Hannah Tool chats with Rocio Franco, a self-identified Chicana warrior poet from Chicago, about poetry as a way to tell the truth, her experience as a nontraditional, working-class poet, and how Brazilian Jiu Jitsu helps remind her that in poetry, and in life, “you can get up and continue doing it.” Rocio reads Diane Seuss’s “My Education” and a selection of poems from her debut chapbook Where the Monarchs Never Die, which won the 2025 Arcana Poetry Press Chapbook Contest. You can connect with Rocio on Instagram at @chio_la_chingona and on her website, rociofranco.com, and buy her chapbook Where the Monarchs Never Die from Arcana Poetry press or wherever good books are sold.

Cassandra Bautista, Rachel Huerta, Zoe Ly Sen & Andrea Wilson visit the KSQD studio with host Farnaz Fatemi to talk about the 44th annual In Celebration of the MUSE in Santa Cruz County. Hear some heart-stopping poems this hour! .....And, in addition to talking about this special event, each of the four commanding voices share their experiences with poetry and writing poems. Join us for an episode with these upcoming poets!

Cassandra Bautista: Mexican-American poet from Los Angeles who recently moved to Santa Cruz to pursue Literature at UCSC. They are enamored by the way poetry weaves soul into its verse, capable of holding the essence of existence. Cassandra works in co-creation with life to reveal personal truths through writing, sharing experiences of migration, womanhood, magic, queerness, or just straight up living. They write for liberation and for any heart who may resonate with their poems.

Rachel Huerta is an English major at Cabrillo College (transferring to Westmont College); she currently works as an English/Spanish tutor. Rachel served as an inaugural Youth Poet Laureate for the City of Watsonville (2023-2025), and her portfolio consists mostly of poetry and half-finished novels. She was once a featured speaker alongside Dolores Huerta – no relation, only wishful thinking. You can find her work in the Porter Gulch Review and Journal X.

Zoe Ly Sen is a queer Vietnamese-American writer and painter. Their favorite color is forest green and their favorite painter is Francis Bacon. If they were a Pokémon they would be dragon-fairy type because they are their own greatest strength and weakness. Their life aspirations are going back to Vietnam as a teacher, also finding a warm place to rest their head. They believe in empowering indigenous youth to heal mother earth from settler-colonial violence. They want to live to see Palestine, Sudan, and Hawai’i be free.

Andrea Wilson has lived and worked in Santa Cruz County for over 20 years but is originally from Massachusetts. They joined the Fungus Federation of Santa Cruz about 15 years ago and volunteers at forays and events, including the Fungus Fair every January. Andrea graduated from Cabrillo, June 2025, with a degree in English. Their pieces can be found published in Cabrillo Watsonville's Journal X.

In this episode of The Hive Poetry Show, Julie Murphy speaks with Bay Area poet Veronica Kornberg about her debut collection Strange Gift, newly released by Wandering Aengus Press. Their conversation explores the interplay of memory, family, and the natural world, and how close attention becomes a generative force in Kornberg’s work. Moving between poems like “Brogues,” “Moon Garden,” and the title piece, they reflect on imagination as both refuge and threshold, where beauty and unease coexist. The episode also touches on Postscript by Seamus Heaney, and the fleeting moments that open and shape a life in poetry.

A Bay Area poet, Veronica Kornberg is a recipient of the Morton Marcus Poetry Prize, and the Wandering Aengus Book Award in Poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Catamaran, Plume, Calyx, and Beloit Poetry Journal.  Veronica co-founded a long-running poetry reading club on the Peninsula, and is a Peer Reviewer for Whale Road Review. At her home in Pescadero, you can find her exploring the tidepools, or on her knees in the dirt in her habitat garden of coastal scrub. Her debut poetry collection, Strange Gift, was just published on April 7th, 2026, and is available from your bookseller of choice.

Dion and Richard read and discuss "Dream Song 14," by John Berryman and then read from his newest book, I Do Know Some Things, a finalist for the National Book Award. We also discuss how one can become insufferable upon learning they have won or placed in a prize.

Richard Siken is a poet, painter, and author of several books. His book Crush won the 2004 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, selected by Louise Glück, a Lambda Literary Award, a Thom Gunn Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are War of the Foxes (Copper Canyon Press, 2015) and I Do Know Some Things (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Siken is a recipient of fellowships from Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Tucson, Arizona.

Farnaz Fatemi and Samyak Shertok discuss Shertok's book, No Rhododendron, selected by Kimiko Hahn as winner of the 2024 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Shertok offers profound and poignant insights in an exploration of the rich invented forms he uses in his debut collection. They discuss the horse-ghosts and other ghosts on the cover, in the book, and in the poet's life. The poet takes a closer look at what he calls "syntactical dismemberment and rememberment" found in his poems about loss and about multiple tongues. Join in for a rich conversation with this stunning poet.

Samyak’s book was shortlisted for the 2026 PEN Open Book Award. His poems appear in The Cincinnati Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, POETRY, Shenandoah, Waxwing, Best New Poets, and elsewhere. A finalist for the National Poetry Series, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, and the Jake Adam York Prize, he has received fellowships from Aspen Words, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Originally from Nepal, he is an Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University.

With Jack Spicer and Federico Garcia Lorca at his heels, ⁠Albert Flynn DeSilver⁠ talks about his latest book, SOME VOID: New and Selected Poems, 1996-2026 as well as his other poetry collection, ⁠Hadrian’s Wall⁠. Working outside the zeitgeist, as Albert says, is a path many poets have taken. Hear him talk about his own path, including its beginning as outlined in the popular memoir ⁠Beamish Boy⁠. The inaugural poet laureate of Marin County, Califonia, DeSilver is also a photographer and writing coach.

In the first of two interviews, Roxi Power talks with poet Elizabeth Robinson about Vulnerability Index, her 2026 poetry book charting her work with the unhoused population of Boulder, Colorado. Through multiple hybrid forms––confessions, parables, lists, and narratives that refuse resolution––Robinson’s collaged fragments rearrange what Joan Retallack has called our “geometries of attention”upon the fractured lives of those members of society who often go unattended.

The fascinating and beautiful characters Robinson helps and befriends become our friends too as we journey with her through the “casual cruelty” of the social services world with its impossible intake forms and hurdles to both heroic and tragicoutcomes.

Elizabeth Robinson is the author of over 20 books, including, most recently Vulnerability Index, published in 2026by Curbstone Books of Northwestern University Press. Her poetry has earned the National Poetry Series for Pure Descent and the Fence Modern Poets Prize for Apprehend, among other recognitions. Robinson has taught at the University of San Francisco, Naropa University, and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.She is currently a senior pastor at Orinda Community Church in the Bay Area and teaches at Lighthouse Writers’ Workshop. Robinson lives with her husband, poet Randy Prunty.

https://www.elizabethrobinsonpoetry.com/about

https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810149205/vulnerability-index/

Farnaz Fatemi talked with Diana Whitney about her maximalist, long armed book, Girl Trouble, a book full with exploration of girlhood, secrets, trauma and also female power.

References in the show:

Diana's essay in Longreads:  The Killer Who Spared My Mother

Ariel Levy’s reporting on the Steubenville rape case: Trial by Twitter

Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich - Netflix documentary featuring voices of survivors

Quote by Rebecca Solnit comes from her incisive essay “Cassandra Among the Creeps” "Sexual assault, like torture, is an attack on a victim’s right to bodily integrity, to self-determination and -expression. It’s annihilatory, silencing."

Diana Whitney is a queer writer and educator embracing a fierce belief in the power of poetry as a means of connection to self and others. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, winner of the Claudia Lewis Award, and the author of three full-length poetry books, Wanting It, Dark Beds, and Girl Trouble. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many other outlets. An advocate for survivors of sexual violence in her Vermont hometown and beyond, Diana works as a developmental editor and a community organizer for a rural LGBTQ+ nonprofit.

Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) sat tangential to The Beats but was singularly distinct from them. As a self-described "serious romantic, “ Gilbert roared onto the scene with his book Views of Jeopardy, earning him a Guggenheim Fellowship and a loyal following. We look at books from The Great Fires as well as earlier work. An outsider poet, In 2013 he was posthumously selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

January Gill O’Neil reads and discusses Lucille Clifton's "Won't You Celebrate with Me" and also poems from January's newest book, Glitter Road.

January Gill O’Neil is a poet whose work explores the afterlives of history in American landscapes and intimate lives. Her poems trace how place, memory, and moral inheritance shape identity across generations, joining lyric precision with documentary attention and restraint.

She is the author of four poetry collections published by CavanKerry Press: Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009). Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.

A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member. She earned her B.A. at Old Dominion University and her MFA. at New York University.