To kick off the third season of Awakeners, Lena speaks with poets Dorianne Laux and Arielle Hebert, who connected when Arielle joined the MFA program at North Carolina State University. We review Dorianne and Arielle’s poetic lineages, with special attention to Dorianne’s close ties to (and beautiful, hilarious stories about) Philip Levine and Sharon Olds. In the second half of the episode, we dive into the weekly generative writing sessions Dorianne has hosted on Zoom since 2020, which operate with a fascinating constraint, and we hear how one of these sessions produced poems that made it into both Dorianne’s and Arielle’s new collections.

Arielle Hebert is a queer poet based in North Carolina with roots in Florida and Louisiana. Her debut poetry collection, Bottom Feeders, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and is out now from Black Lawrence Press. Her poems have appeared in The Slowdown, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, Southern Humanities Review, Great River Review, and others. Arielle is the 2025-2026 fellow at Hellbender Gathering of Poets, an annual writing conference celebrating poetry, environmental science, and community to bring about a joyful rising in a climate-changed world. She is the Director of Operations and Marketing at Blair, a nonprofit publisher focused on emerging and diverse writers.

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 Carry, a finalist for the National Book Critic’s Circle Award; Smoke; as well as a fine small press edition, The Book of Women. She is the co-author of the celebrated text The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry. Her latest collection of poetry is Life On Earth and was released in January of 2024. Finger Exercises for Poets, a book of concise craft essays and exercises for poets was released in July 2024.

More Arielle: https://www.ariellehebert.com/

More Dorianne: https://www.doriannelaux.net/

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