Ruba Ahmed joins Julie Murphy to read “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski and talks about his imperative to see the beauty in the world that lies right beside the horrors. She also reads from her new book Bring Now the Angels and shares her struggle in coming to forgiveness and grief and joy. Ruba also offers some great insights on the power of repetition as well as the importance of Keat’s concept of negative capability.
Dilruba Ahmed is the author of Bring Now the Angels (Pittsburg Poetry). Her debut book, Dhaka Dust (Graywolf Press), won the Bakeless Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, New York Times Magazine, Ploughshares, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She has taught with Swarthmore College, Chatham University’s MFA Program, Hugo House in Seattle, and Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Find her classes & consultations on her website. She’s also on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
To kick off Trans Week of Awareness (Nov. 13 – 19), Geneffa Jahan sits down with local youth poet, Madeline Aliah (age 17) to hear how poetry has given her hope and a voice. Madeline reads from her chapbook of poems, This Is My Body: Poems by a Teen Trans Fem, forthcoming from Jamii Press (2024), and additional works that take her poetry beyond identity politics. She speaks of her activism through the Queer Trans Youth Council and shares advice for allies, reminding us through her wit and wisdom that Queer kids are still just kids.
Roxi Power talks with Brenda Hillman, winner this month of the Northern California Book Reviewers’ Fred Cody Award for Lifetime Achievement, about her 11th book of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later. We discuss her new trans-genre tetralogy about time: how to find calm during the Anthropocene by being in time in multiple ways: sinking into the micro-minutes; performing micro-activism; and celebrating the microbiome. We explore her influences–from Blake to Bergson, Clare to Baudelaire, as well as the less celebrated moss, owls, and wood rats that appear frequently in her eco-poetry. Alive with humor, witness, creative design and punctuation–what Forrest Gander calls “typographical expressionism”–Hillman’s poetry teaches us how to abide in crisis from Covid to California fires, living in paradox as a way to transcend despair.
Brenda Hillman shares the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award with with Isabel Allende, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Pollan, Ishmael Reed, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Alice Walker and others. Winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Griffin Poetry Prize (for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, 2013), the Northern California Book Award (for Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, 2018) and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975.
She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems for Shambhala Press, and co-edited and co-translated several books. She is director of the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and is on the regular poetry staff ad Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman just retired from teaching in the MFA Program at St. Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, grandmother, and is married to poet, Robert Hass.
What do the Sufis, Zen Buddhists, and Catholics have in common? Listen in and find out as Gary Gach brings the poetry of Persian poet Hafiz to The Hive! We talk about the new book, Hafiz’s Little Book of Life, he and translation collaborator Erfan Mojib have put together with a forward by Ari Honarvar.
“How to translate into English what, until now, has justifiably been called the ‘untranslatable’ Persian verses of Hafiz? From its epigraph onward, Erfan Mojib and Gary Gach have given us the answer. Hafiz’s Little Book of Life breathes new life into the world of the Sufi poet’s 14th-century words, making those words new again.” —Stephen Ratcliffe, author Conversation and Listening to Reading
Rick Lupert zooms into The Hive. We read Robert Creeley’s poem “I Know a Man,” and shamelessly display our ignorance about the great Robert Creeley, who did, indeed, sometimes wear an eyepatch, and was a powerful and engaging reader. Rick Lupert reads some poems from his current book, I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii, inspired by his vacation with his family to Hawaii.
Rick Lupert has been involved in the Los Angeles poetry community since 1990. He is the recipient of the 2014 Beyond Baroque Distinguished Service Award for service to the Los Angeles poetry community.
A conversation between Geneffa Jahan and the Youth Poet Laureates of Watsonville, Rachel Huerta and Eva Sophia Martinez Rodriguez, appointed to serve a two-year term from 2023 – 2025. The Watsonville Public Library created this position to recognize a youth under the age of twenty for their literary achievements with a passion for promoting awareness of poetry and whose work demonstrates a commitment to social justice, equity, and diversity. In this hour, the teens share their journey, talk about their craft, and recite poems that showcase their individual styles.
Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review,TheAdroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch, The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere.
Poets Bill Lavender, Sean F. Munro, and Rodrigo Toscano talk with Roxi Power about the wildly successful annual event they organize: The New Orleans Poetry Festival. In the second half, they read their own poems, each of which buzz with national and global currents. Festival co-founder Bill Lavender reads from his opus-in-progress which he started writing during the January 6 insurrection, The City of God, named after Augustine of Hippo’s book of the same name. Rodrigo Toscano: “We’re not impresarios of poetic labor. We’re here to build relationships: international, regional, and national. Atomization is what most Americans are experiencing. Alienation to the hilt. And there’s no better culture than New Orleans to attack that alienation…through the joyful celebration of the art that we’ve devoted our lives to: poetry.
Dion plugs the podcast Maintenance Phase, an excellent source of information on fat shaming, bogus diets, and our society’s screwed up attitudes toward body size and food.
Lana Hechtman Ayers joins host Julie Murphy to read from her two recently published books, Overtures and When All Else Fails. Join us as Lana reads a poem by Ellen Bass and talks about the healing powers of poetry, how the awareness of death brings compassion, and finding joy in difficult times.
