Harper Collins, 1988, 2008), which has sold over a million copies and has been translated into twelve languages.

Ellen founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and the Santa Cruz, CA jails. She currently teaches in the low residency ⁠MFA writing program at Pacific University⁠.

Bonus Episode: Jan Beatty with Dion O’Reilly

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Jan Beatty’s⁠ eighth book, ⁠Dragstripping⁠, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, September, 2024. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Award. Recent books include The Body Wars and a chapbook, Skydog (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022). Other work includes Jackknife: New and Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh, 2018 Paterson Prize) named by Sandra Cisneros on LitHub as her favorite book of 2019. Beatty worked as a waitress, abortion counselor, and in maximum security prisons. She is Professor Emerita at Carlow University, where she directed creative writing, the Madwomen in the Attic workshops, and the MFA program. 

S6:E32. Rick Barot Chats with Julie Murphy

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Rick Barot weaves keen observations of the world with reflections and sustenance of human connections across space and time. Please join host Julie Murphy in a conversation with Rick that begins with a discussion of  Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Lights from Other Windows and journeys through poems from Rick’s new book Moving the Bones. Rick’s exquisitely crafted poems examine the human experience deeply and intimately. In our troubled times, his voice is an invitation to find beauty and hope amidst the chaos. 

S6: E31 Marc Vincenz talks with Roxi Power

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Marc Vincenz has been called the David Bowie of poetry, reinventing himself and exploring new poetic chops in each of his 40 books. Roxi Power talks with Vincenz about his newest book of surreal poems inThe King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars (Lavender Ink Press, 2024). 

From the imperialism of Prussia to the purity of Iceland, Vincenz juxtaposes the monstrous with the meditative in his quiet lyrics of epic scope. Matthew Cooperman writes that “Vincenz conjures a centaur poetics where anything may be attached to anything else.” What connects humans with woodworms? How do eels emerge “from the carcass of a waterlogged horse”? We follow the world-traveling and world-building eye of Vincenz across the globe, then perch quietly among constellations that “grow alongside the window” or under the apple trees among the stars, only to experience in his deep images again and again: “Where your eye is, there you grow.”

Marc Vincenz is a poet, fiction writer, translator, editor, publisher, musician and artist. He has published over 40 books of poetry, fiction and translation. His latest poetry collectionsare A Splash of Cave Paint, and The King of Prussia is Drunk on Stars. His latest translation is An Audible Blue: Selected Poems (1963 – 2016) by celebrated Swiss poet and novelist, Klaus Merz, which won the 2023 Massachusetts Book Award for Translated Literature. His forthcoming poetry collections are Spells for the Wicked (Unlikely Books 2025) and No More Animal Poems with White Pine Press in 2026.  Marc’s work has been translated into German, Russian, Romanian, French, Icelandic, and Chinese.  Marc is the publisher for⁠ MadHat Press ⁠and New American Writing. He produces and hosts the biweekly reading series on Zoom, ⁠Lit Balm. 

S6:E30 Ryler Dustin Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Ryler Dustin⁠ has represented Seattle on the final stage of the Individual World Poetry Slam and his poems appear in outlets like Verse Daily, Major Jackson’s The Slowdown, and The Best of Button Poetry. He is the author of ⁠Trailer Park Psalms ⁠(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Heavy Lead Birdsong (Write Bloody Publishing, 2010). He lives in Bellingham, Washington, with his wife and a dog he met while hiking.

S6:E29 Danusha Laméris Hosted by Dion O’Reilly

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Danusha Laméris⁠, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, ⁠The Moons of August⁠ (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book,⁠ Bonfire Opera,⁠ (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. Her third book, ⁠Blade by Blade,⁠ is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.

S6: E28 Pt II: C.S. Giscombe talks with Roxi Power about Negro Mountain

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C.S. Giscombe—known to his friends as Cecil–talks with long-time friend Roxi Power about the second half of his newest poetry book, Negro Mountain) (University of Chicago Press) which was recommended by a New York Times critic as one of the 5 best poetry books of 2023. 

In the second part of our interview, Giscombe dives deep into the book’s central concepts, such as “negro luck” and the “the long story of evil” through totemic figures that reappear in dreams and landscapes, including wolves and jaguars. Drawing on stories and ideas from Ed Roberson (“the idea of image and the idea of capture”), we explore ways to write about “what’s there…but not seen,” including the namesake for the real Negro Mountain in Pennsylvania: an 18^th c. African-American man named Nemesis, whom Giscombe calls “the long shadow on the mountain.”  The book collages dreams, history, and multiple forms of address—”speeches, elocution, and theatrical masks”—to explore monstrous cultural projections.

C.S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English.  His prose and poetry books include Negro Mountain, Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads (“a long poem in the form of an essay”), Similarly (selected poetry and new work), Border Town, etc. In progress are Railroad Sense and Medicine Book.  He is a long-distance cyclist.

S6:E26: George Lober Hosted by Julia Chiapella by The Hive Poetry Collectivepodcasters.spotify.com

Want to hear what it’s like teaching poetry to Special Ops soldiers? Or how to delineate (or not) the space grief occupies? Tune in to hear poetry mining the vein of Robinson Jeffers and Theodore Roethke. George Lober’s latest book, Rainbow Eucalyptus, New and Collected Poems, is available from ⁠Bookshop Santa Cruz⁠ and ⁠Amazon⁠. 

S6:E25 Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill chat with Roxi Power

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Award-winning book and letterpress artists Felicia Rice and Theresa Whitehill (former Poet Laureate of Ukiah, CA.) created a multi-genre project, Heavy Lifting, that speaks in poetry, letterpress, and film to the multiple crises of recent years:  fires, Covid, Black Lives Matter, housing injustice, and more.

Roxi Power talks with these remarkable artists about their “urgent publishing” and how to “lift the fallen” with imagery and words focused on birds.  Hundreds of thousands of birds fell from the sky during the fires.  The artists carry the burden of memory and accountability in what Whitehill calls “this nervous slice of history.” 

We dive into their trans-genre work, poetry’s relationship to letterpress, and their process of countering Covid’s isolation through radical collaboration.

On August 24, 2-4pm, Rice and Whitehill bring their Heavy Lifting listening tour to the Felton, CA. public library for the 4^th anniversary of California’s CZU Lightning Complex Fire.  It’s a chance to commemorate our losses, including Rice’s home and studio.  Rice’s response to this loss was to collaborate with Whitehill to create a record of these crises as well as ways to survive them, through community and “protest beauty.”

S6:E24 Jessica Cuello Chats with Dion O’Reilly

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Jessica Cuello reads from her latest book. Jessica and Dion also read the poem “Running Home I Saw the Planets” from ⁠Aracelis Girmay⁠‘s book Kingdom Animalia.

⁠Jessica Cuello⁠’s most recent book is Yours, Creature (JackLeg Press, 2023). Her book Liar, selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, was honored with The Eugene Nassar Prize, The CNY Book Award, and a finalist nod for The Housatonic Book Award. Cuello is also the author of Hunt (The Word Works, 2017) and Pricking (Tiger Bark Press, 2016). Cuello has been awarded The 2022 Nina Riggs Poetry Prize, two CNY Book Awards, The 2016 Washington Prize, The New Letters Poetry Prize, a Saltonstall Fellowship, and The New Ohio Review Poetry Prize. She is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review and teaches French in Central NY.

Join Julie Murphy and fellow Bee, ⁠Geneffa Jahan⁠, as they discuss “⁠A Simple Poem for Virginia Woolf⁠” by Bronwen Wallace and then explore and delight in Geneffa’s forthcoming book ⁠”Spilling the Chai: Poems about Family and Food⁠“, published by Jamii Press.

Bonus Episode: Dion O’Reilly Reads from her New Book. Julia Chiapella hosts

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At this live, in-studio interview, Julia Chiapella chats with Hive member Dion O’Reilly about her new book, Sadness of the Apex Predator.

⁠Dion O’Reilly⁠ is the author of three poetry collections: ⁠Sadness of the Apex Predator⁠, a finalist for the Steel Toe Book Prize and the Ex Ophidia Prize;⁠ Ghost Dogs⁠, winner of the Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Poetry Award and The Catamaran Poetry Prize; and Limerence, a finalist for the ⁠John Pierce Chapbook Competition,⁠ forthcoming from Floating Bridge Press. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, Cincinnati Review, The Slowdown, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She is a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective, leads poetry workshops, and is a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader. She splits her time between a ranch in the Santa Cruz Mountains and a residence in Bellingham, Washington.

S6:E22 Shizue Seigel Talks with Geneffa Jahan

Listen here! Geneffa Jahan talks with third-generation Japanese American artist and activist, Shizue Seigel about her seven decades of experiential connections across age, class, continents, and cultures. Born in 1946, shortly after her parents emerged from incarceration, Seigel grew up in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California farm labor camps, and skid-row Stockton.

In this candid interview, Seigel shares how she rebelled early against the model minority ethos. In the 1960s, she dropped out of college to explore diverse cultures from the Haight-Ashbury to Indian ashrams, from the Financial District to public housing. Seigel speaks of the common humanity she discovered that informed her desire to forge connections with everyday people, elevating their stories through visual art and poetry.

In this interview, she reads poems that address the challenges of growing up Asian and female and moves on to poignant poems of family history that focus on her bachans (grandmas) who showed her how to cope with grief. Through poems of oral history, Seigel presents a portrait of resilient people—enduring and gracious as they cope with tremendous loss and grief. In keeping with this spiritual alignment, Seigel ends the hour with a poem reflecting on her Buddhist worldview.

Shizue Seigel has worked within marginalized communities for 30 years to help tell unheard stories–working with Black women living in public housing, Japanese American incarceration camp survivors, and other underrepresented groups. She is the founder of WriteNow! SF Bay, supporting writing and art by people of color. 

For more information, check out ⁠http://www.shizueseigel.com/⁠ and ⁠www.WriteNowSF.com

S6:E20: C.S. Giscombe talks with Roxi Power, Pt. 1

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C.S. Giscombe talks about the first half of his newest poetry book, Negro Mountain (University of Chicago Press) which was recommended by a New York Times critic as one of the 5 best poetry books of 2023.

For over 50 years, Giscombe has written eloquently about borders, geography, and maps, beginning with Giscome Road.  His newest book is a tour de force deserving a two-part interview.  C.S. (known to his friends as Cecil) talks with his longtime friend from their Cornell University days, Roxi Power, about the granular details of the first part of his book as well as the grander sweep of his long career and poetic preoccupations.  

C.S. Giscombe teaches at the University of California’s Berkeley campus, where he is the Robert Hass Chair in English.  His prose and poetry books include Negro Mountain, Prairie Style, Ohio Railroads (“a long poem in the form of an essay”), Similarly (selected poetry and new work), Border Town, etc. In progress are Railroad Sense and Medicine Book.  He is a long distance cyclist.

In Negro Mountain, Giscombe writes about a ridge straddling the Mason-Dixon line in Pennsylvania and Maryland called Negro Mountain.  Named after “Nemesis,” a man in the 1750s who took a bullet from a Native American man that was intended for a white man, Negro Mountain provides fertile grounds for exploring complex relationships between people, wildlife,–especially wolves—and location. The book’s speaker and characters are shape shifters, moving fluidly between an educated “country doctor” and monstrous personas—including werewolves and jaguars—embodying hybridity and cultural projections.

Cecil read from Negro Mountain during his Hive Live! Reading with Nancy Miller Gomez at Bookshop Santa Cruz, July 11, 2024.