The WildStory: A Podcast of Poetry and Plants by The Native Plant Society of New Jersey

Guest host N. West Moss, author of the memoir Flesh and Blood (Algonquin Press), joins us for the opening interview of this episode. West turns the tables to interview The WildStory host and Jersey City Poet Laureate Ann E. Wallace about her new poetry collection, Days of Grace and Silence: A Chronicle of COVID’s Long Haul, forthcoming from Kelsay Books in winter 2024. They speak about Ann’s isola...

Poet Susan Glass, who has been blind since birth, speaks with Ann Wallace about the integral role birds have played in her life—and in her poetry—as she uses their songs and calls to locate herself, spatially and metaphorically, in the natural world. She also brings listeners into the creative process of completing her chapbook  The Wild Language of Deer,  published in 2022 by Slate Roof Press. It...

In this episode, poet Christine Klocek-Lim talks with Ann Wallace about the ways in which her work engages with nature, whether she is taking us onto the trail with her or creating the sequence of persona poems in her new chapbook  Nomenclatura , forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press. Christine reflects on the human history held within seemingly wild spaces, the precarity of life, and the communal ele...

Poet January Gill O’Neil speaks with Ann Wallace about her new collection, Glitter Road, forthcoming from CavanKerry Press in February 2024. January discusses her year as the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, and her immersion in the difficult cultural history of the south, as laid against its rich and fertile landscape. She also reflects on the ways in w...

Episode 2: Lisbeth White, a poet from Washington State and author of American Sycamore (Perugia Press, 2022) speaks with Ann Wallace about how ancestry, myth, and stories are contained within the American landscape, reflecting on the simultaneous beauty and historic violence evoked and held within the trees and waterways of this nation, and how ritual might help restore connection to the land. We...

Episode 1: Sati Mookherjee, a poet from the Pacific Northwest, speaks with Ann Wallace about her new collection Ways of Being (MoonPath Press, 2023) and the way grief, language, and the natural world intersect within her work. NPSNJ President Dr. Randi Eckel discusses the role of cultivars in our gardens. Co-host Kim Correro then joins in for a conversation with Kim Rowe, leader of the Monmouth Ch...