Please join Julie Murphy as she chats with Santa Cruz County's new Poet Laureate, Nancy Miller Gomez, about poetry in the jails and her plans to bring poetry to our community. Nancy reads Ruth Stone's poem, Another Feeling, and talks about the importance of paying attention and how daily observations, memories and current events can ease the challenge of facing a blank page. Listen to Nancy read poems from her stunning debut collection Inconsolable Objects.

Nancy Miller Gomez is the author of Inconsolable Objects (YesYes Books) and Punishment (Rattle Chapbook Series). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, The Adroit Journal, LitHub, Rattle, New Ohio Review, Massachusetts Review, River Styx, Verse Daily, The Hopkins Review, and elsewhere. She received a special mention in the 2023 Pushcart Prize Anthology and is the recipient of a fellowship from the Jentel Foundation. Gomez co-founded Poetry in the Jails, an organization that provides writing workshops to incarcerated women and men and has taught poetry in Salinas Valley State Prison, the Santa Cruz County Jails, the Juvenile Hall and as part of Cornell University’s Prison Education Program. She earned a B.A. from The University of California, San Diego, a J.D. from the University of San Diego and a Master in Fine Arts in Writing from Pacific University. Originally from Kansas she now lives with her family in Northern California and is thrilled to have recently been appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County. She is currently working on a second collection of poems and a collection of personal essays.

Don't miss the Poet Laureate Celebration at Bookshop Santa Cruz featuring Nancy Miller Gomez and Farnaz Fatemi. April 14, 7-9 PM.

Hear from four UCSC student poets who will be part of this year's In Celebration of the Muse at the Resource Center for Nonviolence. Farnaz Fatemi and Julia Chiapella talk to these up and coming poets, who read from their poems and talk about their inspirations, influences and passion.

Poets in the studio: Lilly Tookey, Reilly Newton, and Angel Sunlight. Sofia Nordvedt represented.

More about In Celebration of the Muse at hivepoetry.org.

Santa Cruz poet, journalist, and author, Addie Mahmassani, buzzes into the Hive to talk Irish poetry with Dion O'Reilly. We read William Butler Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Samuel Beckett and Eamon-Grennan

Addie Mahmassani is originally from the East Coast, where she completed a PhD in American Studies. This spring she is finishing an MFA in poetry at SJSU. She covers Arts & Entertainment for Metro Silicon Valley and other Bay Area papers and served as poetry editor of Reed Magazine, Issue 156. Her first book, a feminist history of the American folk revival, is forthcoming with University of Iowa Press.

Dustin Brookshire has gathered an impressive array of poetic emulations in When I Was Straight: A Tribute to Maureen Seaton. They include free verse gestures, couplets, tercets, and prose poems. Maureen’s influence shines, though is never blinding—each of the poets in this anthology takes her title and makes the poem that follows their own.

(From the forward by Denise Duhamel)

We read poems from: Kelli Russell Agodon, Sarah Cooper, Aaron DeLee, Caridad Moro-Gronlier, Diamond Forde, and Addie Tsai.

Dustin Brookshire (he/him) is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Repeat As Needed (Harbor Editions, 2025) and the chapbooks Never Picked First For Playtime (Harbor Editions, 2023), Love Most Of You Too (Harbor Editions, 2021) and To T he One Who Raped Me (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2012). Love Most Of You Too and Never Picked First For Playtime were finalists in the Poetry Chapbook category of the American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards in 2022 and 2023, respectively.

Poet Maureen Seaton earned an MFA from Vermont College in 1996. She is the author of the poetry collections Fear of Subways (1991), winner of the Eighth Mountain Poetry Prize; The Sea Among the Cupboards (1992); Furious Cooking (1996), winner of both the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Lambda Literary Award; Little Ice Age (2001); Venus Examines Her Breast (2004), winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award; and Cave of the Yellow Volkswagen (2009).

Using collage techniques to create delight and dissonance, Seaton’s poetry has been described as unusual, compressed, and surrealistic. Seaton has explored the possibilities of collaboration throughout her career, writing poetry with Denise Duhamel in such collections as Exquisite Politics (1997), Oyl (2000), and Little Novels (2002). She also collaborated with Samuel Ace on Stealth (2011) and with Neil de la Flor on Sinead O’Connor and Her Coat of a Thousand Bluebirds (2011). Seaton, Duhamel, and David Trinidad edited an anthology titled Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry (2007).

Seaton is author of the Lambda Literary Award–winning memoir Sex Talks to Girls (2008), in which she addresses motherhood, sobriety, and sexuality. She teaches at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida.

(from the Poetry Foundation)

Julie Murphy and  Jessica Cohn discuss Jessica's debut book of poems Gratitude Diary, exploring themes of nature, family, loss, and yes, gratitude. Cohn reads Jane Hirshfield's poem My Debtand the poets discuss amazement and appreciation of beauty and nature, but also gratitude for the more challenging and difficult aspects of life.

A Michigan native, Jessica Cohn has made homes in Illinois, New York, and most recently, Aptos, California, where she started a poetry practice with the support of the Santa Cruz community of writers. In GRATITUDE DIARY, her first poetry collection, Cohn marks a path through our post-truth world with rocks, feathers, and observations in verse. This long-time editor and nonfiction author revels in the way poems say what cannot otherwise be said. For more, please visit jessicacohn.net or  [email protected].

Tune in as treasured poet Naomi Shihab Nye reads her poetry, talks of her Palestinian father and ancestors, and recalls the challenging event that led to her popular poem, "Kindness". She also shares a poem by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Tofa from his bookForest of Noise. Listen to Naomi read poems from her books The Tiny Journalist, Fuel, Transfer, and Everything Comes Next.

With Julia Chiapella and Dion O’Reilly, Roxi Power discusses the just-published anthology she co-edited, Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (Carbonation Press 2025) with 100+ amazing poets. This urgent, lightning-fast book was a collaborative effort by 8 editors between election and inauguration day to capture feelings about and implications of this critical election.

The call asked for compassionate but courageous poems that transform readers through visionary rather than didactic language. Editors Katie Sarah Zale, Paul E. Nelson, allia abdullah-matta, Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs, Robert Lashley, Roxi Power, CChristy White, and Theresa Whitehill spent long days over the holidays choosing a wide range of poems reflecting the editors’ different poetics as well as national and international diversity of region, identity, style, and issues affected by this historic election including immigration, reproductive rights, climate change, white supremacy, and more. Publisher Greg Bem made the project happen fast.

Along with our own poems, we discuss poems in the book written on election night “as the map turned red”, including “Election Night Blues” by Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington; a poem about self-care and healing, “the-bigger-picture” by Dana Teen Lomax; and a poem by Martín Espada about freedom-seeking children playing soccer in detention camps. 

Order Winter in America (Again here. 

Listen to readings from our 1/19 and 1/20 launches on KPFK Pacifica Radio in Los Angeles, on Bibliocracy with Andrew Tonkovich on 4 Thursdays at 2:30, starting Feb. 5. 

Join us at our launch events in Seattle (Feb. 4, Seattle U.); Tucson (Feb. 15, Gallery of Food;  San Francisco (March 1, Et Al and summer TBA, City Lights Bookstore), Los Angeles AWP (March 27, CSU-Los Angeles); Santa Cruz (April 1, Bookshop Santa Cruz and April 15, Inter Act, Satori Arts), Lit Balm Interactive Livestream (April 26 & 27 2pm EST), & more.

Farnaz and Sarah Pape discuss the poet's new book, Forgive the Animal, (Cornerstone Press), exploring questions of memory, vulnerability and revelation in her poems, along with the complexity of personal fallibility. Pape thinks and talks eloquently about the process of putting together the manuscript regarding a range of craft issues including point of view, form, and genre-crossing.

Sarah Pape's website is here.

Also mentioned in this interview: You Are No Longer in Trouble by Nicole Stellon O'Donnell

Julie Murphy andDane Cervine discussDEEP TRAVEL – At Home in the [Burning] World(Saddle Road Press), Danes new book of contemporaryhaibun. The poems are rooted in a series of journeys, a pilgrimage, that culminates in the poet findinghome in this fragile, yet resilient, world.

Miller Oberman and Dion O'Reilly read and discuss Omotara James's "My mother's nerves are shot."  and then do a deep dive into Oberman's newest collection, Impossible Things⁠.

Miller Oberman is the author of Impossible Things, forthcoming from Duke University Press, 2024 and The Unstill Ones, Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, 2017.

He has received a number of awards for his poetry, including a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, the 92Y Discovery Prize, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims Memorial Prize for Translation. Poems from Impossible Things have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Hopkins Review, Poem-a-Day, and Foglifter. Poems from The Unstill Ones appeared in Poetry, London Review of Books, The Nation, Boston Review, Tin House, and Harvard Review.

Miller is an editor at Broadsided Press, which publishes visual-literary collaborations and teaches at and serves on the board of Brooklyn Poets. He teaches writing at Eugene Lang College at The New School in New York. Miller is a trans Jewish anti-Zionist committed to the liberation of all. He lives with his family in Queens, New York.