The Hive Poetry Collective

The Body! In all its pain and glory! Listen to this discussion with editors Pichchenda Bao, Nicole Callihan, and Jennifer Franklin as they read and talk about poems from their anthology Braving the Body. Delving into the body's experiences, from sex to motherhood to cancer and beyond, Braving the Body culls the best poetry featuring, as Whitman wrote, “head, neck, hair, ears... mouth, tongue,...

On April 10th, 2024, Santa Cruz County's first ever Youth Poet Laureate honor was given to Dina Lusztig Noyes at the Kuumbwa Jazz Center in Santa Cruz, CA. SC County Youth Poet Laureate finalists include Gregory Souza, Simon Ellefson, Madeline Aliah, and Sylvi Kayser. These poets read their work in conversation with Farnaz Fatemi, Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate. More info about the program he...

Join me for this special episode of poetic witness for Palestine, featuring Faris Sabbah and Beau Beausoleil. Listen as Santa Cruz County Superintendent of Schools, Dr Faris Sabbah , shares movingly about his Palestinian background and reads a poem he penned for his late father. We discuss a poem from Beau Beausoleil's latest volume, WAR NEWS --a collection of poems written daily since October...

"Over the past decade or so, nobody has done more for the Pacific Northwest than Paul Nelson." --Sam Hamill. Paul E. Nelson talks with Roxi Power about his forthcoming book, DaySong Miracle (Past 62) from Carbonation Press. The two poet friends laugh, talk, and even sing some of Nelson's lyrical lines in his long investigative and spiritual poems. Ever the teacher and professional in...

Join Dion O'Reilly as she talks with Ed Hirsch about 100 Poems to Break Your Heart. Edward Hirsch , a MacArthur Fellow, has published ten books of poems, including  The Living Fire ,  Gabriel: A Poem . and  Stranger by Night.  He has also published six prose books about poetry, among them,  How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry , a national bestseller,  100 Poems to Break Your Heart...

Don't miss this enlivening and inspiring episode of the Hive Poetry Collective on KSQD. Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with spoken word poets Tara Bracco and Suzen Baraka . They read work newly published in the debut anthology, Poetic People Power and talk about their motto-- Art + Action= Change. This anthology draws from twenty years of live performances of Poetic People Power , poetry...

Lee Herrick⁠  in conversation with Farnaz Fatemi. Lee Herrick⁠  is the California Poet Laureate. He is the author of three books of poems: Scar and Flower , finalist for the 2020 Northern California Book Award; Gardening Secrets of the Dead ; and This Many Miles from Desire . His poems appear widely, in The Poetry Foundation, Academy of American Poets, The Place That Inhabits Us: Poems from the Sa...

Dorianne Laux ’s sixth collection, Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems  was named a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Her fifth collection, The Book of Men , was awarded The Paterson Prize. Her fourth book of poems,  Facts About the Moon ,  won The Oregon Book Award and was short-listed for the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.  Laux is also the author of  Awake ;  What We C...

Bellingham poet Elizabeth Vignali buzzes in to read from her newest book and also to read and discuss Dorianne Laux⁠ 's poem "Facts about the Moon. Elizabeth Vignali is the author of the poetry collection House of the Silverfish (Unsolicited Press 2021) and three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Endangered [Animal ] (Floating Bridge Press 2019). Her work has appeared in Willow Sprin...

"This weirdness swims up..." Alexandra Regalado talks to Farnaz Fatemi about teeth as relics, finding inspiration in visual artists, attempting to say the unsaid, writing things in poems that might never get said aloud--and more serious and not-so-serious preoccupations. Our conversation focuses on Regalado's second book, the National Poetry Series publication Relinquenda, from Beaco...

"I Am a Woman of Almost 62 Years Old / of no special bravery." With this poem, Carla Rachel Sameth begins her hour on The Hive Poetry Show, reading from her first full-length collection, Secondary Inspections , released in January 2024, as well as newer poems. For a voice both introspective and self-aware, Sameth's writing pours itself into the people around her--her biracial Black s...

The first poem in Katie Farris ' new book of poems, Standing in the Forest of Being Alive , ends with the stanza Why write love poetry in a burning world? / To train myself, in the midst of a burning world/ to offer poems of love to a burning world . This poem, an arrow that sails though each poem in the collection, begins Farris' unflinching look at the details of her own cancer treatment...

Love in all its blissful, blistering forms provides the foundation for lyrical poet Sarah Levine's new book, Each Knuckle with Sugar . A Massachusettes poet, the conversation runs from love to craft to loss. These surprising poems are made more memorable by the way Levine has skillfully built a world to hold them. You can find Levine's book at Driftwood Press: https://www.driftwoodpress.co...

Peter Kline is the author of two poetry collections,  Mirrorforms  (Parlor Press) and  Deviants  (SFASU Press).  A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House, and has won the Morton Marr Prize from  Southwest Review , the  River Styx  International Poetry Prize, and  The Columbia Review  Poetr...

Dion O’Reilly chats with Roxi Power about her new book, The Songs that Objects Would Sing, diving deep into a work that that “is aflame, both with the literal wildfires ravaging the American West and with the slower smolder of personal grief.  Power’s response to loss and disaster is a quirky plangent song…shot through with humor and underpinned by a rippling ostinato of lyric power” (Mark Scroggi...

Andrea Hollander⁠ , author of ⁠six poetry books⁠ , moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2011, after living for more than three decades in the Arkansas Ozarks, where she was innkeeper of a bed & breakfast for fifteen years and Writer-in-Residence at Lyon College for twenty-two. Hollander’s newly released sixth full-length collection is ⁠ And Now, Nowhere But Here (Terrapin Books, 2023)⁠ . Her fifth, B...

Farnaz Fatemi and Julia Chiapella read poems by Palestinian poets and those of Palestinian heritage to amplify and bear witness to the range of their perspectives and the richness of these voices. We found the reading of these aloud to each other to be profoundly moving. Please see the extensive show notes for links to the poets, their books, many more we couldn’t include on the show and other rec...

Listen in as Robin Gow and Farnaz Fatemi discuss Robin’s book Lanternfly, their experience writing a hyper-focused collection, the value of persona poems, defiance, cross-species empathy and more.  Robin Gow   is a trans poet and YA/Middle Grade author from rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of several poetry collections including, most recently,  Lanternfly August , from Driftwood Press, &am...

Ruba Ahmed joins Julie Murphy to read " Try to Praise the Mutilated World " by Adam Zagajewski and talks about his imperative to see the beauty in the world that lies right beside the horrors. She also reads from her new book Bring Now the Angels and shares her struggle in coming to forgiveness and grief and joy. Ruba also shares some great insights on the power of repetition as well as...

Dion O'Reilly and Pacific Northwest poet, ⁠Jeannine Hall Gailey,⁠ talk about science, science fiction, and poetry. Jeannine reads from her new book ⁠ Flare Corona. ⁠ Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She is the author of six books of poetry:  ⁠ Becoming the Villainess ⁠ ,  ⁠ She Returns to the Floating World ⁠ , which was a finalist for the 2012 Er...

To kick off Trans Week of Awareness (Nov. 13 - 19), Geneffa Jahan sits down with local youth poet, Madeline Aliah (age 17) to hear how poetry has given her hope and a voice. Madeline reads from her chapbook of poems, This Is My Body: Poems by a Teen Trans Fem, forthcoming from Jamii Press (2024), and additional works that take her poetry beyond identity politics. She speaks of her activism through...

Roxi Power talks with Brenda Hillman , winner this month of the Northern California Book Reviewers’ Fred Cody Award  for Lifetime Achievement, about her 11th book of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later.   We discuss her new trans-genre tetralogy about time: how to find calm during the Anthropocene by being in time in multiple ways: sinking into the micro-minutes; p...

What do the Sufis, Zen Buddhists, and Catholics have in common? Listen in and find out as Gary Gach brings the poetry of Persian poet Hafiz to The Hive! We talk about the new book, Hafiz's Little Book of Life , he and translation collaborator Erfan Mojib have put together with a forward by Ari Honarvar.  “How to translate into English what, until now, has justifiably been called the ‘untransla...

Rick Lupert zooms into The Hive. We read Robert Creeley’s poem “I Know a Man,” and shamelessly display our ignorance about the great Robert Creeley , who did indeed, sometimes wear an eyepatch , and who was a powerful and engaging reader . Rick Lupert reads some fruit poems from his current book, I Am Not Writing a Book of Poems in Hawaii,   inspired by his vacation with his family to Hawaii.  Ric...

A conversation between Geneffa Jahan and the Youth Poet Laureates of Watsonville , Eva Sophia Martinez Rodriguez (pictured) and Rachel Huerta , appointed to serve a two-year term from 2023 – 2025. The Watsonville Public Library created this position to recognize a youth under the age of 20 for their literary achievements, passion for promoting awareness of poetry and whose work demonstrates a comm...