Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired February 10th, 2026) featuring poet Barbara Leff.  Barbara, joining the show from San Francisco, discusses and reads from her books AND GOD SAID…A Brief History of Creation, and Undertow. Planet Poet’s Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce, also appears on the show.

 Born and raised in New York, Barbara Leff discovered poetry at the age of 12 and has explored the genre ever since.  Her work has appeared in various journals, including Fourteen Hills, Fault Line and Ibbetson Street. Her first collection, AND GOD SAID . . . A Brief History of Creation, finalist for the DA VINCI prize for the book cover, is based on the Book of Genesis and published by Broadstone Books.  Her second Collection, LUCK, a collaboration with visual artist, David Maxim is devoted to forms and her most recent collection, UNDERTOW was published in 2024, also by Broadstone Books.  She lives in San Francisco with her wife, Arlene Singer, and their dog, Baxter. barbaraleffpoet.com,  pamelampearce.com

Praise for AND GOD SAID . . . A Brief History of Creation

 …AND GOD SAID... is a brilliant retelling of The Book of Genesis, one of the foundational texts of Western culture. The biases, gaps and silences of the original are given voice and texture by Leff's humane and compelling imagination which brings a fresh and passionate angle of vision to these familiar stories, transforming in the process not only our understanding of our religious past but also of the contemporary life which is in part a product of that past. This is a wonderful and exhilarating book --- Alan Shapiro, Author of ten poetry collections including Tantalus in Love and Old War Poems

 Praise for UNDERTOW 

….These deftly crafted poems treat the quotidian, the metaphysical, and the magical- “as if I could grab a handful of stars from the sky and toss them on the tiles at your feet.” Sharply observed, heartrending and celebratory by turns, UNDERTOW conducts us through a lifetime of landscapes its fascination with orientation in shifting memory and place becoming our own.--Susan Cobin, Author, What You Choose 

LISTEN to my December 30th, 2025 WIOX show (also a podcast!) featuring Canadian poets Margo LaPierre and Guy Elston. Margo and Guy will read from and discuss their respective poetry collections Ajar and The Character Actor Convention and talk about their lives in poetry.

 Margo LaPierre (she/her) is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario. Visit: www.margolapierreeditor.com

 Guy Elston was born and raised in Oxford, UK.  Guy has an MA in History from the University of Amsterdam and since moving to Canada his poetry has been published by The Malahat Review, Canadian Literature, Event, The Literary Review of Canada, Vallum, The Antigonish Review and other journals. His chapbook Automatic Sleep Mode was published by Anstruther Press in 2023. His debut full-length collection, The Character Actor Convention, was published by The Porcupine's Quill in 2025. Visit: https://guyelston.com/home-page/

 Praise for Ajar

Ajar follows the time travel of a mind haunted by chemistries of violence and suicidality. LaPierre’s keen lyrical voice creates a palimpsest of overlapping timelines and selves, and methodically crafts an expansive theory of Mad temporality and survival. These poems are rituals for haunting oneself into the future. —Rebecca Salazar, author of antibody

 Praise for The Character Actor Convention

"What's certain is voice," quips one of the speakers in The Character Actor Convention, and voices certainly abound in this inventive, hilarious, and slyly wise collection… Guy Elston delves slantwise into the absurdities of our present and the disasters and solaces of our imagined futures. A lively and delightful debut!" –  Catriona Wright, author of Continuity Errors

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired November 18th, 2025) featuring renowned, groundbreaking poet Molly Peacock.  Molly will read from her acclaimed books and discuss her life as a poet, biographer and arts activist.  

 Molly Peacock is the author of eight collections of poetry, including The Widow’s Crayon Box. Her poems appear in leading literary journals such as Poetry and American Poetry Review and are anthologized in A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker. She is the cofounder of Poetry in Motion on New York’s subways and buses. After her husband of 28 years died, she began The Widow’s Crayon Box, realizing that the variety of feelings after a beloved partner dies comprise far more than an 8-color crayon box—it’s the whole 152.  A former Leon Levy Biography Fellow, Peacock is also the author of two biographies about the lives of women artists, The Paper Garden and Flower Diary.

 PRAISE FOR MOLLY PEACOCK

 “Peacock has a luxuriantly sensual imagination—and an equally sensual feel for the language. In mood her poems range from high-spirited whimsy ... to bemused reflection. ... Whatever the subject, rich music follows the tap of her baton.” - David Lehman writing in Washington Post Book World

 “Ms. Peacock uses rhyme and meter as a way to cut reality into sizeable chunks, the sense of the poem spilling from line to line, breathlessly.”

- The New York Times Book Review

 [The Widow’s Crayon Box] bears ample witness to [Molly Peacock’s] wit and gusto, her sensuousness and curiosity, and her courage . . . Her poetic artistry, honed over the course of her distinguished career, enables her to find beauty and zest even in the most forbidding places—and having found them, to offer them to us.
— Rachel Hadas, author of Ghost Guest

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 23rd, 2025) featuring returning guests, award-winning poet Lee Slonimsky and award-winning novelist Carol Goodman.  Lee and Carol will discuss and read from their new books - Lee’s latest bilingual poetry collection Pythagoras in Exile, which is published in Greece and translated by Katerina Mardakioupi, and Carol’s latest Literary Mystery - Writers and Liars, set on a Greek Island. We’ll also hear about their life together as mutual literary muses, and their fascination with the ancient world.  

 Lee Slonimsky has published twenty books of poetry around the world, ten in the U. S. and ten others in countries ranging from Greece to Italy to Israel to India.  His work has been anthologized several times, including in Everyman Library’s Buzz Words.  His latest book, a bilingual edition of Pythagoras in Exile, was published by Enipnio Press in Athens, Greece this past May. Visit: Enipnio Press and Mod.Lunar - The River

 Carol Goodman’s rich and prolific career includes novels such as The Widow’s House and The Night Visitor, winners of the 2018 and 2020 Mary Higgins Clark Awards.  Her books have been translated into sixteen languages.  She lives in the Hudson Vallley. Visit:  carolgoodman.com

 Praise for Lee Slonimsky

 “If Pythagoras and Sappho had ever met, they might have written soulful poems like these to each other.” – Anne Carson

 “The sonnet turns out to be the perfect—maybe even the Platonic—form for Lee Slonimsky’s Pythagorean meditations…These variations on themes serve as an entrance into the philosopher’s mind, as if we are thinking and discovering along with him.” -- A. E. Stallings (2011 winner of the MacArthur Foundation  “Genius Prize”:

 Praise for Carol Goodman

 “An excellent riff on And Then There Were None unfolds within a setting steeped in sinister mythology.... An absolutely perfect vacation read.” —Booklist (starred review) 

“Goodman’s latest delivers a mash-up of Greek mythology and Agatha Christie’s classic mysteries, to delightful effect.”
—Library Journal (starred review) 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August l2th, 2025) featuring poets Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland. Bertha and Mary discuss their new books and talk about their work and their lives in poetry over the last few decades.

 Mary Gilliland is the author of Ember Days, The Devil’s Fools (winner of the Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award and the CNY Book Award), and The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Prize). Honors include the 2023 International Literary Seminars Kenya/Fence 1st Prize in Poetry and a Cornell University Council on the Arts Faculty Grant. Mary is a poet, ecologist, and occasional essayist in New York’s Finger Lakes Region where she has transformed a rocky acre of Six Mile Creek into a fawn-filled woodland garden. https://marygilliland.com/

 Bertha Rogers is a poet, translator, and visual artist who lives and writes and walks on a mountain in New York’s Catskills. Her recent poetry collection (Salmon, Ireland), is What Want Brings: New & Selected Poems. Her translation of the Anglo-Saxon Riddle Poems from the Exeter Book was published in 2019; and her translation of Beowulf  in 2000 (Birch Brook, NY).  Bertha, named First Poet Laureate of Delaware County, New York, in March 2005, and was the founding director of Bright Hill Press and Word Thursdays, a nonprofit organization in New York's Catskill Mountain Region.  www.bertharogers.com.

 Praise for Bertha Rogers and Mary Gilliland

 "The richness of Bertha Rogers's poetry flows from each line, each word, not just on the page to be seen, but heard as we silently mouth the words. Oh, how perfectly musical hervoice is, sometimes celebratory, sometimes sad, but always in tune with the matter at hand, whether it be nature or love or loss. Now I trust/in poems, rustling red leaves/I lay carefully on white pages,' she tells us. Her trust is well placed. What Want Brings brings us a most welcome treasure of poems new and selected."  --Matthew J. Spireng - author of Good Work, winner of 2019 Sinclair Poetry Prize

 Mary Gilliland’s In the Pool of the Sea’s Shoulder is a modern classic; an elemental deep-dive into the life of her brother, as Freddy, whose life was tragically cut short. Here, time and memory are distilled by ‘listening into the dark’ in a poetics so sensitively attuned to loss and written through a myriad of forms and voices. Within the elegiac energy, there are echoes of Muriel Rukeyser’s activist commitment in the documentary approach here. Tender yet ludic, this is a work of searing intelligence. Gilliland is a visionary poet writing at her peak.—JAMES BYRNE

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July l, 2025) featuring two poets of the West:  Tim Hunt and Gerald Wagoner.  Tim and Gerald will read from their work and discuss their journeys in poetry. Visit: Sharon Israel, Tim Hunt, Gerald Wagoner, Broadstone Books

 Tim Hunt is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Western Where (Broadstone Books). Recognitions include the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award for his 2018 collection Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes, six Pushcart Prize Nominations, and the Chester H. Jones National Poetry Award for “Lake County Diamond” from his first collection Fault Lines (The Backwaters Press). His critical work includes two studies of Jack Kerouac (Kerouac’s Crooked Road: Development of a Fiction and The Textuality of Soulwork: Kerouac’s Quest for Spontaneous Prose) and The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Originally from the hill country of northern California, he was educated at Cornell University and concluded his teaching career at Illinois State University where he was University Professor of English. He and his wife, Susan, live in Normal, Illinois.

 Gerald Wagoner is the author of When Nothing Wild Remains, (Broadstone Books,September 2023), and A Month of Someday, (Indolent Books, March 2023) . Gerald’s childhood was divided between Eastern Oregon and Montana where he was raised under the doctrine of benign neglect. With a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana, Gerald pursued the art of sculpture, and left the Northwest to study with Richard Stankiewicz. In 1982, after earning an MFA in sculpture, Gerald moved to Brooklyn, NY In New York Gerald exhibited regularly, then taught Art and English for the NYC Department of Education until 2017, at which time he choose to pursue the art of poetry. Selected Publications: Beltway Quarterly, BigCityLit, Blue Mountain Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Night Heron Barks, Ocotillo Review, Right Hand Pointing, Misfits, Maryland Literary Review, Burningword, The Umbrella Factory, Bangalore Review.

 Praise for Tim Hunt and Gerald Wagoner 

 Tim Hunt’s elegy for a vanished America, Western Where, takes us on an evocative road trip where we discover the last picture show, a played-out silver mine, a hand-me-down fiddle, silver-screen cowboys, and more. His wistful word paintings leave us yearning.

—Holly George-Warren, author of Janis: Her Life and Music & Public Cowboy #1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry

Gerald Wagoner is a poet of uncanny particulars: “The child, as man, remembers the tang and texture of warm / summer apricots picked from / a tree that was never there.” The poems in When Nothing Wild Remains are “on speaking terms with the wind,” rich in imagery of a rural America he knows intimately....Wagoner’s graphic poetry is cinematic and sobering in its frank depictions of what’s missing, the wildness of a remembered past as seen in the light of an ongoing present.—Elaine Sexton, author of Drive

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired June 3rd, 2025) featuringHudson Valley poet Lisa St. John.  Lisa reads from her book Swallowing Stones and discusses her life as a poet. Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also appears on the show.

 Lisa St. John is a writer living in upstate New York. She is the author of two poetry books, Ponderings (Finishing Line Press) and Swallowing Stones (Kelsay Books). She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee for her poem “War is a Human Child” from The Poetry Distillery. She won first place in Anthology’s 2024 Poetry Award for “Through the Membrane.” Lisa is published in journals such as 2Elizabeths, New Verse News, The Poet’s Billow, The Ekphrastic Review, The Orchards Poetry Journal, Light, and Entropy Magazine. Lisa believes that art is hope and that there is beauty in possibility. She is currently working on a memoir. Find out more atlisachristinastjohn.com.  Also visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com and https://www.pamelampearce.com

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired March 11th, 2025) featuring Ulster County Poet Laureate, performance artist and President of CAPS (Calling All Poets), Mike Jurkovic.  Mike reads from his latest work and discusses exciting developments at CAPS now entering its 26th year in the Hudson Valley.  Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce appears later in the show for an extended conversation.

Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com Visit: https://www.mikejurkovic.com, 

Visit: https://www.callingallpoets.net.  Visit:  https://www.pamelampearce.com

 2025 Ulster County Poet Laureate, Mike Jurkovic’s poetry, prose and music reviews have been published globally with little reportable income. Full length collections include Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers,AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2023, 2022, 2020); haiku collections Monet’s Bamboo (CAPS Press, 2025) Blue Fan Whirring, (Nirala Press, 2018). President, Calling All Poets, now in its 26th year in the Hudson Valley. 2016 Pushcart nominee, CD reviews appear online at All About Jazz and lightwoodpress.com  He is the Monday 9am-10:30am host of NuJazzXcursions, WVKR-91.3FM Vassar College.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired February 11th, 2025) featuring poet Tina Barry on her spellbinding new book, I Tell Henrietta.  Kristin Flynn, the artist who created the intense, expressive cover and interior art for I Tell Henrietta also joins us on the show.  Visit:Tina Barry at Tina Barry writer and  Kristin Flynn at https://www.kristinflynn.art   

Praise for I Tell Henrietta

"Tina Barry's astonishing collection I Tell Henrietta explores thresholds between the dream world and wakefulness and between poetry and prose... "
---- Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy

"Tina Barry's startling and eclectic I Tell Henrietta pushes the hybrid aesthetic envelope forward....Suffused with astute observation, memory and crystalline imagery, Barry's collection is a must-read for those who love small works containing multitudes"
----  Nathan Leslie, editor of Best Small Fictions, author of Hurry Up and Relax


Tina Barry is a textile designer turned poet, short-fiction writer and editor. She is the author of I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024) with art by Kristin Flynn, Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2019 and 2016).Her writing can be found in Rattle, Verse Daily, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, SWWIM, The Indianapolis Review, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, and elsewhere. Tina has five Pushcart Prize nominations and several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com.
 
Kristin Flynn earned a BFA in fashion design from Parsons School of Design, an AAS degree in Textiles from Rochester Institute of Technology, and studied painting at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows, including the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, Stone Ridge Center for the Arts, Jane Street Gallery Studio 89, Brick Gallery, Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bard College. 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired December 17th, 2024) featuring Bruce Weber and Jan Alexander.  Bruce is the producer and Jan is the coordinator of “Whirlwind” The 2025 Hudson Valley New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza.  Bruce and Jan will tell us about this great event and read from their writings. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Whirlwind at The Local

 “Whirlwind” The 2025 Hudson Valley New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, will take place Wednesday, January 1st, 2025 from 1:00-7:00 pm at The Local, 16 John Street, Saugerties.  Admission is free.  Wine and beer will be available for purchase.

 Bruce and Jan and the “Whirlwind” organizers/staff will gratefully accept donations of books, new and used, fiction and nonfiction, hardcover and paperback for the Greene Correctional Facility in Greene County, New York and non-perishable food, beverages, toothbrushes or toothpaste for the Saugerties Food Pantry, which provides food for nearly 250 men, women and children in the area each month.

 Bruce Weber is a poet and historian of American art. His poetry has been published widely in magazines both in print and online, and he is the author of six books of poetry, including These Poems Are Not Pretty (with Jan McLaughlin), How the Poem Died, The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot, Poetic Justice, The Breakup of My First Marriage, and most recently, There Are Too Many Words in My House (Rogue Scholars Press, 2019). For twenty-five years he organized the Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza in New York City. Upon settling in Saugerties in the Hudson Valley he moved the event where it will be held next year at The Local in Saugerties with the support of the Saugerties Arts Commission. Currently he and his wife Joanne curate the multidisciplinary series Dialogues for the Ear & Eye on the first Tuesday evening of the month at the 9W Diner in Saugerties.

 Jan Alexander is the author of the novel Ms. Ming’s Guide to Civilization (Regal House Publishing, Sept. 2019), a fractured utopian tale that was a Leap Frog Fiction Prize semi-finalist. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and literary magazines including Atticus Review, Everyday Fiction, Flash Fiction, Guernica, Silver Birch Press, and 34th Parallel. Her flash fiction stories have received two honorable mentions and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She has written about business and travel for many publications and taught Chinese history at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of Getting to Lamma, a novel, and co-author of Bad Girls of the Silver Screen, a look at Hollywood’s portrayal of prostitutes through the ages.