The Deerfield Public Library Podcast

Poet and anthropologist Nomi Stone is the author of three books, most recently the poetry collection Kill Class (Tupelo, 2019), finalist for the Julie Suk Award, and the ethnography Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire, finalist for the Atelier award (University of California Press, 2022). Her poems recently appear in The Atlantic, POETRY Magazine, American Poetry Review...

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and writer living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022) and Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019), which was nominated for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently a PhD student in English at the University of Chicago where...

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza is a trans woman poet. Her work has been featured in Poetry Magazine, the American Poetry Review, Southeast Review, The Rumpus, Poem-a-day at poets.org, and elsewhere. She is the author of I'm Alive / It Hurts / I Love It (Big Lucks 2019) and THERE SHOULD BE FLOWERS (The Accomplices 2016). She holds an MFA in poetry from UC Riverside and currently teaches creative writing....

Donika Kelly is the author of The Renunciations (Graywolf), winner of the Anisfield-Wolf book award in poetry, and Bestiary (Graywolf), the winner of the 2015 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Kelly's poetry has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Publishing Triangle Awards, the Lambda Literary Awards,...

We are so excited to launch the second year of our special Pride Month podcast series Queer Poem-a-Day . Exclusive to the Deerfield Public Library Podcast , Queer Poem-a-Day is the first daily poetry podcast to focus exclusively on the LGBTQIA+ community. Once again we are thrilled to feature many award-winning, leading, and emerging poets—as well as several poets with Chicagoland connections—and...

beautiful small things features songs from the LYNX Project , a Chicago-based non-profit, and their Amplify Series, which takes texts written by primarily non-speaking neurodiverse young writers and commissions composers to set these words to music for piano and voice.  To discuss beautiful small things , we have a panel of guests involved in the project: Caitleen Kahn , Executive Director of the...

We are honored to welcome Dr. Debbie Reese, a tribally enrolled Namb é Pueblo author and scholar. Dr. Reese is best known for her popular blog American Indians in Children's Literature which " provides critical analysis of Indigenous peoples in children's and young adult books."  Dr. Reese is also the co-adapter (with Dr. Jean Mendoza) of  An Indigenous People's History of the United States for Yo...

A Hundred Lovers (Knopf, 2022) is the second collection by poet Richie Hofmann. Hofmann is also the author of Second Empire (Alice James Books, 2015). He teaches at Stanford University and lives in Chicago and San Francisco.  The poems in A Hundred Lovers describe fleeting moments—memorable smells, erotic encounters, travels through Europe, a wedding—all with intimate, diaristic directness. Our co...

Reconstruction Fiction: Housing and Realist Literature in Postwar Britain ( Ohio State University Press, 2020) by Dr. Paula Derdiger, Associate Professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth, looks at how historical changes in housing after the second World War impacted the realist literature of British writers. You can check out Reconstruction Fiction here at the library or get the pd...

Celebrating the debut full-length poetry collection, Afterfeast , by poet Lisa Hiton. Lisa Hiton  grew up in Deerfield and recently collaborated with the Deerfield Public Library Podcast as the founder and co-director of our  Queer Poem-a-Day project.  Selected by the poet Mary Jo Bang as the winner of the Dorset Prize for Poetry, Afterfeast is published by Tupelo Press .  Lisa will be doing a rea...

Our conversation with acclaimed author Rosellen Brown. O riginally released in two parts in February and March 2020 at the start of the pandemic lockdowns, we are excited to rerelease one of our favorite conversations as one combined episode. W e discuss themes that run through Brown's whole career, and how she uses form to approach difficult emotional and political subjects. We also discuss her n...

The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021) by Chicago-based poet Rachel Mennies takes an unusual form--each poem in the collection is a dated letter or draft from the speaker of the poems to the woman she loves, named Naomi. Recounting a year in the life of this speaker, a Jewish woman under the pressures of mental illness and longing, this form also allows us to explore a profound question: can a fic...

Jenny Johnson is the author of In Full Velvet (Sarabande Books, 2017). Her honors include a Whiting Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and a NEA Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, New England Review, Waxwing, and elsewhere. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at West Virginia University, and she is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Worksho...

Dan Kraines earned a PhD in poetics. Queer Longing, his manuscript, won the Susan B. Anthony Dissertation prize in gender and sexuality studies, from the University of Rochester. He teaches creative writing at FIT. Twitter- @dan_kraines "Donut" was previously published in The Adroit Journal (Djanikian Prize). Recent publications by Dan Kraines include: https://www.cortlandreview.com/issue-86/dan-k...

Eileen Myles (they/them) came to New York from Boston in 1974 to be a poet. Their books include For Now (an essay/talk about writing), I Must Be Living Twice /new and selected poems, and Chelsea Girls . They showed their photographs in 2019 at Bridget Donahue, NYC. Eileen has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. They live in New York and Marfa,...

Lauren Clark is the author of MUSIC FOR A WEDDING (2017), but also isn't a poet right now. Text of today's poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org/queerpoemaday/ Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for our series is from Excursions Op. 20, Movement 1, b...

Kazim Ali was born in the United Kingdom and has lived transnationally in the United States, Canada, India, France, and the Middle East. His books encompass multiple genres, including several volumes of poetry, novels, and translations. He is currently a Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. His newest books are a volume of three long poems entitled The Voice of Sheil...

Julian Guy is a queer and genderqueer writer born in the West. Julian is a graduate from the University of Nevada, Reno, where they received the DQ Creative Writing Award, Ester Early Writing Scholarship, and James Taylor Writing Scholarship for their poetry. Julian loves swimming, eating cotton candy while roller skating and gossiping in the park with their friends. They split their time between...

Carl Phillips is the author of 15 books of poetry. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Twitter: @CPhillipsPoet Instagram: @pinestereo   "Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors" was originally published in Tin House, and in the book Pale Colors in a Tall Field (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) Text of today's poem and more details about our program can be found at: deerfieldlibrary.org...

Jameson Fitzpatrick is the author of the poetry collection Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020) and the chapbooks Mr. & (Indolent Books, 2018) and Morrisroe: Erasures (89plus/LUMA Publications, 2014). They teach expository writing at New York University and occasionally write about art. Twitter: @jmsnftzptrck   "Duplicity" was published in the book Pricks in the Tapestry (Birds, LLC, 2020) ht...

D. A. Powell is a painter and poet living in San Francisco. His books include Repast (Graywolf, 2014) and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys (Graywolf, 2012). He received the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Twitter: @powell_da "Puzzle Pieces" was published in the chapbook Atlas T (Rescue Press, 2020, https://www.rescuepress.co/da-powell ) and first appeared...

Amanda Gunn is a poet, teacher, and PhD candidate at Harvard where she studies poetry, ephemerality, and Black pleasure. Raised in Connecticut, she worked as a medical copyeditor for 13 years before earning a master of fine arts degree in poetry from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She was recently named a Stegner fellow and was the inaugural winner of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize honoring...

Michael M. Weinstein is a poet, scholar, and teacher. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Michigan's Helen Zell Writers' Program, he is currently working on a book about the social and romantic lives of tra...

Randall Mann is the author of five collections of poetry: A BETTER LIFE, PROPRIETARY, STRAIGHT RAZOR, BREAKFAST WITH THOM GUNN, and COMPLAINT IN THE GARDEN. He is also the author of a book of criticism, THE ILLUSION OF INTIMACY: ON POETRY. A three-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, he lives in San Francisco. Twitter: @randallmannpoet Instagram: @randallmann   "Eros" was originally from C...

Jill McDonough's books of poems include Here All Night (Alice James, 2019), Reaper (Alice James, 2017), Where You Live (Salt, 2012), and Habeas Corpus (Salt, 2008). The recipient of three Pushcart prizes and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, NEA, NYPL, FAWC, and Stanford, her work appears in The Threepenny Review and Best American Poetry. She teaches in the MFA program at UMass-Boston and of...