Listen to the episode here (Content warning: discussion of suicide)

Joan Kwon Glass ⁠zooms into the Hive to talk about her new book Night Swim ⁠(Diode Editions, 2022). We also read and discuss ⁠Laura Apol⁠‘s poem “Instructions for the Friends Who Are Sorting my Daughter’s Things this Afternoon.”

Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean American author of ⁠Night Swim ⁠(Diode Editions, 2022), and three chapbooks (How To Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy, If Rust Can Grow on the Moon, and Bloodline). She serves as poet laureate for Milford, CT, Editor in Chief for Harbor Review, and is a Brooklyn Poets Mentor. Joan is an instructor on the faculty of various writing centers including the Hudson Valley Writers Center, Brooklyn Poets & Corporeal. Her poems appear in Poetry Northwest, Ninth Letter, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Asian American Writer’s Workshop, The Slowdown and elsewhere. She is available for manuscript consultations, readings and workshops..

Listen to the episode at this link!

Public interest in Emily Dickinson continues strong, evidenced by recent pop culture hits like Apple TV’s Dickinson, and the movie, Wild Nights With Emily, starring Molly Shannon.  Dickinson herself was influenced by 19th century popular cultural forms, including crime novels. Tune in to hear two poets have fun trying to solve some puzzles, while appreciating the mystery, in her enigmatic poems and life.

Listen to the episode here

Join us as Gail Rudd Entrekin reads poems from her book Walking Each Other Home, an homage to the bittersweet journey of love, life, and parting. Gail is editor of the online environmental literary magazine, Canary (canarylitmag.org) and holds an M.A. in English Literature/Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. She has taught both subjects for over 25 years. Her poems have been finalists for the Pablo Neruda Prize, won the Women’s National Book Association Award and were First Runner-Up for the Steve Kowit and Catamaran Poetry Prizes. Her sixth poetry book, Walking Each Other Home (Longship Press, 2023), was a finalist for the Blue Light and Richard Snyder Prizes, and her chapbook The Mother/Daughter Papers was finalist for the Comstock and Poetry Box Chapbook Prizes in 2023. Walking Each Other Home is available here from Longship Press.

Listen HERE

Geneffa Jahan hosts San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, as he shares how he became an organizer after the 2007 bombing of Al-Mutanabbi Street, the famed Booksellers’ Street of Baghdad. They discuss his global movement, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, with annual readings worldwide to commemorate the bombing, and his anthology of poems and prose by survivors and witnesses, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here (2012). Beausoleil reads two poems, written as letters to Iraq, and one poem he wrote for his collaborative photojournalism project, Shadow & Light, honoring the 324 Iraqi Academics murdered between 2003 and 2012. With 57 participants from Jordan to Egypt, Iran, the US, the UK, and Canada, the project ensures that “the protest does not go home,” to quote Beausoleil, “but lives on as a project of witness, memory, and solidarity.”

Beau Beausoleil is the author of 15 books of poetry, most recently, Another Way Home (Bluelight Press, 2022) and two chapbooks: The Killing of George Floyd (Intermittent Press, 2023) and Poems for Ukraine (Barley Books, UK, 2023). 

Listen to the episode here!

Jamaica Baldwin zooms into The Hive to talk about her new book, Bone Language. We read some Vievee Frances and talk about the radical acceptance that poetry can bring. Jamaica, a Santa Cruz native, will be in town to read at The HiveLive! on July 18th at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Reading with her, will be the fabulous Francesca Bell. 

Jamaica Baldwin’s debut collection is Bone Language (YesYes Books 2023). Her poetry has appeared in Guernica, World Literature Today, The Adroit Journal, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, and The Missouri Review, among others. Her accolades include a 2023 Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a RHINO Poetry editor’s prize, and a Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. Her writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, Aspen Words, Storyknife, Furious Flower, and the Jack Straw Writers program. Jamaica is currently the associate editor of Prairie Schooner at the University of Nebraska -Lincoln where she is pursuing her PhD in English with a focus on poetry and Women’s and Gender Studies. She is originally from Santa Cruz, CA.

Listen to the episode here!

Join Tim Lindner, editor of The Book of Life After Death (Tolsun Books, 2023) with Farnaz Fatemi as they discuss this forthcoming book which explores how the dead might be remembered in poems & essays. We are joined by four more poets–Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña, Xioaly Li, Hunter Hazelton, and Jen Karetnick–reading selections from the book.

“We’re all going to die. What’s worse is that once we do, we don’t have a chance to explain ourselves for everything we’ve done. Once we’re ghosts, our identities are defined by the places and things we leave behind. When we’re the ones left behind, we decide what’s of value and how our ghosts should be remembered. Sometimes, people become something entirely different than when they were here. And perhaps that’s the point. Maybe it’s not our fear of dying that drives us but rather that our lives after death aren’t our lives at all.”

Listen to the episode HERE

Earl Hines and Dion O’Reilly talk about earning an MFA at Pacific University, read and discuss the fabulous poem, “Shrike,” by Henri Cole, and read and talk about Hines latest book Any Dumb Animal. 

AE Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book award. His poems have been widely published in anthologies and literary journals, including more recently: Rattle, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, Rhino, Ninth Letter, The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, The Greensboro Review, and I-70 Review. He is currently pursuing his MFA in Writing at Pacific University.

Listen to the episode here!

Listen to this free-wheeling conversation with acclaimed poet, memoirist, screenwriter and educator Jimmy Santiago Baca. We talk about the gift of saying ‘no,’ the unexpected byproducts of incarceration, his upcoming writers retreat, and hear him read several of his poems from his 50-year writing career. You can learn more about Jimmy on his website, at the Poetry Foundation, and find out about his upcoming writers retreat in Albuquerque, New Mexico here. The documentary based on his novel “A Place to Stand” can be seen on YouTube. You can also watch the film directed by Taylor Hackford, Bound by Honor, based on Jimmy’s life here.

Listen to the episode here!

Vincent Rendoni and Dion O’Reilly engage in a wide-ranging discussion of life and poetry. He reads Monica Rico’s  “Poem in Consideration of My Death” from an anthology that, due to its representation of Latino life, influenced Vincent’s decision to be a poet, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4, LatinNext. Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, which was the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. Previously, he was a 2022 Jack Straw Cultural Center Fellow and winner of the 2021 Blue Earth Review Flash Fiction Contest. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions. His work appears in The Sycamore Review, The Texas Review, The Quarterly West, Another Chicago Magazine, Sky Island Journal, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Listen to the episode here!

One of the original Hive members, Lisa Allen Ortiz, joins us to talk about her Idaho Prize-winning poetry collection, STEM, a book which asks, among other questions, “where in the body does aliveness reside?” Our conversation plumbs more of these easy-to-answer inquiries.

Lisa is the author of two poetry collections: Stem, winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize and Guide to the Exhibit winner of the 2016 Perugia Press Prize. Her short stories and poems have appeared in Prime Number Magazine, Colorado Review and The Literary Review among other places. She is co-translator with Sara Rivera of The Blinding Star, selected poems of the Peruvian poet Blanca Varela, a book which won the 2021 Northern California Book Award for Poetry in Translation.