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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.  

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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

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 HERE 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 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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.