Episodes

  • Dana Delibovi and Molly Peacock (Of Literary Afterlives, Emotion and Color, and Material Connections in Women's Writing Across Time)
    Nov 11 2024

    Purchase: Sweet Hunter: The Complete Poems of St. Teresa of Ávila (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2024) trans. Dana Delibovi and The Widow's Crayon Box (Penguin, 2024) by Molly Peacock

    Dana Delibovi is a poet, essayist, and translator. She began translating the poetry of St. Teresa of Ávila in 2019, after retiring from a hybrid career as an advertising copywriter and adjunct instructor of philosophy. Her translations of Teresa's poetry and her essays on Teresa’s legacy have appeared in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, The Catholic Poetry Review, U.S. Catholic, After the Art, and Confluence, with a translation forthcoming in a new anthology from Word on Fire. Delibovi's writing has also appeared in Apple Valley Review, Bluestem, Ezra Translations, Moria, Noon, Psaltery & Lyre, Salamander, Slippery Elm and many other journals. She is a 2020 Pushcart Prize nominee, a 2020 Best American Essays notable essayist, and 2023 co-winner of the Hueston Woods Poetry Contest. Delibovi is Consulting Poetry Editor at the literary e-zine Cable Street. She received her BA from Barnard College, Columbia University, and holds MA degrees from New York University (philosophy) and Bank Street College of Education (early childhood education). She lives in Lake Saint Louis, Missouri.

    Molly Peacock is a poet and a biographer whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others. Her latest poetry collection is The Widow’s Crayon Box (W.W. Norton), a A book-length sequence of poems that dares to affirm the vast variety of emotional colors in loss and rejuvenation. Peacock is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Analyst: Poems and Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, as well as A Friend Sails in on a Poem, about a 47-year friendship in poetry. Peacock is the co-founder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses, the founder of The Best Canadian Poetry series and, most recently, creator of The Secret Poetry Room at Binghamton University. Awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Canada Council, and the Leon Levy Center for Biography, Peacock is also a memoirist and biographer, author of two books about creativity in the lives of women artists Flower Diary and The Paper Garden: Mrs. Delany Begins Her Life’s Work at 72, named a Book of the Year by Booklist, The Economist, The Globe and Mail, The Irish Times, The Kansas City Star, The London Evening Standard, MacLean’s, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette and The Sunday Telegraph. A dual citizen of Canada and the United States, she lives in Toronto and teaches at 92NY.

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    1 hr and 8 mins
  • Junious 'Jay' Ward (Of the Field, the Mythic Perception of the South, and the Vulnerable Document)
    Oct 30 2024

    Read: "Inheritance" and "Homecoming, Rich Square, NC" (Fourway Review)

    Purchase: Composition (Button Poetry, 2023)

    Junious 'Jay' Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte's inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

    Recommended Reading and Listening:

    Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez (Boa Editions)

    Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press)

    Zong! by M. nourbeSe philip (Graywolf Press)

    Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante (Noemi Press)

    Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)

    Catherine Rockwood's Episode 44: Of Pirates, the Event of the Image, and Angelic Sex

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    46 mins
  • Emilie Menzel (Of Invocations, Fables, and Narrative Leaps as Neurodivergent Play)
    Oct 16 2024

    Read: "I Pull My Leaf Leg Stockings Off My Body" (The Boiler Journal)

    Purchase: The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (HCP, 2024)

    Emilie Menzel, writer and librarian of hybridities, is the author of the book-length lyric The Girl Who Became a Rabbit (Hub City Press, 2024). Their gently haunted writing features in Copper Nickel, Bennington Review, and The Offing, amongst others, and has garnered such honors as the New Southern Voices Poetry Prize, the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award in Poetry, and the Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. Menzel holds an MFA from UMass Amherst and serves as a collections librarian at Duke University and creative resources librarian for Seventh Wave. Raised on Georgia summers, they live in Durham, North Carolina.

    Recommended Reading:

    The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley

    "The War of Vaslav Ninjinsky" by Frank Bidart

    My Life in the Nineties by Lyn Hejinian

    Max Porter

    Annie Dillard

    Toni Morrison

    Maggie Nelson

    Bernadette Meyer

    Sabrina Ora Mark

    Lydia Davis

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    58 mins
  • Nicholas Molbert (Of Nostalgia and Work, Southern Boyhood, and Storm Season on the Gulf Coast)
    Oct 2 2024

    Read: "Men Working Above: demolition" and "Parable of Baiting" (UCity Review)

    Purchase: Altars of Spine and Fraction (Northwestern University Press, 2024)

    Nicholas Molbert Born and raised on Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, Nicholas lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of Altars of Spine and Fraction(Northwestern University Press, 2024) and two poetry chapbooks from Foundlings Press: Goodness Gracious (2019) and Cocodrie Elegy (2024). You can find his work in places like The Cincinnati Review, The Greensboro Review, Mississippi Review, and Missouri Review among others. He holds a PhD from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign."

    Recommended Reading:

    Martha Serpas

    Dear Memphis by Rachel Edelman

    Night Angler by Geoffrey Davis

    Lures by Adam Vibes

    Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith

    Beyond Katrina by Natasha Trethewey

    The Room Where I Was Born by Brian Teare

    Larry Levis

    Phillip Levine

    Wanda Coleman

    Unmanly Grief by Jess Williard

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    56 mins
  • Sebastián H. Páramo (Of Apocalypse Literature, Writing Semi-Autobiography, and Hunting Pixelated Ducks)
    Sep 6 2024

    Read: "Everyone Said Nature Was Healing" (Poetry Northwest)

    Purchase: Portrait of Us Burning(Curbstone Books, 2023)

    Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023) and was named a finalist for the 2023 Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. His poems have recently appeared or will appear in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and elsewhere. His work has received fellowships and support from the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at UT-Austin, CantoMundo, among others. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and lives in Texas.

    Recommended Reading:

    Apocalypse and Disaster Communities Reading List on Bookshop

    Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin

    Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm

    Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

    The World Keeps Ending, the World Goes On by Franny Choi

    The Murderbot Diariesby Martha Wells

    Stanley Kunitz

    Larry Levis

    Thomas Lux

    Nicola Davison-Reed

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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Emily Kramer (Of Intimacy, Archive, and Saskia Hamilton)
    Aug 17 2024

    Read: Emily's poem "The Meat of the Plum" in Moist Poetry Journal

    Emily Kramer is a poet and editor living in Boston, MA. She received her BA in English from Barnard College, and her PhD from Boston University’s Editorial Institute. Her critical edition of Arthur Henry Hallam’s collected poems is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

    Recommended Reading:

    Saskia Hamilton

    Arthur Henry Hallam

    Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam

    Robert Lowell

    Words in Air: the complete correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton

    The Dolphin by Robert Lowell, edited Saskia Hamilton

    Virginia Woolf's Letters with Vita Sackville-West (Paris Review)

    John Keats' Letters

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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Molly Spencer (Of Invitation, Bridges and Water, and How Should We Live?)
    Jul 23 2024

    Read: "Invitatory" at Poetry Daily

    Purchase: Invitatory (Parlor Press, 2024)

    Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, editor, and writing instructor. Her debut collection, If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge​ (SIU Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Invitatory, her forthcoming third collection, won the 2022 New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published in 2024 by Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press. Molly’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her critical writing and essays have appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review online, Literary Hub, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. Molly's work has won a Lucile Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, a Writers@Work Fellowship Award, and a faculty fellowship from the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and teaches writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. ​

    Further Reading:

    Carl Phillips

    Jorie Graham

    "Home Burial" by Robert Frost

    Wordsworth's Prelude, Book 1 ("Fair seedtime had my soul...")

    Aracelis Girmay's essay From Woe to Wonder

    Jake Skeets' essay Poetry as Field

    Louise Glück

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    1 hr
  • Kyla Houbolt (Of Frogs, Radicalism, and "Going to the Root”)
    Jul 8 2024

    Read: "Dawn's Fool" (author's website), also "[your mind that beautiful country]" at Malarkey Books

    Purchase: But Then I Thought by Kyla Houbolt (above/ground press, 2023)

    Kyla Houbolt writes poems and occasional reviews, and takes care of two goats, 11 chickens, and 8 ducks. Chapbooks But Then I Thought available from above/ground press, Tuned available from CCCP Chapbooks, Surviving Death available from The Broken Spine, and a re-issue of Dawn’s Fool(a micro chap) also available from above/ground press.

    Recommended Reading:

    Lucille Clifton

    Tang Dynasty poets

    Gary Snyder

    Frank O'Hara

    Emily Dickinson

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    49 mins