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Javier Zamora was born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. When he was a year old, his father fled El Salvador due to the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992). His mother followed her husband’s footsteps in 1995 when Javier was about to turn five. Zamora was left at the care of his grandparents who helped raise him until he migrated to the US when he was nine. His first poetry collection, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, September 2017), explores some of these themes.

In his debut New York Times bestselling memoir, SOLITO (Hogarth, September 2022), Javier retells his nine-week odyssey across Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually through the Sonoran Desert. He travelled unaccompanied by boat, bus, and foot. After a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants.

Zamora was a 2018-2019 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University (Olive B. O’Connor), MacDowell, Macondo, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation (Ruth Lilly), Stanford University (Stegner), and Yaddo. He is the recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes & Noble Writer for Writers Award for his work in the Undocupoets Campaign.

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Jim Moore has been writing poetry for more than four decades. Before Prognosis from Graywolf in 2021, he wrote, Invisible Strings, published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the work in that book. Underground: New & Selected Poems is available now from Graywolf Press.

He has won the Minnesota Book Award for his poetry four times. Jim has received grants from the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Boards, the Loft McKnight and in 2012 from the Guggenheim Foundation.  His poems have appeared three times in Pushcart Prize Editions as well as in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Nation, American Poetry Review, Harper’s The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and Water-Stone Review.

Jim lives in Minneapolis and Spoleto, Italy with his wife the photographer JoAnn Verburg. He teaches in the Hamline University MFA Program in St. Paul, Minnesota and is often a Visiting Professor at the Colorado College in Colorado Springs, Colorado. He works online individually with poets from around the country.

Jim reads and discusses one of his favorite poems, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” by Adam Zagajewski translated by Clare Cavanagh.

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Listen to Nikia Chaney interview the editor and poets of ESSENTIAL VOICES: POETRY OF IRAN & ITS DIASPORA. Christopher Nelson, editor, is joined by Persis Karim, Armen Davoudian, the Hive’s Farnaz Fatemi, and Arash Saedinia to read their poems and translations from the anthology (Sept 2021, Green Linden Press).

Show links:

Green Linden Press

Christopher Nelson 

Armen Davoudian

Farnaz Fatemi

Persis Karim

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Poet Daniel Summerhill talks with Julie Murphy about his new collection of poems and a writer’s duty to tell the truth.

Daniel Summerhill is a poet and scholar originally from Oakland, CA. His work has appeared in Columbia Journal, Obsidian, Academy of American Poets and elsewhere. He is the author of Divine, Divine, Divine (Nomadic Press 2021), a semi-finalist for the Wheeler and Saturnalia Poetry Prizes and Mausoleum of Flowers (CavanKerry Press 2022). He is Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action & Composition at CSU Monterey Bay and is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County.

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Editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke discuss their upcoming compilation of Dolly poems, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology from Madville Publishing, due to be released on January 19th, 2023 on Dolly Parton’s 77th Birthday. 

Dustin and Julie attended their first Dolly concert in August 2011. Ten years later, they  joined forces to co-edit a Limp Wrist Dolly issue in 2021 to honor Dolly’s 75th birthday, and on January 19th, they will release an anthology of poems paying tribute to the great singer-songwriter and cultural icon, Dolly Parton.

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Join Julia Chiapella in conversation with award-winning Santa Cruz poet Charles Atkinson. We talk about his recent release, New and Collected Poems, life reflected in poetry, and his clear-eyed embrace of a diagnosis of lewy body dementia. You can purchase the book at Bookshop Santa Cruz or Two Birds Books. Chuck is joined in the conversation by his wife, writer and educator Sarah Rabkin.

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Ellen Bass talks about her experience having Anne Sexton as a teacher in the ’70s at Boston University. Then, Francesca Bell zooms in and we read and discuss a few of Sexton’s poems. Dion mentions Sexton’s fabulous biography by Diane Middlebrook. If you are interested in reading Sexton’s poems, a good place to start is collected poems or her selected poems.

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Paola Bruni chats with Dion O’Reilly about the collaborative book, How do you Spell the Sound of Crickets, written with the late Jory Post.

Jory Post was an educator, writer, and artist who lived in Santa Cruz, California. He and his wife, Karen Wallace, created handmade books and art together as JoKa Press. Jory was the co-founder and publisher of phren-Z, an online literary quarterly, and founder of the Zoom Forward reading series.

His first book of prose poetry, The Extra Year, was published in 2019, and was followed by a second, Of Two Minds, in 2020. His novel, Pious Rebel, also appeared in 2020. His novel, Smith: An Unauthorized Fictography, was published in 2021.

His work has been published in Catamaran Literary Reader, Chicago Quarterly Review, Rumble Fish Quarterly, The Sun, and elsewhere. 

Paola Bruni is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, winner of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Prize judged by Ellen Bass, as well as a finalist for the Mudfish Poetry Prize.

Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Five Points Journal, Rattle, Massachusetts Review, and Catamaran Literary Reader, among others. Her short plays have been produced by Actors Theater, Santa Cruz as well as short-listed for play festivals around the globe.

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Join Farnaz Fatemi as she talks with Lucian about the planet’s creature, clouds, climate change and curing ham—and the poems Lucian writes invoking all of these things. 

Lucian Mattison is a US-Argentinian poet and translator. He is the author of three books of poetry, Reaper’s, Peregrine Nation and, most recently, Curare , just released from C&R press.

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John Sibley Williams is the author of Scale Model of a Country at Dawn (Cider Press Review Book Award, 2021), The Drowning House (Elixir Press Poetry Award, 2021),  As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019),  Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. His book Sky Burial: New & Selected Poems is forthcoming in translated form by the Portuguese press do lado esquerdo. He has also served as editor of two Northwest poetry anthologies, Alive at the Center (Ooligan Press, 2013) and Motionless from the Iron Bridge (barebones books, 2013).

A twenty-eight-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Laux/Millar Prize, Wabash Prize, Philip Booth Award, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, The 46er Prize, Nancy D. Hargrove Editors’ Prize, Confrontation Poetry Prize, and Vallum Award for Poetry. Previous publishing credits include: Best American Poetry, Yale Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Colorado Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast, and various anthologies.