Poet Talk on WMUA

Karen Keough-Huff, also known as ‘Q’, has self-published 4 books and recently published a book of poetry, When I Was 8 .  Her background in education and in business includes curriculum and handbook writing, as well as technical writing as a documentation specialist.  She is a member of the Writing Sisters, a group of BIPOC and LBGTQ+ women writers in western Massachusetts. You can find her book W...

Kali Lightfoot lives in Salem, MA. She worked as a teacher, wilderness ranger in Washington state, executive at Road Scholar, and retired from her position as founding Executive Director of the National Resource Center for Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes. Kali earned an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2015. Her poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies; been nomina...

Poet Eric Wasileski (M.Div), is a long time writer and facilitator for Warrior Writers, a national veterans writing group out of Philadelphia. His poetry book, Live Free (or die) is available from Human Error Publishing. He has also been included in many anthologies including Warrior Writers, Massachusetts Bards, and locally in Silkworm. His second collection Consoling the Weeping Willow is nearin...

Darlene’s professional career spans 32 years from working on youth leadership development programs with the United Way, runaway youth and their families for RAP, then a program of the YWCA, a s a social worker for Holyoke DCF, a crisis worker for Mount Tom, a clinician, a Juvenile Probation Officer, and now she works to mediate civil petitions in Family Court, and also by helping individuals with...

Since 2012, Carla Manene Cooke has facilitated writing groups in and from her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.  Her poetry has appeared in the literary journals  Emulate, Meat for Tea, Naugatuck River Review, Persimmon Tree, Pineapple, Plum, RavensPerch, Silkworm,  and  Wordpeace .  She is a freelance copy editor and 2022 Pushcart nominee.

Brad Crenshaw has published four collections of poetry. His most recent book,  Chased by Lunacies and Wonders , has won the 2023 Catamaran Poetry Prize. His other books include  My Gargantuan Desire, Genealogies,  and  Memphis Shoals . His work has appeared in a wide range of journals including  Catamaran, Shenandoah, Chicago Review, Massachusetts Review , and recent poems appear in  Salt, Hawaii...

Carolyn Zaikowski is a fiction writer, poet, essayist, and death doula. She is the current Poet Laureate of Easthampton, Massachusetts. Carolyn is the author of two prose poetry/experimental novels:  A Child Is Being Killed  (Aqueous Books, 2013),  which poet Eileen Myles called a "saint of a little book", and  In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse,   which won the Mainline Conte...

Ellen Miller-Mack is a nurse practitioner (retired/rewired) with an MFA in Poetry from Drew University. Her book reviews have appeared in Rattle, Valparaiso, Bookslut, the Rumpus, the Poetry Cafe, and the Poetry Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Lavender Review ( journal and anthology January 2025), Lily Poetry Review, Antiphon, 5 A.M., Redheaded Stepchild, Affilia, and The Lake Rises: poems...

DeMisty D. Bellinger lives with her family in Central Massachusetts, where she teaches creative writing. She has a BA in English from University of Wisconsin-Platteville, an MFA from Southampton College, and a PhD from the University of Nebraska. She is an alum of Bread Loaf and Marge Piercy’s Intensive Writing Workshop. Also, she was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center on a fellowship and at...

I am the daughter of Lie Chenn Lin and Yin Chou Lin, born in Taiwan into a big extended farming family from which I was taken away when we immigrated to Canada for my father’s graduate education. I’m an interdisciplinary artist, writer/poet and educator in love with the forests of cedar as they burn up in fires stoked by colonialism. Through storytelling and ceremonial activism, I am co-becoming a...

C. Desirée Finley is a writer and artist now living in western Mass. Her poetry is published in  Straw Dog Writers Pandemic Poetry ,  Silkworm Journal (print),   Cape Cod Times  &  Willawaw Journal   [ Pushcart nomination ] Meat For Tea and some local anthologies, and soon to be in  The Brussels Review . Finley says , "I've lived on both coasts, in cities and ocean adjacent, but what...

Jovonna Van Pelt is a writer, a lover of animals and trees, a reader of history, and an enthusiastic volunteer at the LAVA Center (Local Access to Valley Arts) in her home town of Greenfield. She has an M.A. in Ethics and can play the spoons. Her favorite job was running a puppet theater. All of this has helped Jo become a multiple finalist for the Poet's Seat prize and author of Unrelated Que...

Born in Brooklyn, NY, Ivy Schweitzer has lived for many years in Vermont and taught English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College. Her poetry has appeared, most recently, in Passager, Ritualwell, Tikkun, New Croton Review, Mississippi Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Mid-Atlantic Review and The New England Poetry Club’s Prize Winners’ Anthology 2024. Dividing Rivers is...

Susan Middleton edits science books and writes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Her work has been published in regional and national literary publications, including most recently Raven's Perch, Silkworm, and WordPeace. Susan is a co-founder of the Northfield-based Slate Roof Press ( slateroofpress.com ), which in 2007 published her chapbook "Seed Case of the Heart." In 2018 she won...

Cameron Awkward-Rich is the author of two collections of poetry:  Sympathetic Little Monster  (Ricochet Editions, 2016) and Dispatch   (Persea Books, 2019). His third collection, An Optimism , is forthcoming in October 2025 from Persea Books. Cameron’s creative work can be found in POETRY , American Poetry Review , Kenyon Review , and elsewhere, and has been supported by fellowships from Cave Cane...

Beth Filson is a writer, poet and self-taught artist. She earned the MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop of the University of Iowa in poetry but works in multiple genres including playwrighting. Most recently Beth was awarded a writing fellowship from Hawthornden Foundation in Scotland where she gets to spend a month in a Scottish castle roaming its halls and libraries, meeting other fellows, getti...

Ian Fishman is a poet from Northampton, MA. Recent poems and writings can be found in  b l u s h  and  BOMB. He edits and operates the poetry engine, Press Brake. His new chapbook Calm Down ! was published by Factory Hollow Press. www.factoryhollowpress.com

A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts, Mary Warren Foulk (she/her) has been published in The Hollins Critic, Palette Poetry, Fjords Review, Silkworm, The Gay & Lesbian Review, and North American Review, among other publications. Her work also has appeared in Who's Your Mama? The Unsung Voices of Women and Mothers (Soft Skull Press), (M)othering Anthology (Inanna Publications), and My...

Candace R. Curran was raised alongside Wachusett Mountain in rural Princeton by a Coyote and Ford mechanic doing the best they could. Curran is the founder and organizer of INTERFACE, exhibitions that included the work of twenty or more artists and poets over ten years of presentations throughout Western Massachusetts. Candace was also a co-founder of Exploded View, a five woman traveling collabor...

Janet E. Aalfs is the author of 3 full-length books of poems and several small press and self-published chapbooks. Her writing is widely published in journals, anthologies, and online, most recently in Soundings East (Pushcart Prize nomination), How to Write a Form Poem, Words to Live By, Compass Roads, and Emulate. Former poet laureate of Northampton, MA (2003-2005), 8th degree black belt, master...

Dennis James Sweeney is the author of How to Submit: Getting Your Writing Published with Literary Magazines and Small Presses , a guide for writers. His first book, In the Antarctic Circle , won the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize and was a Debut Poetry Book of 2021 in Poets & Writers. You’re the Woods Too , his second book, was a Small Press Distribution bestseller and a finalist for the Deb...

In addition to her book Hive (Lily Poetry Review and Press), Suzanne Mercury is the author of two chapbooks, Sassafracas (Xerolage 69), a collection of photographs of visual poems that she made out of scraps of dichroic glass (2018,  Xexoxial Editions ) and Hand to Earth (2019,  Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs ). Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including SpoKe, Truck, Summer Stock,...

Libby Maxey is a senior editor and poetry editor at the online journal  Literary Mama , where she has been a member of the staff for over a decade. Her poems have appeared in  Crannóg, Stoneboat ,  Whale Road Review, Blue Unicorn,  and elsewhere. She is among the winners of the Princemere Poetry Prize, the Helen Schaible International Sonnet Contest, and the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, and her...

Zoe Tuck was born in Texas, became a person in California, and now lives in Massachusetts. She is the author Bedroom Vowel (Bunny Presse), Terror Matrix (Timeless, Infinite Light) and the chapbooks Vape Cloud of Unknowing (Belladonna*), and The Book of Bella (DoubleCross Press), the latter of which is bound in a dos-a-dos edition with Emily Hunerwadel's "Peach Woman”. In addition to teach...

Eliot Cardinaux is a neuroqueer poet, pianist, composer, translator, and publisher working at the intersection of the lyric and improvised music. The author of seven poetry collections, including On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres, 2023), Eliot has produced and appeared on over a dozen albums of original music, including, most recently, Imminence , with percussionist Gary Fieldman. Eliot’s poems a...