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.

Tim Seibles reads and discusses Lucille Clifton's poem "Hag Riding." Then he reads from his newest collection Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems .

Tim Seibles was the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2016 to 2018. He is a former National Endowment for the Arts fellow and Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center fellow. His seven books of poetry include Fast Animal, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, winner of the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and the Pen Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Poetry. This was followed by One Turn Around the Sun in 2017. His latest collection, Voodoo Libretto: New & Selected Poems was released by Etruscan Press in 2022. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from The Furious Flower Poetry Center in 2024.

 SPREZZATURA, Christopher Buckley's 30th book, is due from Lynx House Press, January 2025. The sense of place in these poems-- whether its the foggy cliffs above the sea or the street of Fresno-- is vivid and immediate.  Buckley examines friendship and the inevitability of change as he braids grief, love, and hope in these poems, many of which are dedicated to the great Fresno poets including Phillip Levine, Larry Levis and Peter Everewine.  Chris opens the show with two Everwine poems and discusses the book of interviews and essays he edited, "Naming the Lost: The Fresno Poets."

Christopher Buckley's work was selected for Best American Poetry 2021; he is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, two NEA grants, a Fulbright Award in Creative Writing, and four Pushcart Prizes.  

Recent books are—One Sky to the Next, winner of the Longleaf Press book Prize for 2022—Agnostic (Lynx House Press), The Pre-Eternity of the World (Stephen F. Austin State University Press), and The Consolations of Science & Philosophy (Lynx House Press). Star Journal: Selected Poems was published by University of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. 

He has edited over a dozen critical collections and anthologies, most recently NAMING THE LOST: THE FRESNO POETS—Interviews & Essays; Bear Flag Republic: Prose Poems & Poetics from California (with Gary Young) Alcatraz Editions, 2008; with Alexander Long, A CONDITION OF THE SPIRIT: THE LIFE AND WORK OF LARRY LEVIS. Again co-edited with Gary Young, Lynx House Press published, One for the Money: the Sentence as a Poetic Form.  With Jon Veinberg, he edited MESSENGER TO THE STARS: A LUIS OMAR SALINAS NEW SELECTED POEMS & READER, published by Tebot Bach in 2014.

Listen here!

Former HIVE member, Geneffa Jahan, returns to offer this salient conversation with beloved local poet and SC Poet Laureate Emeritus, David Sullivan, and his equally lauded friend, the Illinois poet and teacher, Ignatius Valentine Aloysius. They discuss their recently released collaborative poetry collection, Salt Pruning, as they reflect upon the unlikely parallels of their lives and their evolving friendship.

"Salt pruning references the process by which saline mists and seawater shape and shear foliage and rocks along coasts. Meanwhile, the poems in Salt Pruning are a thoughtful conversation using the language of poetry and invented forms to explore how grief and love, immigrant trauma, and friendship have sculpted" these two fine poets (Luisa A. Igloria).

Saline winds, whether on the West Coast of Santa Cruz or Mumbai, prune the landscape, offering a ready trope for how truthful language, flowing between friends, shapes both craft and connection.

As Lee Herrick aptly notes about this collection, the long final poem says it well: 'Men weep everywhere / They can hardly see to steer.' This book is vulnerable and revelatory, a collaborative delight."

This one-hour conversation will leave you touched by something sacred and salient--something to steer you forward and inward.

"Words: They give and give and give." Cintia Santana joins the Hive to read from her Northern California Book Award-winning poetry debut, The Disordered Alphabet. Hear several poems and a conversation with Farnaz Fatemi about Cintia's views on words as magic, the paying attention, ekphrasis and more.

Cintia Santana teaches literary translation and poetry workshops in Spanish and English at Stanford University. Santana's poems have appeared in Best New Poets 2016 and 2020, 2023 Best of the Net Anthology, Poets.org, Poetry Daily, among many others! Her debut poetry collection, The Disordered Alphabet published by Four Way Books in 2023) was short-listed for the 2023 California Independent Booksellers Alliance “Golden Poppy” Award, received the 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal, the 2023 North American Book Award's Silver Medal, and just this fall won the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Poetry.  

https://www.cintiasantana.com