Meg Weston is a poet, non-fiction writer, and photographer with passion for the geological processes that shape the earth and the stories that shape our lives. She has an MFA from Lesley University. As co-founder of The Poets Corner, and the Camden Festival of Poetry, and a board member of Millay House Rockland, Meg actively supports the poetry community. Images can be seen on her photography website, www.volcanoes.com. 

Meg Weston's poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. Her publications include a poetry collection, Magma Intrusions, published by Kelsay Books in 2023, a self-published chapbook, Letters from the White Queen. and a collaborative collection with poet Margaret Haberman, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Annaliese Jakimides has been cited in national competitions by poets laureate and other notable writers. Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, her prose and poetry have been published in many magazines, anthologies, and journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal and Southeast Review. She’s a member of MWPA’s community advisory board and cofounder of the Belfast Poetry Festival. After decades of living in the shadow of Mt. Katahdin in a town of 160, pumping water by hand, she now lives in an apartment in a small Maine city overlooking a library and writes in a closet. Learn more at www.annaliesejakimides.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Mike Bove is the author of four books of poetry, most recently EYE. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Tar River Poetry, and others. He was a two-time finalist for a Maine Literary Award and won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest in 2021. In 2024 he served as Writer-in-Residence at Acadia National Park. Currently, he is editor of Hole in the Head Review, a biannual journal of poetry. Mike lives with his family in Portland, Maine where he was born and raised, and is Professor of English at Southern Maine Community College. 

Learn more at: www.mikebove.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Katherine Hagopian Berry (she/her) is the author of Mast Year (Littoral Books 2020), LandTrust (NatureCulture, 2022) and Orbit (Toad Hall Editions, 2023). Katherine has appeared in literary magazines, including Café Review, SWWIM, and Feral, in the Portland Press Herald, on Maine NPR and in multiple anthologies. Her next collection, Handfast, is forthcoming from NatureCulture Books.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Rosa Lane is author of four poetry collections including Called Back, published by Tupelo Press in fall 2024; Chouteau’s Chalk, winner of the Georgia Poetry Prize, published by the University of Georgia Press in 2019;Tiller North, winner of the National Indie Excellence Award, published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2016; and Roots and Reckonings, a chapbook. 

Her work was named Best of Poetry for the 2024 Geminga Prize, chosen as winner of the 2023 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Prize, and selected finalist for the 2023 Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Competition among other awards. Rosa Lane’s poems have appeared in Cloudbank, Five Points, Nimrod, RHINO, Third Coast, and elsewhere.

Learn more at: www.rosalane.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Lauren Saxon is a queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and being chronically online. Lauren’s work is featured in Barrelhouse, Empty Mirror, Across the Margin, Homology Lit, and more. Her debut chapbook, You’re My Favorite, won the 2023 Maine Literary Award for Book of Poetry, and is out now with Thirty West Publishing.

Learn more at: www.laurenmsaxon.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Kristen Case is a poet and scholar. She is the author of American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe, and three books of poetry - most recently, Daphne. She has co-edited several essay collections on American writers. Most recently, the Oxford Handbook of Henry David Thoreau. She lives in Maine. 

Learn more at: www.kristencase.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Jefferson Navicky was born in Chicago and grew up in Southeastern Ohio. He earned his M.F.A. from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodies Poetics at Naropa University. He is the author of four books, most recently Head of Island Beautification for the Rural Outlands (2023), a Finalist for the 2023 Big Other Book Award for Fiction. Antique Densities: Modern Parables & Other Experiments in Short Prose (2021) won the 2022 Maine Literary Award for Poetry.

Jefferson’s work has received several acknowledgments and awards, including an American Rescue Plan/Maine Project Grant, a Maine Arts Commission grant, and three Maine Literary Awards. His plays have been produced throughout New England. Jefferson is proud to be a member of Maine’s literary arts community and is active in several volunteer boards, committees, and community projects. He is the archivist for the Maine Women Writers Collection.

Learn more at: www.jeffersonnavicky.com.

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This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Margaret A. Haberman lives and writes in Belfast, Maine. Her poems have appeared in the Island Journal, the journals Spiritus, and kerning/ a space from here. Her poems have also been selected for the Maine Public Radio program Poems from Here. Margaret and Meg Weston co-authored a book of poems, To the Point and Back: Swimming Poems, which came out in 2024. 

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.

Kate Kearns is the author of You Are Ruining My Loneliness (Littoral Books, 2023), and a chapbook called How to Love an Introvert (Finishing Line Press, 2015). Her work has appeared in Maine Women Magazine, the Maine Sunday Telegram “Deep Waters” section, and on Maine Public Radio’s “Poems from Here”. Her poems have also been published in Salamander, Peregrine, Northern New England Review, Sugar House Review and elsewhere. Kate was a finalist for the 2024 Charles Simic Poetry Prize and the 2024 Maine Postmark Poetry Contest. She earned her MFA from Lesley University and BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Learn more at: www.katekearns.com.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc’s first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers. His second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including The New Republic, Tin House, The Literary Review, FIELD, Poetry Northwest and Orion. Gibson’s prose has appeared in Guernica, Kenyon Review, Publishers Weekly, Slice, and other places. 

He served as the City of Portland’s fifth Poet Laureate, ending a three-year term in 2018. His projects included Written, Spoken, Rapped, a multimedia website that he collaborated on with poet Wesley McNair and that is aimed at high school teachers and students interested in writing poetry, and “Deep Water,” a column that features a poem each Sunday in the Maine Sunday Telegram and now continues with poet Megan Grumbling as editor. 

With graduate degrees from UC Berkeley and Columbia University, he has taught writing at conferences, schools and universities including Fordham, Haystack, and University of Southern Maine, and helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks Artist Colony. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland with his family.

Learn more at: www.gibsonfayleblanc.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. 

Get in touch with us at: [email protected] 

You can also find this show on the Topsham Public library website, www.topshamlibrary.org/, and on the Fort Worth Poetry Society website, www.fwpoets.org.