Jeri Theriault is a Franco-American poet who grew up in Waterville, Maine, and graduated from Colby College, later earning degrees from USM (MS in Instructional Leadership) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA in Poetry). Her teaching career spanned thirty-four years, including seven years in Prague, six of them as English Department chair at the International School of Prague. She lives now in South Portland with my husband, the composer, Philip Carlsen. 

Learn more at www.jeritheriault.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] 

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community. In 2024, he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book, collaborations in writing and visual art (Brynmorgen Press).

He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.

Stuart was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.

Learn more at stuartkestenbaum.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] 

Megan Grumbling writes poetry, criticism and essays, and dramatic works, and serves as an editor, teacher, and writing mentor. Her second poetry collection, Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, launched in fall of 2020 from Acre Books. Her first collection, Booker's Point (UNT 2016), was awarded the Vassar Miller Prize and the Maine Book Award for Poetry.

Her work has been awarded the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the Robert Frost Award from the Robert Frost Foundation, a Hawthornden Fellowship at Hawthornden Castle, Scotland, and a St. Boltoph Emerging Artist Award, and has been included in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, the New York Times Poetry Pairing Series, and Verse Daily.

As a filmmaker, she is co-director/producer with David Camlin of We Are the Warriors (2023), which follows members of a Maine high school community as they grapple with ingrained settler narratives about their Native American mascot and the difficult conversation of whether to retire the image. We Are The Warriors was awarded the Tourmaline Prize for best feature at the 2023 Maine International Film Festival. Megan also wrote and co-directed the short film and cultural allegory Carrying Place, a Sisters Grumbling production.

Megan is also the librettist of the spoken opera Persephone in the Late Anthropocene, a co-creation with the late composer Denis Nye, and of which her newest collection is an expansion. This experimental opera had its world premiere production by Hinge/Works Modern Opera in 2016 at SPACE Gallery, in Portland, Maine. She now works regularly with composer Marianna Filippi on a variety of environmentally-themed new music compositions, including a synesthetic exploration of a day in the life of an octopus and a work for 8 cellos and chorus written in the voice of a glacier.

She has written and directed interactive street theater for the sea level rise consciousness-raising group King Tide Party and collaborated on site-specific performances about healing and sound. Her dramatic and operatic work as co- founder of Hinge/Works has been staged as part of the PortFringe Festival, the Sacred and Profane Festival, and the Belfast Poetry Festival.

Megan also edits the weekly poetry column Deep Water in the Portland Press Herald; serves as Reviews Editor for The Café Review, a poetry and arts journal; and wrote theater and film criticism for the Portland Phoenix from 2004 until the alt-weekly’s sad final demise in 2024. She teaches at the University of New England and Southern Maine Community College, frequently leads writing workshops and tutorials, and offers manuscript consultations and editing services to a range of authors. She earned a Master’s Degree in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from New York University’s School of Journalism, and studied oral history, ethnography, and American Studies as an undergraduate at The Evergreen State College.

Megan’s work is strongly influenced by the natural world, stories, and documentary modes. She has written a portrait-in-verse of an old Maine woodsman; explored the significance of gold in America through the voices of three historical figures; and contemplated how we inhabit the vessels of a neighborhood, a body, and the deep and precarious blue.

Learn more at megangrumbling.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] 

Jeffrey Thomson is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, and the author of ten books, including Museum of Objects Burned by the Souls in Purgatory, Half/Life: New and Selected Poems, The Belfast Notebooks, The Complete Poems of Catullus, and Birdwatching in Wartime. He has been an NEA Fellow, the Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Poetry Centre at Queen’s University Belfast, and the Hodson Trust-John Carter Brown Fellow at Brown University. He is currently professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington.

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] 

Christian Barter’s fourth book of poetry, The Ends, is published by Littoral Books. He has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Maine Literary Award for Poetry, the Isabella Gardner Award from BOA Editions, and he was the Poet Laureate of Acadia National Park. For over thirty years he has worked for the Acadia trail crew as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and supervisor.

Learn more at www.christianbarterpoetry.org.

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] 

Cynthia Reeves began her writing life over thirty years ago as a poet, but she found that her poetry more often than not drifted into narrative. She gravitates toward forms that lie in the gray area between poetry and prose—prose poems and flash fiction. 

She’s the author of three award-winning books: the novel The Last Whaler (Regal House Publishing, September 2024), the novel-in-stories Falling Through the New World (Gold Wake Press 2024), and the novella Badlands (Miami University Press 2007). Reeves’s short stories, poetry, and essays have been widely published. Most recently, three of her Maine-based poems appear in Echoes in the Fog: Reflections on the Liminal Spaces of Maine’s Coast (12 Willows Press). 

A Hawthornden Fellow, she’s been awarded residencies to the Arctic Circle Summer Solstice Expedition, Spitsbergen Artists Residency, Art & Science in the Field, and Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA program, she taught in Bryn Mawr College’s Creative Writing Program and Rosemont College’s MFA program. She serves on the board at Millay House Rockland and lives in Camden, Maine.

Learn more at: www.cynthiareeveswriter.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] 

Arisa White is an associate professor of English and Creative Writing at Colby College. She is the author of Who’s Your Daddy, co-editor of Home Is Where You Queer Your Heart, and co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice Series for young readers. Post Pardon: The Opera marked Arisa’s debut as a librettist, and the libretto is forthcoming from Ecstatic Motion Press in 2026. 

Her poetry is widely published, and her collections have been nominated for both the NAACP (N-double-A-C-P) Image Award and the Lambda Literary Award. She has also won the Per Diem Poetry Prize, the Maine Literary Award, the Nautilus Book Award, an Independent Publisher Book Award, the Golden Crown Literary Award, and the Airlie Press Prize. The poem installation, look after your heart, is permanently displayed at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. She is a Cave Canem fellow and serves on the Community Advisory Board for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Learn more at arisawhite.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] 

Claire Millikin is a poet and long-distance runner originally from Georgia (USA), and now lives in coastal Maine. The author of ten poetry collections, including Magicicada, a book of poems about juvenile solitary confinement and winner of the 2024 Foreword Indies Award for Poetry, Millikin’s recognitions also include an Independent Press Award Distinguished Favorite and the WB Yeats’ Society Prize. Claire teaches art history and writing for the University of Maine system and for the Maine Media Workshops and College. Learn more at: www.claireraymond.org.

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] 

Maya Williams (ey/em, they/them, and she/her) is a religious Black multiracial nonbinary suicide survivor who is currently an Ashley Bryan Fellow, a Creative Fellow of the University of New England's Maine Women Writers Collection, and was selected as the seventh Poet Laureate of Portland, Maine  for a July 2021 to July 2024 term.

Maya's debut poetry collection, Judas & Suicide, is available through Game Over Books. Eir second poetry collection, Refused a Second Date, is available through Harbor Editions.  Maya's third poetry collection, a chapbook: What's So Wrong with a Pity Party Anyway? , is available via Garden Party Collective.  Maya's fourth poetry collection, a chapbook: Feminine Morbidity is available through The Headlight Review. 

Maya's collections are a finalist of a New England Book Award, a finalist of a Maine Literary Award, a winner of Garden Party Collective's chapbook contest, and a winner of The Headlight Review's chapbook contest respectively. They were also a recipient of the Maine Humanities Council's Constance Carlson Public Humanities Prize in 2024. 

Catch Maya hosting the hybrid open mic series Port Veritas on Tuesday nights and hosting the hybrid writing workshop series at Novel Maine on Sunday mornings. You can support Maya's poetry on eir Patreon page and follow their work at mayawilliamspoet.com.

*SENSITIVE CONTENT WARNING: This episode references the existence of suicide. If you or someone you know needs help, call or text 988 in the U.S., or visit www.988maine.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] 

Dr. Therí A. Pickens received her undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and her PhD in Comparative Literature from UCLA. She is a poet-scholar who focuses on Arab American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature and Disability Studies. Dr. Pickens is currently the Charles A Dana Professor of English & Africana at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. In her debut poetry collection, What Had Happened Was, Therí A. Pickens investigates the complex structures of Black storytelling. 

Learn more at: www.tpickens.org

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]