Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez founded the Rising Voices Program, providing Santa Cruz County high school students with workshops led by local poets devoted to introducing poetry to teens. Listen in to hear some of the students read their poetry and learn from the teachers participating how poetry is affecting young lives.

Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez founded the Rising Voices Program, providing Santa Cruz County high school students with workshops led by local poets devoted to introducing poetry to teens. Hear some of the students read their poetry and learn from the teachers how the impact of poetry is affecting lives.

Jane and Dion plumb the mysteries when they read and discuss Hirshfield's newest book, The Asking: New and Selected, which recently came out in paper book.

Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023); Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004); and The Heart of Haiku (2011). 

Listen in as Farnaz Fatemi and Maggie Paul preview this year's Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading, taking place Thursday November 20, 2025 at UCSC, featuring Ellen Bass.

To register for this week's event go to ⁠thi.ucsc.edu⁠

Find out about the history of this reading series and the accompanying annual $1000 poetry prize. Hear poems from Morton Marcus and several of the past featured poets and prize winners.

To read Maggie Paul's interviews with several of the featured readers over the last 15 years, check out her website.

For an archive of the series, check out ⁠https://www.mortonmarcus.com/history-of-reading-orig⁠

Ruth Mota joins Julia and provisional Hive member Hannah Tool to read and discuss Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill and share selections from her debut chapbook, Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, which is available for pre-order here. You can hear more of Ruth’s poems on December 4th at “The Power of Her Voice,” a poetry benefit for Santa Cruz Community Health, at Temple Beth El in Aptos - tickets available here.

Ruth Mota currently lives in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, California after residing a decade in northeast Brazil and working as an international health trainer throughout Latin America and Africa. Now she devotes her time to writing poetry and facilitating poetry circles to groups in her community like veterans, seniors or men in jail. Her poem “The Sloth” is nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Connecticut River Review, and over sixty of her poems have been published in online and print journals. Her first chapbook, entitled Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, is available for pre-order now through Finishing Line Press.

Victoria Bañales joins the Hive Live! at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday Feb 10, 2026 at 7pm. Event information here. Join our non-spamming email list here to keep up with Hive events.

Victoria (Vicky) Bañales is the 2025-2027 Watsonville Poet Laureate. A Chicanx educator and writer, she is the author of the poetry collection, The Sun Will Not Harm You by Day, Nor the Moon by Night (Jamii Publishing, 2025), and the founder of Journal X, a social justice literary arts magazine, which was awarded the Superior Distinction by the National Council of Teachers of English. Her writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, Storyknife, Macondo, Vermont Studio Center, and other artist residencies. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from UCSC, and teaches composition and creative writing at Cabrillo College, where she also serves as the Faculty Senate President. More at vickybanales.com.

Marie Howe buzzes into the Hive to read from her newest books and also to recite a little Juan Ramon Jimenez.

Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton, 2024), winner of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; Magdalene (W. W. Norton, 2017), which was long-listed for the National Book Award; The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (W. W. Norton, 2009), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; What the Living Do (W. W. Norton, 1998); and The Good Thief (Persea Books, 1988), which was selected by Margaret Atwood for the 1987 National Poetry Series. What the Living Do is in many ways an elegy for Howe’s brother, John, who died of AIDS in 1989. In 1995, she coedited the anthology In the Company of My Solitude: American Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (Persea, 1995).

Keetje Kuipers and Dion read and discuss a poem by Ruth Schwartz and then read from Kuiper's new book, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers.

.Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poetry, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers, was the recipient of the Isabella Gardner Award. Her poetry and prose have appeared in American Poetry Review, New York Times Magazine, and Poetry, and have been honored by publication in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. Keetje has been a Stegner Fellow, NEA Literature Fellow in Creative Writing, and the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Previously a VP on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, Keetje is currently Editor of Poetry Northwest, and teaches at the dual-language writers’ gathering Under the Volcano in Tepoztlán, Mexico. She lives with her wife and children in Montana, where she co-directs the Headwaters Reading Series for Health & Well-Being and keeps an eye out for bears in her backyard.

Join Julie Murphy and Dion O'Reilly for a conversation that moves through love, loss, and wonder — from Yeats’ “The Wild Swans at Coole” to Andrea Cohen’s sharp humor in Something, Richard Siken's quiet reflections in “Kitchen Window,” and the stargazing tenderness of Keith Wilson's “there aren’t enough idioms about the stars.” We’ll also talk about Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s moving “Miss you. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love” and the poignant beauty of  Connie Leung's “Autumn in Prison.”  These poems remind us how language can hold both the ache and the brightness of being alive.

Maxine Chernoff and Paul Hoover talk with Roxi Power in this second part of our interview, revealing their mutual love of film and poetry inspired by it. From Chernoff’s surreal meditations on François Truffaut’s French New Wave film, Jules et Jim, toHoover’s weaving of Wim Wenders’ Lisbon Story into his dreamlike language, we look through the lenses of other artforms—including the deep and unsettling Brazilian musical genre, Fado—to experience the strange and gorgeous interior worlds of these prolific and beloved Bay Area poets.

Listen to Part 1 of our interview from 8-9-25 here.

Maxine Chernoff is professor emeritus of creative writing at San Francisco State University. She is the author of 19 books of poetry and six of fiction, including recent collections from MadHat Press:  Light and Clay: New and Selected Poems (2023)and Under the Music: Collected Prose Poems (2019).  Peter Johnson called her the most important prose poet of her generation. She is a recipient of a 2013 National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry and, along with Paul Hoover, the 2009 PEN Translation Award for their translation of The Selected Poems of Friedrich Hölderlin. In 2016 she was a visiting writer at the American Academy in Rome. A former editor of New American Writing, she lives in Mill Valley. 

Paul Hoover is the author of over a dozen collections of poetry; his most recent book of poetry is O, and Green: New and Selected Poems (MadHat Press, 2021). He has also published a collection of essays and a novel, and translated or co-translated a few books, including Black Dog, Black Night: Contemporary Vietnamese Poetry.  Founding and current Editor of the literary annual, New American Writing–now published by MadHat Press–and two editions of the indispensable Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, Hoover teaches at San Francisco State University.  He’s also won an NEA and numerous awards, including the Carl Sandberg Award in poetry which Chernoff has also won.