Courtney and Chris sit down with Hannah Cohen, author of Year of the Scapegoat (coming Spring of '22 from Glass Poetry), to talk about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

Hannah Cohen resides in Virginia with her two cats. She's a graduate of the Queens University of Charlotte MFA program. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks: YEAR OF THE SCAPEGOAT (Glass Poetry Press, 2022) and BAD ANATOMY (2018). Hannah is one of the co-editors of the online literary journal Cotton Xenomorph. Publications include Qu Lit Mag, The Offing, The Rumpus, Cherry Tree, Entropy, Drunk Monkeys, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and others. She was a Best of the Net 2018 finalist and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She previously served as contributing editor for Platypus Press.

Chris sits down with Patrick Roche, author of A Socially Acceptable Breakdown (Button Poetry), for a one-on-one conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Patrick Roche (he/him) is an award-winning poet, performer, mental health advocate, and Carly Rae Jepsen enthusiast from New Jersey. Videos of Patrick’s work have amassed over 9.5 million views on YouTube, making him one of the most popular spoken word poets. Patrick has competed or been featured at multiple national and international competitions and festivals, including placing 3rd in the world at the 2016 Individual World Poetry Slam, 2nd  at the 2017 Capturing Fire national queer slam, 9th at the 2017 National Poetry Slam as part of the Bowery Slam Team, and 3rd at the 2014 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational (CUPSI, the national collegiate slam) representing Princeton University. Patrick serves nationally as an ambassador for the JED Foundation, promoting mental and emotional health, suicide prevention, and substance abuse awareness.

In recognition of his work as a touring speaker and performer, Patrick was named the 2020 Spoken Word Artist of the Year by APCA (the Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities), and he has featured at numerous conferences and conventions including the national conferences for both APCA and NACA (the National Association for Campus Activities).

His solo stage show debuted in 2020 and was featured on BroadwayWorld. It was then selected for Dixon Place’s HOT! Festival, the longest-running festival of its kind celebrating LGBTQ theater and art.

Patrick is the author of the full-length poetry collection, A Socially Acceptable Breakdown (Button Poetry, 2021). He has also written two chapbooks: Wait 30 Minutes (self-published, 2015) and An Exercise in Necromancy, winner of Bowery Poetry Club’s inaugural chapbook competition (Bowery Poetry/The Operating System, 2017). His work has appeared in or been published by Button Poetry, UpWorthy, Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, NBC LX, MSN, Beech Street Review, Gal Pals Present, Freezeray Press, Voicemail Poems, and his mom’s fridge. He has shared stages with Darryl “DMC” McDaniels of RUN DMC, Pitch Perfect star Brittany Snow, Everybody Hates Chris and The Walking Dead star Tyler James Williams, and Olympic Gold Medalist Chamique Holdsclaw, among others. His work explores mental health, grief, sexuality, body image, disordered eating, family, memory, love, joy, pop culture, and everything in between. Patrick is a 2014 graduate of Princeton University, where he studied Classics (specifically Latin and Greek poetry) and Education. He loves his dog very much.

Chris and Courtney sit down with Ashley Elizabeth, author of You Were Supposed to be a Friend (Nightengale & Sparrow), for a conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Ashley Elizabeth (she/her) is a writing consultant, teacher, and poet. Her works have appeared in SWWIM, Rigorous, and Kahini Quarterly, among others. Her chapbook, you were supposed to be a friend, is available from Nightingale & Sparrow. When Ashley isn’t serving as assistant editor at Sundress Publications or working as a member of the Estuary Collective, she habitually posts on Twitter and Instagram (@ae_thepoet). She lives in Baltimore, MD with her partner and their cat.

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Chris sits down for a one-on-one conversation with Taylor Byas, author of Bloodwarm (Variant Lit), for a conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist. Originally from Chicago, she moved to Alabama for six years, where she received both her Bachelor’s degree in English and her Master’s degree in English (Creative Writing concentration) from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Taylor currently lives in Cincinnati, Ohio where she is a third year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati studying poetry. She is also an Assistant Features Editor for The Rumpus.

She has received five Pushcart and six Best of the Net nominations, and has won a Best Microfiction Award. She is also the 1st Place Winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway Contest, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets, the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Award, a finalist for the 2020 Frontier OPEN Prize, and an Honorable Mention for the 2021 Ninth Letter Literary Award in Poetry.

Her chapbook, BLOODWARM, is out now from Variant Lit (2021). Her debut full-length poetry collection, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press in the Spring of 2023.

She is represented by Rena Rossner of The Deborah Harris Agency. 

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Join Courtney and Chris Margolin for a sit down with DeMisty D. Bellinger, author of Peculiar Heritage (Mason Jar Press), for a conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry!

DeMisty D. Bellinger is the author of the poetry collections Rubbing Elbows (Finishing Line Press, 2017) and Peculiar Heritage (Mason Jar Press, 2021), and the forthcoming novel New to Liberty (Unnamed Press, 2022). A graduate of the MFA program at Southampton College and the PhD program at the University of Nebraska, DeMisty is now poetry editor with Porcupine Literary and with Malarkey Books, and she teaches creative writing at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. You can find her online at demistybellinger.com.

Chris sits down for a one-on-one conversation with Jose Hernandez Diaz on passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of a collection of prose poems: The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). He holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from UC Berkeley and Antioch University Los Angeles. His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Review, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Nation, Poetry, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Currently, he is an Editor for Frontier and Palette Poetry.

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Courtney & Chris Margolin sit down with Rita Mookerjee of Honey Literary to discuss all things passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Rita Mookerjee is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Iowa State University. Her research interests include postcolonial women's literature, food studies, and queer theory. She holds a PhD in Literature from Florida State University. In 2019-2020, she was a Fulbright Fellow to Jamaica.

Her critical work has been featured in the Routledge Companion of Literature and Food, the Bloomsbury Handbook to Literary and Cultural Theory, and the Bloomsbury Handbook of Twenty-First Century Feminist Theory. Her poetry is featured in Juked, Aaduna, New Orleans Review, Sinister Wisdom, and the Baltimore Review. She is the author of the chapbook Becoming the Bronze Idol (Bone & Ink Press, 2019). Currently, Rita is the Assistant Poetry Editor of Split Lip Magazine and a poetry staff reader for [PANK]. She is the Poetry Editor and Sex, Kink, and the Erotic Editor for Honey Literary.

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Chris Margolin sits down one-on-one with Ariana Brown for a conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

ARIANA BROWN is a Black Mexican American poet with ten years of experience writing, performing, and teaching poetry. She offers a list of services for college events, poetry slams, and local organizations. Her work focuses on Black relationality, queer kinship, and imagining a world where Black girls are free. She is currently on tour with Alan Pelaez Lopez as part of the We Are Owed. Tour in fall 2021. Click here to book Ariana for an artist talk, writing workshop, or poetry performance.

**Please excuse any audio issues on this episode, we were trying a different setup for it, and it didn't work as well as we wanted. 

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Courtney and Chris Margolin sit down with Chen Chen for a conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and Poetry. They might also talk about Russian literature, Buffy, and the horrors of getting sucked down a mall escalator. This is quite the conversation!

陳琛 / Chen Chen’s second book of poetry, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in Sept. 2022. His debut, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions, 2017), was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award, among other honors. In 2019 Bloodaxe Books published the UK edition. Chen is also the author of four chapbooks and the forthcoming book of essays, In Cahoots with the Rabbit God (Noemi Press, 2023). His work appears/is forthcoming in many publications, including Poem-a-Day and three editions of The Best American Poetry (2015, 2019, & 2021). He has received two Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from Kundiman and the National Endowment for the Arts. He teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence and serves on the poetry faculty for the low-residency MFA programs at New England College and Stonecoast. With a brilliant team, he edits the journal, Underblong. With Gudetama the lazy egg, he edits the lickety~split. He lives in Waltham, MA with his partner, Jeff Gilbert and their pug, Mr. Rupert Giles.

**Correction... it was not Courtney's Aunt, but a friend of the family. :)

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Courtney and Chris sit down with Dare Williams for a conversation about passions, process, pitfalls, and poetry! 

Dare Williams: A 2019 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, Dare Williams is a Queer HIV-positive poet, artist, rooted in Southern California. He has received fellowships from John Ashbury Home School and The Frost Place. He is a co-producer of the reading series Word of Mouth which raises money for communities facing food and nutrition inequities and was the co-curator of the WeHo Reads Literature Festival 2021. Dare’s poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best American Poets 2021. His work has been anthologized in Redshift 5 by Arroyo Secco Press and is featured in THRUSH, The Shore, Exposition Review, Cultural Weekly, Bending Genres, and is forthcoming in Altadena Review and elsewhere. He is at work on his debut poetry collection.