We read from Matthew's newest book and also the poem My Father's Locker by James Ciano.

Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

In this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, host Julie Murphy talks with poet Preeti Vangani about humor, loss, and the surprising ways joy can hold our grief. The episode opens with Vangani reading Ross Gay’s beloved poem “To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian,” setting the tone for an exploration of abundance and community. Vangani then reads several poems from her new collection of poems Fifty Mothers available here for presale. discusses craft, memory, lineage, and the intergenerational textures of care. She reflects on her workshops in Writing Grief Through Joy, and the surprising healing possibilities that emerge when poetry turns its attention toward the everyday.A warm, intimate conversation with one of today’s most compelling emerging poets. Sunday night at 8 p.m. on KSQD Santa Cruz 90.7, 89.7, and 89.5 FM, or anytime at HivePoetry.org.

Three “bees” from The Hive Poetry Collective warm your minds with cozy—and existential–conversation about winter poems as we draw closer to the Winter Solstice.  

Roxi Power talks with Julia Chiapella and Parker Shabala live in the Santa Cruz KSQD radio station about poetry ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnet to his beloved about aging to Elizabeth Robinson’s new poetry about members of the unhoused community surviving frostbite. We talk about winter’s philosophical soundscapes  in Louise Glück’s “bone dice/of blown gravel clicking” and in the U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s “world of being [that] is like this gravel:/ you think you own a car, a house, /this blue zig-zagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.”

Tune in and let us borrow an hour of your time to enjoy Kenneth Patchen’s spiritual and erotic snowscapes, laugh about Anne Sexton’s branches that “wear the sock of God,” and contemplate Wallace Stevens’  “mind of winter” that beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

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).