Of Poetry Podcast

Listen: On the web, Google, Apple, Spotify, etc

Read: “Dear Hannah,” and other poems

Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance (Fence Books 2011), was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. The Brooklyn Rail called the book “humble, folksy, romantic, tough, inventive, and not over-programmed.” Her second book, Parallel Resting Places, was chosen by Peter Gizzi for the New Measure Prize, was released with Free Verse Editions in January 2021. She has published three chapbooks: Dick Erasures (Red Ceilings Press 2011), the collaboratively written at the intersection of 3 (Dancing Girl Press 2014), and Grief Is the Only Thing That Flies (Bateau Press 2018), which Arielle Greenberg selected for the Keel Chapbook Contest. Her poem “No one wants to be the victim no one when there is a gun involved and blue” was adapted as an artist book by Inge Bruggeman.

Her poetry appears in Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, VOLT, Anomaly (Drunken Boat), among others, and in three anthologies: Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books 2020), The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books 2012), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse 2014). Her essays and book reviews have appeared in The Volta, Hyperallergic, Full Stop, Jacket2, and 1508.

Laura co-founded and, for a decade, co-edited textsound.org: an online journal of experimental poetry and sound. Poets & Writers named textsound an “indie innovator,” one of a small group of “groundbreaking presses and magazines that are redrawing the publishing map.” She developed an integrated curriculum for graduate and undergraduate students working on the Sierra Nevada Review and for four years taught those classes. In 2014 she joined Baobab Press as their poetry editor.

Wetherington is a graduate of University of Michigan’s MFA program, UC Berkeley’s Undergraduate English Department, and Cabrillo College. She has taught for the French Ministry of Education, the University of Michigan, the New England Literature Program, Eastern Michigan University, Sierra Nevada University’s Humanities Department and Low-Residency MFA Program, and for the Nevada Arts Council’s writers in the schools program. She currently teaches creative writing at Amsterdam University College and with the International Writers’ Collective. Grants include a 2017 & 2015 Artist Fellowship in Literary Arts from the Nevada Arts Council and a 2014 Artist Grant in Literature from the Sierra Arts Foundation. She has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and Camac.

Purchase: Laura Wetherington’s Parallel Resting Places (Parlor Press, 2021)

And the two collections Laura reads from on Episode 8:

Milla Van der Have’s Ghosts of Old Virginny

Mustafa Stitou’s Two Half Faces

Listen: On Apple, Google Play, and elsewhere.

Read: Jessica’s poem “The Ballad of the Red Wisteria”

Jessica Q. Stark is a California-native, Vietnamese American poet, editor, and educator that lives in Jacksonville, Florida. She holds a BA from UC Berkeley and dual MA Degrees in English Literature and Cultural Studies from Saint Louis University’s Madrid Campus. She received her PhD in English from Duke University. She has published scholarly articles on poetry and comics studies and teaches writing at the University of North Florida.

Her poetry has most recently appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Society of America, Pleiades, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Carolina Quarterly, Poetry Daily, The Boiler, The Southeast Review, Hobart Pulp, Verse Daily, Tupelo Quarterly, Potluck, and for the Glass Poetry Journal: Poets Resist series. Her first poetry manuscript, The Liminal Parade, was selected by Dorothea Lasky for the Double Take Grand Prize in 2016 and was published by Heavy Feather Review. She is the author of four poetry chapbooks, including her most recent titled INNANET (The Offending Adam, 2021). 

Her full-length poetry collection, Savage Pageant, which was a finalist for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Book Prize, the 42 Miles Press Book Prize, and the Rose Metal Press Hybrid Book Prize, was published by Birds, LLC in March 2020. Savage Pageant was named one of the “Best Books of 2020” in The Boston Globe and in Hyperallergic. Her third poetry manuscript, Buffalo Girl, explores a short time in her mother’s life, Vietnamese-diasporic wolves, and different iterations of Little Red Riding Hood. She occasionally writes poetry reviews for Carolina Quarterly and is currently a Poetry Editor for AGNI and the Comics Editor for Honey Literary.

She has lived in several cities across the globe, including Seoul, South Korea, Madrid, Spain, and for a short time in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, where she ran a backpackers’ hostel with her partner and learned how to crack a coconut with a machete. In her free time, she is a cat-lover and has been trained as a Level Two Reiki practitioner. 

Purchase Jessica Q. Stark’s Savage Pageant (Birds LLC, 2020).

Listen: Online and Other Places

Read: Four of C.T.’s American Cavewall Sonnets

C.T. Salazar is a Latinx poet and librarian from Mississippi. His debut collection, Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking is forthcoming in 2022 from Acre Books. He’s the author of three chapbooks, most recently American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press, 2021). He’s the 2020 recipient of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters award in poetry. His poems have appeared in The Rumpus, Beloit Poetry Journal, Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, RHINO, and elsewhere.

Purchase C.T. Salazar’s American Cavewall Sonnets (Bull City Press, 2021).

Listen: On Spotify, Apple, Google, and the Web

Read: An interview with Kelly Cressio-Moeller at ZYZZYVA.

Kelly Cressio-Moeller is a poet and visual artist. Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, Best New Poets, Best of the Net and have appeared widely in journals and at literary websites including Gargoyle, North American Review, Poet Lore, Salamander, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Water~Stone Review, and ZYZZYVA, among others. She is an associate editor at Glass Lyre Press. She lives in the Bay Area with her husband, two sons, and their basset hound. Shade of Blue Trees is her first poetry collection, the finalist for the Wilder Prize at Two Sylvias Press.www.kellycressiomoeller.com

Purchase Kelly Cressio-Moeller’s debut poetry collection Shade of Blue Trees.

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, and Elsewhere

Read: Carla’s Chapbook Ironbound Fados and her craft chap Eat a Persimmon

Carla Sofia Ferreira is a Portuguese-American poet from Newark, New Jersey who teaches high school English in Newark today. She’s received fellowships from the Sundress Academy for the Arts and DreamYard Radical Poetry Consortium. Her micro-chap Ironbound Fados was published in 2019 by Ghost City Press and in 2020, she self-published a poetry prompt chapbook for high school students and their teachers, Eat A Persimmon. She believes in community gardens, semicolons, and that ICE must be permanently abolished.

Listen here: On Apple, Spotify, or via the Web.

Read: Tom’s poem Gospel of Thomas, which he reads on Episode 3.

Tom Snarsky is a math teacher who writes poetry. He is a former Robert Noyce Teaching Fellow at Tufts University and a Senior Fellow at the Knowles Teacher Initiative. He is the author of two books forthcoming from Broken Sleep in 2022: Speaking Roles, a collection of poetry interviews, and Complete Sentences, a pamphlet of poems about teaching. He is also the author of the chapbook Threshold, published in 2018 by Another New Calligraphy. In addition to his work in print, several of Tom’s chapbooks and pamphlets can be found online as free .pdfs: Number Among (Epigraph), WEAKEN (The Argotist Online), 21 small poems (Binbag Press), minimal sonnets with Jo Ianni (Ghost City Press), the pamphlet Two Songs (Fathomsun Press), the self-published Two Notebook Poems, and With Sorrow as My Window and Forgiveness as My Shield, one of the winners of the Boston Uncommon Chapbook Contest at Boston Accent Lit. Along with Kristin Garth he is the co-organizer of Performance Anxiety, a monthly online poetry reading series. He teaches at Lightridge High School in Aldie, Virginia and lives in Bluemont with his wife Kristi, who all this is for.

Purchase Tom Snarsky’s debut book of poetry Light-Up Swan (Ornithopter Press, 2021).

Listen here: On Apple, Spotify, or via the Web.

Read: Kempf’s poems “National Anthem” and “The Union Forever” in full, which he reads a selection from on Episode 2.

Christopher Kempf is the author of the poetry collections What Though the Field Be Lost (LSU, 2021) and Late in the Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books and has been reviewed widely, including in The New York Times. His scholarly book, Craft Class: The Workshop in American Culture, is forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press.

Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, his poetry and creative nonfiction have appeared in Best American Poetry (2020), Boston Review, Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, The New Republic, and PEN America, among others.  His scholarship appears in American Literary History (ALH), English Literary History (ELH), and Modernism/modernity.

Kempf holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Chicago, an MFA from Cornell University, and teaches in the MFA program at the University of Illinois.

Listen Here: On Apple, on Spotify, or via the Web.

Read one of the poems Jessica reads on Episode 1: “The Androgynous Christ.”

Jessica Cuello’s manuscript, Liar, has been selected by Dorianne Laux for the 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize, forthcoming in October 2021. She is also the author of Pricking (Tiger Bark Press 2016), winner of the 2017 CNY Book Award, and Hunt (The Word Works 2017), winner of the 2016 Washington Prize. In addition, Cuello has published three chapbooks: My Father’s Bargain (2015), By Fire (2013), and Curie (2011). Cuello was the recipient of The 2018 New Ohio Review Poetry Prize, The 2013 New Letters Poetry Prize, and a 2015 Saltonstall Writing Fellowship. In 2014 she was awarded The Decker Award from Hollins University for outstanding secondary teaching. She teaches French in Central NY and is a poetry editor for Tahoma Literary Review.

Of Poetry Podcast is hosted by Han VanderHart.