The Hive Poetry Collective

Rooja Mohassessy buzzes into the Hive to talk about her new book, When Your Sky Runs Into Mine . She also reads a Sylvia Plath poem "Black Rook in Rainy Weather." ⁠ Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annua...

Poets Bill Lavender, Sean F. Munro, and Rodrigo Toscano talk with Roxi Power about the wildly successful annual April event they organize: The New Orleans Poetry Festival. In the second half of the show, they read their own poems; the political poetics of each poem buzzes with national and global currents. Festival co-founder Bill Lavender reads from his opus-in-progress that he began writing on t...

Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders Courtney Le Blanc reads from her latest book,  ⁠ Her Whole Bright Life  and also the poem,  ⁠"Where No One Says Eating Disorder⁠ " by  ⁠Kelly Grace Thomas⁠  from Thomas's collection  ⁠ Boat Burn  ⁠   ⁠ Courtney LeBlanc⁠  is the author of the full-length collections  ⁠ Her Whole Bright Life; Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart; and  Beautifu...

Joan Kwon Glass zooms into the Hive to talk about her new book. We also read and discuss Laura Apol 's poem "Instructions for the Friends Who Are Sorting my Daughter's Things this Afternoon." Joan Kwon Glass is the mixed-race, Korean American author of Night Swim (Diode Editions, 2022), and three chapbooks ( How To Make Pancakes for a Dead Boy, If Rust Can Grow on the Moon, and B...

Lana Hechtman Ayers joins host Julie Murphy to read from her two recently published books, Overtures and When All Else Fails . Join us as Lana reads a poem by Ellen Bass and talks about the healing powers of poetry, how the awareness of death brings compassion and finding joy in difficult times.

Public interest in Emily Dickinson continues strong, evidenced by recent pop culture hits like Apple TV’s Dickinson, and the movie, Wild Nights With Emily, starring Molly Shannon.  Dickinson herself was influenced by 19th century popular cultural forms, including crime novels. Tune in to hear two poets have fun trying to solve some puzzles, while appreciating the mystery, in her enigmatic poems an...

Join us as Gail Rudd Entrekin reads poems from her book Walking Each Other Home , an homage to the bittersweet journey of love, life, and parting. Gail is editor of the online environmental literary magazine,  Canary ( www.canarylitmag.org ) and holds an M.A. in English Literature/Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. She has taught both subjects for over 25 years. Her poems have been f...

Geneffa Jahan hosts San Francisco poet and bookseller Beau Beausoleil as he shares how he became an organizer after the 2007 bombing of Al Mutanabbi Street, the famed booksellers’ street of Baghdad. They discuss his global movement, Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here , with annual readings worldwide to commemorate the bombing, and his anthology of poems and prose by survivors and witnesses, Al-Mutana...

Jamaica Baldwin zooms into The Hive to talk about her new book,  Bone Language . We read some  Vievee Frances  and talk about the radical acceptance that poetry can bring. Jamaica, a Santa Cruz native, will be in town to read at  The HiveLive!  on July 18th at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Reading with her, will be the fabulous  Francesca Bell.  Jamaica Baldwin ’s debut collection is  Bone Language  (YesYe...

Join Tim Lindner , editor of The Book of Life After Death (Tolsun Books, 2023) with Farnaz Fatemi as they discuss this forthcoming book which explores how the dead might be remembered in poems & essays. We are joined by four more poets--Elizabeth Quiñones-Zaldaña, Xioaly Li , Hunter Hazelton , and Jen Karetnick --reading selections from the book. "We're all going to die. What's wo...

Earl Hines  and  Dion O'Reilly  talk about earning an MFA at Pacific University, read and discuss the fabulous poem, " Shrike," by Henri Cole​ , and read and talk about Hines latest book  Any Dumb Animal .  AE Hines’s debut collection, Any Dumb Animal, received Honorable Mention in the North Carolina Poetry Society’s 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book contest, and was a daVinci Eye finalist...

Listen to this free-wheeling conversation with acclaimed poet, memoirist, screenwriter and educator Jimmy Santiago Baca. We talk about the gift of saying 'no,' the unexpected byproducts of incarceration, his upcoming writers retreat, and hear him read several of his poems from his 50-year writing career. You can learn more about Jimmy on his website , at the Poetry Foundation , and find ou...

Vincent Rendoni  and  Dion  O'Reilly  engage in a wide-ranging and lively discussion of life and poetry. He reads Monica Rico's  " Poem in Consideration of My Death " from an anthology that, due to its representation of Latino life, influenced Vincent's decision to be a poet,  The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4, LatinNext .  Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in...

One of the original Hive members, Lisa Allen Ortiz, joins us to talk about her Idaho Prize-winning poetry collection, STEM, a book which asks, among other questions, "where in the body does aliveness reside?" Our conversation plumbs more of these easy-to-answer inquiries. Lisa is the author of two poetry collections:   Stem , winner of the 2021 Idaho Prize and  Guide to the Exhibit  winn...

Barbara Bloom, who recently relocated to Bellingham, Washington, shares poems about the deep connection she finds in nature, especially in Santa Cruz, where she lived for over 30 years. Barbara studied poetry with Santa Cruz poets, Joe Stroud and Morton Marcus and taught in the English Department of Cabrillo College for nearly 30 years. In this episode, Barbara reads and discusses poems of departu...

Farnaz talked with  Jennifer Franklin , whose third book,  If Some God Shakes Your House, has just been published by Four Way Books in March 2023.  We discuss If Some God Shakes Your House , in which Franklin has “reimagined Antigone for our times--where filial devotion and ossified roles of gendered labor become the engine of her defiance.” Franklin's work is honest and riveting, and full of...

Denise Duhamel ’s most recent books of poetry are  Second Story   (Pittsburgh, 2021) and  Scald  (2017).  Blowout  (2013) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. A proponent of collaboration, she and  Maureen Seaton  have co-authored five collections, the most recent of which is  CAPRICE (Collaborations: Collected,Uncollected, and New)  (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015). Her nonfict...

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the first Tibetan woman to publish poetry in English. She joins Julie Murphy to read new and favorite poems, as well as the poem ⁠ When it rains in Dharamsala ⁠ by Tenzin Tsundue. They talk about exile, impermanence, and how poems take us from image to mystery. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of the poetry books, My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday, an...

Listen as Caridad reads poems from her book Tortillera, a work in three parts addressing the journey of a woman claiming her own voice. We talk about desire, the Cuban-American experience, coming out, artist Ana Mendienta...among other things. Tune in! Caridad's website is here: http://www.caridadmoro.com/about-me.html#/ You can purchase both the soft and hardcover copies of Tortillera here: https...

Gregory Orr buzzes back into the Hive to talk with Dion O'Reilly about his newest book, Selected Books of the Beloved . We talk about John Keats's " Lines Supposed to Be Addressed to Fanny Braun, " the difference between epic and lyric poetry, and the dangers of the false Beloved.  Gregory Orr was born February 3, 1947 in Albany, New York. He grew up in the rural Hudson Valley. At the age of...

In this week’s episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, Rodrigo Toscano joins Roxi Power to read work from The Charm and the Dread (Fence Books, 2022) and The Cut Point (Counterpath Press, 2023).  We hear about his work in the fields of labor organizing, as well as how his work within Latinx, New Orleans, and experimental poetry communities influence his poetics.

Join host Julie Murphy as she chats with Janice Lobo Sapigao about how the intimate details of our lives are the best way to address big themes in poetry such as immigration, community, connectedness, colonization, and loneliness. Janice reads new works as well as the poem "Swerte" by Alyza Taguilaso.

Jim Moore has been writing poetry for more than four decades. Before Prognosis from Graywolf in 2021, he wrote,  Invisible Strings , published in 2011 by Graywolf Press. In 2012 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for the work in that book. Underground: New & Selected Poems is available now from Graywolf Press. He has won the Minnesota Book Award for his poetry four times. Jim has re...

Join Julie Murphy as she speaks with Daniel Summerhill,  Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action & Composition at CSU Monterey Bay and is the inaugural Poet Laureate of Monterey County. Daniel reads a Danez Smith poem and talks about the duty of a poet to tell the truth.  His poems look closely at how things really are with beauty, lyric grace and hope.

Editors Dustin Brookshire and Julie E. Bloemeke discuss their upcoming compilation of Dolly poems, Let Me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology from Madville Publishing, due to be released on January 19th, 2023 on Dolly Parton's 77 th Birthday.  Dustin and Julie attended their first Dolly concert in August 2011. Ten years later, they  joined forces to co-edit a Limp Wrist Dolly issue...