Poet Talk on WMUA

M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. She is a member of the Thursday Poets, Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of  Molecule: a tiny lit mag , Editor-in-Chief of  Solstice: a Magazine of Diverse Voices , and teaches at Salem State University. She has received fellowships or support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Essex Community Foundation,...

Lesle Lewis has a new poetry collection, Survival of the Fittest Pronoun (Quale Press.)She is the author of six poetry collections:   Small Boat   (2003),  Landscapes I & II  (2006),  lie down too   (2011),  A Boot’s a Boot  (2014),   Rainy Days on the Farm  (2019),  John’s Table  (2026) and the chapbooks,   It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium   (2012)and  Hydrogen  (2025).  Lesle has an MFA in W...

Life long poet, fiction and non fiction writer Chaya has been writing and sharing poetry for 3 decades. She recently published poetry books, "Reborn: Poetic Codes For Psychiatric Survivors" and “Daylilies Wild as Night”.

Amy Dryansky’s third poetry collection, Ambergris , is out now from Pine Row Press. Her first, How I Got Lost So Close to Home , won the Kinereth Gensler Award from Alice James Books, the second, Grass Whistle (Salmon Poetry) received the Massachusetts Book Award. Poems appear in Adroit Journal, Harvard Review, New England Review, Orion, The Sun, Tin House, Waxwing and other journals, as well as s...

M.A. Scott is the author of the Hunger, little sister (Ghost City Press, 2024). Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in A-Minor Magazine, Harbor Review, Crab Creek Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, and New Ohio Review. M.A. also works in analog collage to create visual poetry, and is a classically trai...

Clay Ventre's book, It's Not Love Till Someone Loses an Eye , was a finalist for the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His second book, Excellent Wildlife Photos (2025,lilypoetryreview.blog) collects 13 years of poetry. He has work published in Iterant, Jubilat, Lily Poetry Review, Soundings East, The Arts Fuse, and others.

Corwin Ericson is the author of Swell , a novel, the collection Checked Out OK, and the forthcoming chapbook Proctors of Hush . Recent work of his appears in Posit , Sortes, Trampoline, Volt, and Tough Poets Review. He lives in a small, rural town north of Amherst where he is a trustee of the town library. This semester he’s teaching Writing in Engineering at UMass and has previously taught writin...

Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, winner of The Believer Book Award in Poetry, and Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award.  Between the publication of her first two poetry books, Harvey co-wrote Marvel Comics’ World of Wakanda, which earned an Eisner Award for best li...

Eileen Cleary (she/her/hers) is the author of Child ward of the Commonwealth (2019) which won honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Award,  2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021) and Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate, 2024), long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. She founded and is editor in chief of Lily Poetry Review Books and the  "Lily Poetry Review".

Sara Eddy’s second full-length collection, How to Wash a Rabbit is forthcoming from Cornerstone press. Her third chapbook, Jewelweed: Poems about Plants , is also forthcoming, that one from Finishing Line press. She is author of Ordinary Fissures (Kelsay Books, 2024), Tell the Bees: Poem About Bees & Beekeeping (A3 Press, 2019), and Full Mouth: Poems about Food (Finishing Line Press, 2020).  H...

Poet, public speaker, and long-distance runner dedicated to mental health advocacy, domestic violence awareness, and personal empowerment. A resilient storyteller who uses poetry, performance, and athletics as vehicles for healing and community impact. Experienced in public readings, published anthology work, and culturally rooted creative expression incorporating bilingual elements (English/Spani...

Robin Becker was born in Philadelphia and earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State. Becker’s many collections of poetry include  Personal Effects  (1977);  Backtalk  (1982);  Giacometti’s Dog  (1990);  All-American Girl  (1996), wh...

Regine Jackson is a Springfield-born writer and poet now based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Raised in a home filled with books through her mother’s work in Springfield’s libraries, she developed an early love of reading across science fiction, fantasy, horror, and graphic novels. Regine writes across speculative and fantastical genres, alongside poetry and prose shaped by inner-city life, memory...

Ellen Doré Watson  is the author of five full-length collections of poems, including  Pray Me Stay Eager  (Alice James Books, 2019);  Dogged Hearts  (Tupelo Press, 2010);  This Sharpening  (Tupelo Press, 2006); and  Ladder Music  (Alice James Books, 2002.  A sixth collection,  Mostly, I Tell the Truth , will be out from Alice James in May 2028. Library Journal recognized her as one of "24 Poe...

Dara Barrois/Dixon has been making poems since before she could read. She drew pictures of poems before she could write properly with our conventional alphabet in conventional ways. Once she could read and write she wrote poems in imitation of what she could read and she self-published these by putting them in small jars with tight lids and launching them off into the currents of the Mississippi R...

Mary A. Koncel's collections of prose poems include Closer to Day (Quale Press, 1999), You Can Tell the Horse Anything (Tupelo Press, 2003), and The Last Blonde (Hedgerow Books/Levellers Press, 2017).   Her work has been published in numerous journals and anthologies and nominated for several Pushcart Prizes.  Mary was awarded a grant for her poetry from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and...

Diana Whitney is a queer writer & educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (Workman, 2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Wanting It (Harbor Mountain Press,...

Kirsten Mosher is an American artist and author based in Western Massachusetts. Mosher is engaged in video, writing, studio work and art in public places. At once subversive and always playful, Mosher's work draws attention to how context transforms the language of urban scenes, signs and furniture by navigating and challenging everyday boundaries. Mosher often documents the relationships betw...

María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado was born in Manati, Puerto Rico, and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Colby College, an MA from Tufts University, and an MFA from Pine Manor College. Arroyo Cruzado writes poetry and prose that code-switch between English, Farsi, German, and Spanish—the cultural languages of her experiences. She is the author of  Thought Here Would Cure Me of...

Kevin & Ellen read from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass : the first 25 "cantos", in honor of its publication on 4July 1855. Walt Whitman is America’s world poet—a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. In  Leaves of Grass  (1855, 1891-2), he celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship. This monumental work chanted praises to the body as well as to th...

Lesle Lewis is the author of six poetry collections:   Small Boat   (2003),  Landscapes I & II  (2006),   lie down too  (2011),  A Boot’s a Boot  (2014),   Rainy Days on the Farm  (2019),  John’s Table  (2026) and the chapbooks,   It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium   (2012), and  Hydrogen  (2025).  A new book,  Survival of the Fittest Pronoun , is due out this fall.  She graduated from the UMass...

Carol Edelstein, with Robin Barber, co-founded Gallery of Readers Press. With Liz George, she edits  Switch , a journal of micro fiction. She is the author of three books of poems, most recently  Past Repair  (Simian Press, 2021). Her poetry and fiction have been featured in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, including  The Massachusetts Review, The Georgia Review,  and  Alaska Quarterly...

Samantha Pious translates women's poetry, especially sapphic women's poetry. Her aim is to contribute to a canon—or canons—of our own. So far, she has translated the selected poems of Renée Vivien, Natalie Barney, and Judith Teixeira. Her translations of Teixeira have been shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Award. She has also translated  A Lover and Hi...

Amy Gordon's poems have appeared in Antiques Magazine, The Amsterdam Review ,  Ekphrastic Review ,  The Massachusetts Review, and other journals. She is the author of three chapbooks: Deep Fahrenheit (Prolific Press) and The Yellow Room (Finishing Line Press).   Leaf Town is the winner of the 2023 Slate Roof Press Elyse Wolf Chapbook Prize. Before turning to poetry, she wrote and published pri...

In a career spanning six decades, Ted Pearson has published thirty-two books of poetry, most recently Epistrophy and Trilogy. He also co-authored The Grand Piano, a ten-volume experiment in collective autobiography; edited Epilogue , a posthumous edition of Craig Watson’s last poems, and co-edited Bobweaving Detroit: The Selected Poems of Murray Jackson . His work has appeared in Canada, England,...