Rickey Laurentiis is the author of Boy with Thorn, which won the Cave Canem Poetry Prize and the Levis Reading Prize. Laurentiis is the recipient of fellowships from the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics (CAAPP), the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Poetry Foundation, among others. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic, BOMB, and poets.org. A 2018 Whiting Award winner, she lives in New Orleans. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast September submitted poems episode features five wonderful contributions read by five poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more. Subscribe today.
Sarah Green is the author of a previous collection, Earth Science (421 Atlanta), and the editor of Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence (Ohio University Press.) She has received a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the Sewanee Writers' Conference and the Vermont Studio Center. She is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at St. Cloud State University.
m. mick powell is a queer Black Cape Verdean femme, a poet, an artist, an Aries, and author of the chapbooks threesome in the last Toyota Celica and chronicle the body. Their poems have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology and a Pushcart Prize, and appear in RHINO, Muzzle, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and elsewhere. mick is a professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Connecticut and an adjunct in Bay Path University’s MFA in creative nonfiction writing program. A former Tin House Resident, mick enjoys chasing waterfalls and being in love.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast July submitted poems episode features four wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more. Subscribe today.
Hosho McCreesh is currently writing, painting, & making stuff in the gypsum & caliche badlands of the American Southwest. His work has appeared widely in print, audio, & online.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets, songwriters, and artists including Safia Elhillo, Olivia Gatwood, Daniel Ash + David J, Kari Byron, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, and many more. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast is a must-listen for anyone who loves poetry, music, and art. Listen, be inspired, and subscribe today.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast June submitted poems episode features four wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more. Subscribe today.
Listen to the poems using your favorite podcast player and then read each below:
Adela Najarro is a poet with a social consciousness who is working on a novel. She serves on the board of directors for Círculo de poetas and Writers and works with the Latine/x community nationwide, promoting the intersection of creative writing and social justice. Her extended family left Nicaragua and arrived in San Francisco during the 1940s; after the fall of the Somoza regime, the last of the family settled in the Los Angeles area. She is the author of four poetry collections: Split Geography, Twice Told Over, My Childrens, and Volcanic Interruptions, a chapbook that includes Janet Trenchard's artwork. The 2024 Int'l Latino Book Awards designated Volcanic Interruptions as an Honorable Mention in the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award category. The California Arts Council has recognized her as an established artist for the Central California Region and appointed her as an Individual Artist Fellow.
The poems in Variations in Blue address the aftermath of domestic violence through the transformative power of language, leading to healing and empowerment via the author’s journey into her Latine/x culture. They cycle through the traumatic residue of dysfunctional relationships, the complexities of Latinx representation through a series of ekphrastic poems, and reimagine Nicaragua as a homeland set in a volcanic landscape. Each section contains a series of poetic variations on a theme, and the poems reverberate and rotate through the indeterminacy of language. Najarro’s Variations in Blue insists that the complexities of experience must be understood one version at a time, each distinctly unfolding its unique design.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast April submitted poems episode features four wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more.
Listen to the poems using your favorite podcast player and then read each below:
Liz Cahill is the Co-founder & Executive Director of Decentered Arts and leads the organizational and strategic direction. Liz is also a founding member and resident of Uzay Gallery, a poet, event producer, and researcher. She is working on her first book of poems, Garbage Age Lady, forthcoming on Decentered Press. Outside of the arts she can be found cooking food for friends and biking with her tiny dog Rya in a backpack.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast March submitted poems episode features four wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more. Subscribe today.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is author of three books of poetry: Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024), winner of the 2024 National Book Award for Poetry and the 2022 Akron Poetry Prize; Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the 2024 Firecracker Award and honorable mention for the 2024 Arab American Book Award; and Water & Salt (Red Hen), winner of the 2018 Washington State Book Award and honorable mention of the 2018 Arab American Book Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Arab in Newsland, winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Prize, and Letters from the Interior (Diode, 2019), finalist for the 2020 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize. For more about her work, visit www.lenakhalaftuffaha.com.
Queer poet and writer Cass Donish was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. They are the author of the poetry collections Beautyberry and The Year of the Femme, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, as well as the nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine. Their work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, VICE, and elsewhere. Donish received an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon, an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. They live in Columbia, Missouri.
A trigger warning. Please note that this interview, because of the subject matter and themes of Cass' new book, touch on suicide. If you are having suicidal thoughts please reach out for support resources in your area.
Sam Rush began writing after developing progressive hearing loss and realizing how many words each word could be. They were a finalist at the National Poetry Slam in 2016 and Sam's work has been featured in Muzzle, The Offing, Voicemail Poems & The Journal, as well as on Button Poetry, and SlamFind. Their first collection of poems, SWALLOW (Sibling Rivalry Press,2021) was nominated for the Georgia Author of the Year Award. Sam has spent the last decade working in environmental education and youth empowerment.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast November submitted poems episode features four wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more.
Featured poets in this episode:
Robin LaMer Rahija is originally from Kansas City, MO and now lives in Kentucky. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is currently staff in the Department of English. In 2010, she co-founded and edited Rabbit Catastrophe Press, a handbound, feminist, book arts micropress. In 2015, she co-founded Workhorse Writers Collective, a publishing and education platform for poets outside of academia. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Spoon River Review, and elsewhere. Inside Out Egg is her first full-length book, published by Variant Lit in 2024.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast October submitted poems episode features four wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more. Subscribe today.
Featured poets:
Tyler Mills is the author of the memoir The Bomb Cloud (Unbound Edition Press 2024), which received a Literature Grant from the Café Royal Foundation NYC. Her poetry guidebook, Poetry Studio: Prompts for Poets, is newly released this summer (2024) from the University of Akron Press. She is the author of the poetry books City Scattered (Tupelo Press 2022), Hawk Parable (University of Akron Press 2019), Tongue Lyre (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry First Book Award, Southern Illinois University Press 2013), and co-author with Kendra DeColo of Low Budget Movie (Diode Editions 2021). A poet and essayist, her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, The New Republic, the Kenyon Review, The Believer, and Poetry, and her essays in AGNI, Brevity, Copper Nickel, River Teeth, and The Rumpus. She teaches for Sarah Lawrence College’s Writing Institute and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center's 24PearlStreet and lives in Brooklyn on part of the unceded homeland of the Lenape people.
Maria Giesbrecht is a Canadian poet whose writings explore her Mexican and Mennonite roots. Her work has previously been published in Contemporary Verse 2, Talon Review, and is forthcoming in Queen's Quarterly. She is the runner-up for the 2022 Eden Mills Poetry Contest and a graduate of the post-graduate Creative Writing program at Humber College. Maria is the founder and host of the writing table, Gather, and spends her days nurturing creative folks to write urgently and unafraid.
The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast August submitted poems episode features six wonderful contributions read by the poets. Different forms and themes are featured. The Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast explores the art of poetry through interviews with poets and artists including Safia Elhillo, A.E. Stallings, Dana Gioia, Yanyi, Olivia Gatwood, Lisa Marie Simmons and more. Subscribe today.
