Planet Poet - Words in Space

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired March 11th, 2025) featuring Ulster County Poet Laureate, performance artist and President of CAPS (Calling All Poets), Mike Jurkovic.  Mike reads from his latest work and discusses exciting developments at CAPS now entering its 26th year in the Hudson Valley.  Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce appears later in the show for an extended conversation.Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com Visit: https://www.mikejurkovic.com, Visit: https://www.callingallpoets.net.  Visit:  https://www.pamelampearce.com 2025 Ulster County Poet Laureate, Mike Jurkovic's poetry, prose and music reviews have been published globally with little reportable income. Full length collections include Buckshot Reckoning, mooncussers,AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2023, 2022, 2020); haiku collections Monet's Bamboo (CAPS Press, 2025) Blue Fan Whirring, (Nirala Press, 2018). President, Calling All Poets, now in its 26th year in the Hudson Valley. 2016 Pushcart nominee, CD reviews appear online at All About Jazz and lightwoodpress.com  He is the Monday 9am-10:30am host of NuJazzXcursions, WVKR-91.3FM Vassar College.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired February 11th, 2025) featuring poet Tina Barry on her spellbinding new book, I Tell Henrietta.  Kristin Flynn, the artist who created the intense, expressive cover and interior art for I Tell Henrietta also joins us on the show.  Visit:Tina Barry at Tina Barry writer and  Kristin Flynn at https://www.kristinflynn.art   Praise for I Tell Henrietta"Tina Barry's astonishing collection I Tell Henrietta explores thresholds between the dream world and wakefulness and between poetry and prose... " ---- Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy"Tina Barry's startling and eclectic I Tell Henrietta pushes the hybrid aesthetic envelope forward....Suffused with astute observation, memory and crystalline imagery, Barry's collection is a must-read for those who love small works containing multitudes"----  Nathan Leslie, editor of Best Small Fictions, author of Hurry Up and RelaxTina Barry is a textile designer turned poet, short-fiction writer and editor. She is the author of I Tell Henrietta (Aim Higher, Inc., 2024) with art by Kristin Flynn, Beautiful Raft and Mall Flower (Big Table Publishing, 2019 and 2016).Her writing can be found in Rattle, Verse Daily, ONE ART: a journal of poetry, SWWIM, The Indianapolis Review, The Best Small Fictions 2020 (spotlighted story) and 2016, and elsewhere. Tina has five Pushcart Prize nominations and several Best of the Net and Best Microfiction nods. She teaches at The Poetry Barn and Writers.com. Kristin Flynn earned a BFA in fashion design from Parsons School of Design, an AAS degree in Textiles from Rochester Institute of Technology, and studied painting at Marylhurst University in Portland, Oregon. Her paintings and drawings have been exhibited in numerous group and solo shows, including the Cheryl McGinnis Gallery, Stone Ridge Center for the Arts, Jane Street Gallery Studio 89, Brick Gallery, Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bard College. 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired December 17th, 2024) featuring Bruce Weber and Jan Alexander.  Bruce is the producer and Jan is the coordinator of “Whirlwind” The 2025 Hudson Valley New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza.  Bruce and Jan will tell us about this great event and read from their writings. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Whirlwind at The Local “Whirlwind” The 2025 Hudson Valley New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza, will take place Wednesday, January 1st, 2025 from 1:00-7:00 pm at The Local, 16 John Street, Saugerties.  Admission is free.  Wine and beer will be available for purchase. Bruce and Jan and the “Whirlwind” organizers/staff will gratefully accept donations of books, new and used, fiction and nonfiction, hardcover and paperback for the Greene Correctional Facility in Greene County, New York and non-perishable food, beverages, toothbrushes or toothpaste for the Saugerties Food Pantry, which provides food for nearly 250 men, women and children in the area each month. Bruce Weber is a poet and historian of American art. His poetry has been published widely in magazines both in print and online, and he is the author of six books of poetry, including These Poems Are Not Pretty (with Jan McLaughlin), How the Poem Died, The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot, Poetic Justice, The Breakup of My First Marriage, and most recently, There Are Too Many Words in My House (Rogue Scholars Press, 2019). For twenty-five years he organized the Alternative New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza in New York City. Upon settling in Saugerties in the Hudson Valley he moved the event where it will be held next year at The Local in Saugerties with the support of the Saugerties Arts Commission. Currently he and his wife Joanne curate the multidisciplinary series Dialogues for the Ear & Eye on the first Tuesday evening of the month at the 9W Diner in Saugerties. Jan Alexander is the author of the novel Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization (Regal House Publishing, Sept. 2019), a fractured utopian tale that was a Leap Frog Fiction Prize semi-finalist. Her short fiction and reviews have appeared in the Chicago Tribune and literary magazines including Atticus Review, Everyday Fiction, Flash Fiction, Guernica, Silver Birch Press, and 34th Parallel. Her flash fiction stories have received two honorable mentions and a Pushcart Prize nomination. She has written about business and travel for many publications and taught Chinese history at Brooklyn College. She is also the author of Getting to Lamma, a novel, and co-author of Bad Girls of the Silver Screen, a look at Hollywood's portrayal of prostitutes through the ages.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired October 22nd, 2024) featuring award-winning poet Janet Kaplan who will explore the theme of “Chaos and Creativity” in her poetry. Her work has earned praise from poets and critics including Dan Beachy Quick and Adrienne Rich. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Janet Kaplan Ecotones.   Janet Kaplan's full-length poetry books are Ecotones (2022; shortlisted for the Sexton Prize and published by The Black Spring Press Group Ltd., London), Dreamlife of a Philanthropist (2011 Sandeen Prizewinner from the University of Notre Dame Press), The Glazier's Country (2003 Poets Out Loud Prizewinner from Fordham University Press), and The Groundnote (1998, Alice James Books). Her collection & then is forthcoming from PB&J Books. Her honors include grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Bronx Council on the Arts, fellowships and residencies from the VCCA, Yaddo, Ucross, and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, (An Introduction to the Prose Poem, Firewheel Editions, 2007; Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James, Alice James Books, 2012; and Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose by Bright Hill Poets & Writers, 2017). She has served as Poet in Residence at Fordham University and as a member of the undergraduate and graduate creative writing faculty at Hofstra University, where she edited the digital literary magazine AMP. Praise for Ecotones:"The personal. The citational. The chronicle. All the “conquistadorial spillage….” In Ecotones, Janet Kaplan pieces these verging environs. The writing is transitional; contemplative. We are reminded everywhere of how edges touch, how language is code. The poet has flipped the surface of the page to better show us a map of our disconsolate displacements. “Motion is the translation of a body from the place it occupies to another place,” writes Euler; Janet Kaplan: “and I, bit player, confessor-chronicler, / will write it.”  "- Edric Mesmer, author of Fawning and series editor of Among the NeighborsPraise for Dreamlife of a Philanthropist“…The poems here hover above their own titles, this dreamlife of the poem more important than the poem itself, a place in which thinking is not yet thought, intent not yet conclusive, not language even as a form of life, but language in the process of making that life possible.  It isn't a mental life; it's too real for that easy confine.  Let's just call it the necessary life – a life of serious play.”  - Dan Beachy-Quick

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 10th, 2024) featuring poet, writer and historian Bill Birns.  Bill brings his great knowledge of Catskills history and his deep affinity with Ralph Waldo Emerson to the show and reads from his work-in-progress The Cooper Shop.  Bill Birns was honored to be named one of 50 Stewards of the Catskills by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, on the occasion of the Center's 50th birthday. A citizen of Delaware County, for over 50 years, Bill has long been active in the community.  Bill is the author of the recently re-released A Catskill Catalog, available from Purple Mountain Press (nysbooks.com); I Was Corning a Beaver Like You Do: Joe Hewitt, John Burroughs, Mountain Culture (John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge & Mountain Arts Media); and two books of locally-focused verse: The Myth in the Mountain and Fleischmanns in Verse.            A Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Linguistics, Bill taught a couple generations of Catskill Mountain kids at Margaretville Central School and Onteora High School. He lives in Fleischmanns with wife, Gayla, and dog, Murray Wagner.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August 13th, 2024) featuring Bruce McPherson, the founding Director of the award-winning McPherson & Co.- a Literary and Arts Publishing Company, who will present and read from his compelling and award-winning catalog of books.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's intrepid Poet-at-Large, joins us later in the program. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit McPherson & Co  Visit: Pamela Manche Pearce Here's some information about Bruce McPherson and McPherson & Co. In 1974, Bruce McPherson founded McPherson & Company, an independent literary and arts publishing house in Providence, Rhode Island.  He relocated the press three years later to Kingston, N.Y. in the Hudson Valley.  McPherson & Company has been a full-time project since 1984, and has issued roughly 150 editions of more than 100 titles by authors from around the country and around the world. The press specializes in four areas: contemporary fiction (mostly American authors), great “lost” literary works from the Twentieth Century (our Recovered Classics series), non-fiction books dealing with contemporary art, film, aesthetics, and related cultural issues (often presented under the Documentext imprint), and, finally, translations of distinguished works by authors of Italian, Spanish, French, and German fiction and non-fiction.   McPherson & Co. was named ForeWord Reviews' 2010 Independent Publisher of the Year. The press has won numerous other awards including Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Lord Nose Award 2017; NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for Fiction 2010: Lord of Misrule; the Bronze IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Awards) Visionary Fiction Prize 2023: Headless World; the Bronze IPPY Literary Fiction Prize 2017: Renato After Alba; Ohioana Prize Finalist 2016: This Earth You'll Come Back To; And, for the novel Sea of Hooks  - the Gold IPPY Literary Fiction Prize 2015 and the PEN CENTER USA Fiction Award 2014.  Sea of Hooks was also CHAUTAUQUA Prize Finalist 2014 and was listed as one of the top 10 books of the year in New York Magazine and Publishers Weekly).    

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July 30th, 2024) featuring returning guest - the remarkable poet, teacher and editor, Geoffrey Nutter, who'll read from his work and share with us his erudition and passion about the Haiku form.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's intrepid Poet-at-Large is also featured on the show.  Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit: Geoffrey Nutter Wallson Glass Visit: Pamela Manche Pearce Geoffrey Nutter is originally from Sacramento, California, but has lived in New York City for many years. He is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He has taught poetry at several schools, including Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, and the New School; and currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City, where he conducts day-long writing sessions for people from all over the world, and also does private consultations. from Wave Books on Giant Moth Perishes:With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter's sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. Here are poems that teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July 16th, 2024) featuring award-winning poet and President and Executive Director of the Academy of American Poets, Ricardo Maldonado.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large, is also featured on the show. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit: https://poets.org/academy-american-poets and https://poets.org/poet/ricardo-alberto-maldonado.  Visit:  https://www.pamelampearce.com Ricardo Alberto Maldonado was born and raised in Puerto Rico. A graduate of Tufts and Columbia University's School of the Arts, he is the author of The Life Assignment (Four Way Books, 2020), a finalist for the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, one of Remezcla's Best Books by Latina or Latin American Authors, and Silver Medalist for the Juan Felipe Herrera Best Poetry Book Award. He is also the translator of Dinapier DiDonato's Colaterales/ Collateral (National Poetry Series / Akashic Books, 2013) and coeditor of Puerto Rico en mi corazón (Anomalous Press, 2019), a bilingual anthology that raised funds for grassroots recovery efforts in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria. Maldonado is the Academy of American Poets' President and Executive Director. Previously, he served as the co-director of 92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center in New York City. He is the recipient of fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, CantoMundo, Queer|Art|Mentorship, and the T. S. Eliot and Hawthornden foundations. Praise for The Life Assignment Lynn Melnick… Complex and unblinking, with heaps of sorrow and grace, Maldonado has a knack for the impossible, and for making his readers look headlong into it until we all come out the other side more compassionate and honest. Emily Skillings… This bilingual collection asks us to consider how we as readers and citizens reconcile self and state, body and landscape, desire and capital, language and communication . . . Urayoan Noel-The Life Assignment is, in its own startling terms, an ecology of late capitalist grief… This outstanding first book, merciless in its beauty and wit, is a ‘schema for our lapsed world,' a way to make sense of our ‘somber city' and ‘the grief / we happen to be around.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired June 4th, 2024) featuring the founding members of PRP (Poets Read Poetry) who have gathered together to read and discuss the wildly expressive poetry of 19th century poet Francis Saltus Saltus.  Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Visit: Francis Saltus SaltusPamela  Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's own Poet-At-Large,  began PRP in her Garrison, New York living room in 2010 with a simple idea: to have poets gather and discuss the poems of other poets based on a pre-determined theme followed by a shop talk discussion of the members' own writing lives. Poets Jo Pitkin, Andrew Acciaro and Frank Ortega joined Pamela to form the original group which disbanded in 2014, and was revived on Zoom in the summer of 2021, when Sharon Israel was invited to become the fifth member.The members of PRP:Andrew AcciaroLi Po sailed the YangziShelley had his SpeziaBlake his FelphamCyrano the MoonAndrew supineOn the supple banks of the river that flows both ways…Has his poet's panache and Blarney kissed plume…Andrew lives in Peekskill, N.Y. Frank Ortega“As a seeker of wisdom and peace, following those paths in life and art,my work is often about race, poverty and oppression--until we have erased them.What I take in becomes my work, those messages we send to each other, always trying to make this a better world”.   Frank now resides near Boulder, Colorado.  https://artlitlab.org/artists/frank-ortegaPushcart Prize nominee, Pamela Manché Pearce is the author of the poetry chapbook, WIDOWLAND (Green Bottle Press, London) and the co-author of THE CHARLES STREET TRIO: A Novel in Three Voices (Daisy H Productions) both of which are available on Amazon. The Poet-at-Large on WIOX's Planet Poet-Words in Space is on Instagram at #pamelamanchepearceNYC.  Pamela lives in Manhattan.A Hudson Valley native, Jo Pitkin is the author of a chapbook and four full-length poetry collections. She works as a freelance educational writer creating English language arts materials for K through 12 students and is a teaching artist with The Poetry Barn.  Jo lives in Cold Spring N.Y. www.jopitkin.com

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired May 7th, 2024) featuring teacher, editor, poet and writer, Nancy Merritt Bell.  How do you teach young children to write poetry?  Nancy shares her methods and also reads from works she has edited and written specifically for children.  The show also features Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large, who brings us Natasha Trethewey's Bellocq's Ophelia. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com.  Nancy Merritt Bell is the great-great-great- grand-niece of the poet Christopher Smart, and also a writer, book editor and poet.  Nancy grew up in the 60's in Athens, Greece, and Tucson, Arizona and then moved to Toronto, Canada.  Her two beatnik parents didn't allow her to watch TV, so what better to do but read? Everyone had to recite poems by heart on birthdays and special events, and long car rides – which was often as Canada is a big country and all car rides are long. This came in handy when Nancy studied epic poetry at the University of Toronto and did graduate work at New York University. Nancy underwrote her academic career by successfully working in development on a dozen TV series, including the Emmy-winning Anne of Avonlea, The Odyssey and Degrassi, and writing as many plays, such as The Mean Time at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. In 2006, Nancy edited William Loizeaux's prize-winning kids' book WINGS! After moving to Brooklyn, Nancy went on to edit 20 books, including four by her husband, author Michael McKinley, with the most recent one, Diamond Dust, coming out in July. Nancy is currently editing the collected works of the poet Callum Tichenor, and also a collection of children's poetry by Sara Fymme, as well as Sara's chapter book for kids in verse, Invisible Isabel.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX broadcast (aired March 26th, 2024) featuring award-winning poet Sam Truitt.   Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit:  samtruitt.com, samtsong.com, Station Hill Press Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of the ten works in the Vertical Elegies series, among others in print and other media, including most recently TOKYOATOTO and the forthcoming STATE/SHAFT SHAFT/STATE. Among other recognitions, he is the recipient of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. He is also the maker of numerous works in mixed media, including the aforementioned STATE/SHAFT SHAFT/STATE and other series like DICTE and numerous works in Intermedia with musicians and filmmakers. Truitt earned a PhD in English from the University at Albany and a MFA in Creative Arts from Brown University. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts (including, among other projects, the podcast Baffling Combustions and the Station Hill Intermedia Project), he lives in Woodstock, NY, where he is the co-founder of the non-profit Woodstock Center for Awakening, which will host the second Woodstock Community Festival of Awakening in August, and is a volunteer ambulance driver for the Woodstock Rescue Squad.  On TOKYOATOTO“Sam Truitt has added a wonderful new innovative example of one of my favoirte genres – travel poetry. By way of two ‘T squares' (Times and Tiananmen) on the way to Japan, he generously expands the notational into double accordion-fold expanses; one typed and sculptural, one handwritten, drawn notation condensing sound, thought, perception and time.  The reader is invited into the poet's process alternating between quicksilver caught thought to poems lifted to the next level of line-break shape and form…”---- Lee Ann Brown, author of Philtre: Writing in the Dark 1989-2020 “…the intimacy of writing as note-taking feels palpably present.  We intrude on those personal pages, even in facsimile. By contrast, the public-facing presentation of the typeset texts feels bold, exposed, declaratively blunt in its directness..”----Joanne Drucker, author of Diagrammatic Writing

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX broadcast (aired February 13th, 2024) featuring award-winning poets Carey Salerno and Stacy L. Spencer, who are on the show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Alice James Books, an important Press solely dedicated to poetry. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit Alice James Books Carey Salerno is the executive director and publisher of Alice James Books. She is the author of Shelter (2009) and Tributary (2021), and her poems, essays, and articles about her work as a publisher can be found in places like American Poetry Review, NPR, The New York Times. She has poems forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and ONLY POEMS. Salerno serves as the co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing arts at the University of Maine at Farmington. In 2021, she received the Golden Colophon Award for Independent Paradigm Publishing from CLMP for the leadership and contributions of Alice James Books in indie literature. Stacy L. Spencer is a poet, fiction writer, and nonprofit consultant. After attending the Interlochen Arts Academy where she studied with Jack Driscoll, she graduated from Amherst College and received her doctorate from the University of Michigan in American Studies. At Amherst she won the Collin Armstrong Poetry Prize. Her positions in New York City nonprofits, where she focused on fundraising, include Barnard College, The Public Theater, the Apollo Theater, and the Museum of the City of New York. She has also taught arts management at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University. Since 2016 Stacy has served on the board of Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine, Topical Poetry, and Detroit Lit Mag. Stacy is currently writing a novel. 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired December 19th, 2023) featuring award-winning poet and activist MARY GILLILAND, who discusses and reads from her latest poetry collection The Devil's Fools and from her forthcoming collection Ember Days. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's erudite and entertaining Poet-at-Large, also joins us on the show.  Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit: marygilliland.com. Mary Gilliland is the author of two award-winning poetry collections: The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020) and The Devil's Fools (2022). Her latest collection Ember Days is forthcoming from Codhill Press in 2024. Mary's poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. After college she apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills where she studied Buddhism and helped to build a wood- framed public school. Mary retired early from teaching at Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry.  “Mary Gilliland's magisterial new collection, The Devil's Fools, opens in myth and magic, but its vast reach is deeply rooted in her reverence for earth and all earthly creations…. At once eco-sensual and erudite, Gilliland writes a nuanced poetry that richly investigates humanity's contradictory capacities to destroy and to love…. From first to last, I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty of this wondrous collection.” -- Cynthia Hogue “Mary Gilliland brings to her work the rich flavors of the natural world, yet her destination is clearly news of the inner self, its perceptions, its relationships with others.  She is not afraid of delight, neither does she shirk the hard tasks of anger, pain, and deep caring.” —Mary Oliver

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired November 21st, 2023) featuring Maureen Buchanan Jones, poet, writer and Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) Training Director, who discusses and reads from her books blessed are the menial chores and Maud & Addie. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large also joins us on the show. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit Maureen Buchanan Jones. Maureen Buchanan Jones is Training Director and former Executive Director of Amherst Writers & Artists. Maureen has led workshops with diverse writers including people who have experienced domestic violence, high school students, the bereaved, those who are in recovery, veterans, sexual assault survivors, and members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. She leads writing workshops and retreats online and in Massachusetts and California. With a PhD in English Literature and a Phi Beta Kappa, Maureen has taught at, Holyoke Community College, Westfield State College, the University of Massachusetts, The Conway School of Environmental Design, and the Pre-College Writing Program at Smith College. Her poetry has appeared in Woman in Natural Resources, 13th Moon, Peregrine, North Dakota Quarterlyamong others. Her prose has appeared in Every Day Fiction, and Orion. Her poetry book, blessed are the menial chores was published by Amherst Writers & Artists Press. Her novel, Maud & Addie, was published by Regal Publishing House. Visit Maureen Buchanan Jones About blessed are the menial chores:   “…Jones' poems teach us the ways to hold close and how we must learn to let go.  Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.”  --Sue Brannan Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama 2003-2012, her author of Blood Will Bear Your Name won Book of the Year from Alabama State Poetry Society. About Maud & Addie:  "An absorbing tale of two young sisters from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who are swept out to sea and their trials and risk-taking as castaways. [...] With confident pacing that rises and falls like the waves, the book charts the girls' progress as they enter survival mode, growing more resilient and resourceful with each test." —Kirkus Reviews 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired Oct. 10, 2023) featuring poet Pui Ying Wong and her new collection Fanling In October, and co-host poet Lee Slonimsky.  Poet Pui Ying Wong's new collection, Fanling In October has just been published by Barrow Street Press. She's also the author of three other collections: The Feast, An Emigrant's Winter and Yellow Plum Season along with two chapbooks: Sonnet For a New Country and Mementos. She has received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Zone 3 among many others. Born in Hong Kong she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.Lee Slonimsky's latest books are Pythagoras and the Animals in Greece, translated by Stamatis Polenakis and Caterina Marikoupou, Pythagoras in Love in Italy, translated by Enrico Bernard, and Bright Yellow Buzz in the United States.  On November 2, he will lecture at the Keats/Shelley House Museum in Rome on the historical connections among Pythagroras, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and John Keats.  His wife, Carol Goodman, two time winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award, is just out with her latest literary thriller, The Bones of the Story.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 26th, 2023) featuring the wonderful poet, writer and visual artist, Anique Sara Taylor who reads from and talks about her new, award-winning Chapbook Civil Twilight. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large is also on the show, bringing us her unique insights into poetry and poets.  Anique Sara Taylor's chapbook Civil Twilight won the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her full-length poetry book Where Space Bends was published in May 2020 by Finishing Line Press.  Anique's other chapbooks include When Black Opalescent Birds Still Circled the Globe, chosen Finalist by Harbor Review's Inaugural 2023 Jewish Women's Prize; Feathered Strips of Prayer Before Morning, chosen Finalist by Minerva Rising Chapbook Competition 2023 and Cobblestone Mist, Longlisted Finalist for the 2023 Harbor Editions' Marginalia Series. Her Holocaust poem “The Train” was a 2019 Charter Oak Award Finalist for Best Historical Poem. https://aniquesarataylor.comAnique Sara Taylor's award-winning collection is mesmerizing. Thirty poems, thirty words each, shimmer with a refined intensity at once both taut and expansive. Within this tight form, her emotional richness is as lyric as it is restrained. Grief's shadow, loss-yet love of the stubborn, simple glories of existence, emerge as gifts of her inner iconography. These resonate with Taylor's organic allusions to the natural world, her outer landscape. Starfish, eagles, crickets, thunderstorms, a sycamore tree-all conspirators in her survival story. "Half daughter, half swallow," she writes, "if only I could tie down the corners of the air." In Civil Twilight, she has done just that.- Leslie T. Sharpe, Author of The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills …these brief poems filled, line by line, with such rich diction. [Her] formal gestures--30 words, five lines--keep the poems taut, & with stresses, the insistent spondees throughout, emphasize the emotional resonance underlying the book: shy mouth nailed shut / sheets creased white / cockroach shells / quill-shaped mist / bones break naked / beaks crave rain / …so many lovely phrasings, all toward expressing & containing the undercurrent of grief. "Bittersweet," [she] says, yes. - Michael Waters, innerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020) Civil Twilight is a stunningly crafted sequence of small poems that deliver both an architecture and music reminiscent of the stanza. Here, the reader…enters room after room of discovery…These poems, like little vestibules, exist between…moments that illuminate the inner life…between daylight and darkness, past and present, between the living and the dead, between a daughter and the memory of a father. Taylor's poems are keenly attuned to the language of the natural world and to all the mysteries that come with it. - Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  If you missed yesterday's broadcast (September 12th), LISTEN to my WIOX show featuring the founding members of PRP (Poets Read Poetry) who have gathered together to read and discuss the poetry of Carl Sandburg. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's own Poet-At-Large, began PRP in her Garrison, New York living room in 2010 with a simple idea: to have poets   gather and discuss the poems of other poets based on a pre-determined theme followed by a shop talk discussion of the members' own writing lives. Poets Jo Pitkin, Andrew Acciaro and Frank Ortega joined Pamela to form the original group which disbanded in 2014, and was revived on Zoom in the summer of 2021, when I was invited to become the fifth member. Here's a bit about the members of PRP: Andrew Acciaro Li Po sailed the YangziShelley had his SpeziaBlake his FelphamCyrano the MoonAndrew supineOn the supple banks of the river that flows both ways…Has his poet's panache and Blarney kissed plume…Andrew lives in Peekskill, N.Y.Sharon Israel's chapbook Voice Lesson was published in 2017 by Post Traumatic Press. She won Brooklyn College's Leonard B. Hecht Poetry Explication Award, was nominated for “Best of the Net” 2016 and won Four Lines' 2020 winter poetry challenge. Sharon hosts Planet Poet-Words in Space and lives in the Catskills with her husband Robert Cucinotta.  For more information: https://linktr.ee/sharonisraelpoet. Frank Ortega“As a seeker of wisdom and peace, following those paths in life and art,my work is often about race, poverty and oppression--until we have erased them.What I take in becomes my work, those messages we send to each other, always trying to make this a better world”.   Frank now resides near Boulder, Colorado.  https://artlitlab.org/artists/frank-ortega Pamela Manché Pearce Pushcart Prize nominee, Pamela Manché Pearce is the author of the poetry chapbook, WIDOWLAND (Green Bottle Press, London) and the co-author of THE CHARLES STREET TRIO: A Novel in Three Voices (Daisy H Productions) both of which are available on Amazon. The Poet-at-Large on WIOX's Planet Poet-Words in Space is on Instagram at #pamelamanchepearceNYC.  Pamela lives in Manhattan. Jo PitkinA Hudson Valley native, Jo Pitkin is the author of a chapbook and four full-length poetry collections. She works as a freelance educational writer creating English language arts materials for K through 12 students and is a teaching artist with The Poetry Barn.  Jo lives in Cold Spring N.Y. www.jopitkin.com

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired July 18th, 2023) featuringpoet, writer and historian Bill Birns who will discuss and read from his latest book Fleischmanns in Verse and other works.  Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large, writer and visual artist Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the program to bring us her unique poetic insights and the latest in poetry news Bill Birns was honored to be named one of 50 Stewards of the Catskills by the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development, on the occasion of the Center's 50th birthday. A citizen of Delaware County, for over 50 years, Bill has long been active in the community.  Bill is the author of the recently re-released A Catskill Catalog, available from Purple Mountain Press (nysbooks.com); I Was Corning a Beaver Like You Do: Joe Hewitt, John Burroughs, Mountain Culture (John Burroughs Woodchuck Lodge & Mountain Arts Media); and two books of locally-focused verse: The Myth in the Mountain and Fleischmanns in Verse.            A Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Linguistics, Bill taught a couple generations of Catskill Mountain kids at Margaretville Central School and Onteora High School. He lives in Fleischmanns with wife, Gayla, and dog, Murray Wagner.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired May 9th, 2023) featuring longtime guest and erudite occasional co-host, poet and writer Lee Slonimsky who will talk about and read from his latest collection, the beautifully intriguing Pythagoras and the Animals. Lee Slonimsky has published eleven books of poetry (including his latest, Pythagoras and the Animals). In addition, his sonnet sequence Pythagoras in Love has been translated into French, Greek, Polish and, most recently, into Italian.  He manages a hedge fund that advocates for the rights of animals.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired April 11th, 2023) featuring award-winning poet Christopher Brean Murray whose debut collection Black Observatory, published by Milkweed Editions, was selected by Dana Levin as the winner of the 2021-22 Jake Adam York Prize.   Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large, writer and visual artist Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the program to bring us her unique poetic insights and the latest in poetry news Christopher Brean Murray has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and Inprint Houston and he served as online poetry editor of Gulf Coast.  His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Copper Nickel, New Ohio Review, Washington Square Review and other journals. He lives in Houston, Texas. “Its very strangeness, its eccentric lenses on cis masculinity, and its simple, formal elegance called me to Black Observatory.  Reading these poems is like embarking on a Twilight Zone episode where Franz Kafka bumps into Salvador Dali in a hardware store, and dark, absurdist adventures ensue; where ‘Crimes of the Future' involve ‘Quitting a job everyone agrees you should keep' and ‘Kissing a foreigner in a time of war.”  There's sweetness here, too, and deep thought and feeling – this is a singular debut by a singular sensibility:  no one else sounds like Murray.”  -- Dana Levin “In Christopher Brean Murray's Black Observatory, characters set out on adventures in a world not quite like our own.  They enter museums of impossible objects, venture down forest paths to strangely abandoned settlements, or wander along the industrial outskirts of eerie cities.  All at once, the new American painters – all of them? everywhere? – act in unison, as if their simultaneous cooperation had some specific, perhaps insidious intent. Here, everything is off-kilter and mysterious.  Speakers move thorough unnerving landscapes with a mixture of curiosity, ambivalence, and moments of startling insight.  This is a brilliant first book, one I will return to with pleasure.” – Kevin Prufer

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired March 14th, 2023) featuring two remarkable guests:  visionary humanitarian, musician and poet Elissa Montanti and writer, producer and director Michael McKinley, both here to discuss their documentary “Our Lady of Staten Island” which focuses in great part on Elissa's work helping African children with Albinism, victims of mutilation, get needed protheses.  For more information on the documentary and to view the trailer go to:  www.ourladystatenisland.com.  Michael will also discuss his book project Meta War and his recent travels to Iraq and Syria.  Elissa Montanti, visionary founder and executive director of the Staten Island-based Global Medical Relief Fund (GMRF), has brought more than 500 children of 57 countries to the U.S. for treatment, including surgery, limb prosthetics and other medical necessities. Injured children come from countries or regions able to offer only minimal medical care, poorly fitted prostheses, or none at all. Elissa's appearance on “60 Minutes” and her book “I'll Stand By You” One Woman's Mission to Heal the Children of the World” (written with Jennifer Haupt, Penguin Books, 2012) have helped spread the word about this remarkable woman and her work.  The New York Times and The Washington Post, among many print venues, have heralded her extraordinary work.  Elissa was featured in “CNN Heroes,” BBC World News, “Democracy Now” WorldVision Radio, and Voice of America.  People Magazine voted their story “the Saint of Staten Island”, as one of the five best stories of the year.  Elissa received Amnesty International ‘s Modern Day Saints Award and recognition from the Humanitarian Operating center in Kuwait for her bravery and humanitarian work in Iraq and the Shriners Humanitarian Award.  “To Walk Without Fear”, a documentary produced by Miracle Mile Films and sponsored by the UN Correspondence Association and the Prince of Jordan, premiered at the United Nations on November 16, 2006.    Elissa lives in Staten Island with her adopted son Ahmed who was blinded and lost his arm at 7 years old in Iraq while walking into crossfire.   Elissa's passions also include music, poetry and painting. Her poetry has won recognition from the American Poetry Society. Michael McKinley's first novel, The Penalty Killing, was shortlisted for an Arthur Ellis Award as best debut crime novel. His subsequent page-turners include, among others,  international bestseller Facetime and Willie: The Game Changing Story of the NHL's First Black Player, nominated for an NAACP Image Award as best biography and one of the top twenty books of 2021. Michael‘s writing credits include the screenplay for the 1992 feature film Impolite, starring Christopher Plummer; a number of Discovery Channel docu-drama series including Perfect Disasters, Solar Storm and I Shouldn't Be Alive.  He wrote and produced award-winning films for CNN on the Vatican and on biblical archaeology in the Middle East, and The Jesus Strand for History TV. His most recent show is the 2021 three-part documentary series Epstein's Shadow: Ghislaine Maxwell, which he co-created and Executive Produced for Peacock and SKY UK. Michael traveled to Iraq and Syria for projects with US Special Forces operators and Syrian Democratic Forces. Michael, educated at Oxford University, lives in New York City. He is currently directing, writing and producing, with Nancy Bell and Alice Barrett Mitchell, Our Lady of Staten Island.  

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired February 14th, 2023) featuring writer Frances Collato, who will read from and talk about her moving family saga, Shadows on the Pathway (including Sephardic poetic proverbs passed down through centuries).  Planet Poet's Poet-at-Large, writer and visual artist Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the program.   Frances Collato, teacher, reading consultant, educational coordinator, middle school principal and college dean, among her other professional accomplishments, has written a book steeped in Sephardic and Italian culture, a family saga spanning 70 years, telling the story of four immigrant families that settle on Manhattan's Lower East Side in the early 1900's. Their lives become intertwined when American born super athlete Joey Collato meets Lena Levy in 1932.   This is Fran's family story.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired January 17th, 2023) featuring  Eric Baylin, Poet Laureate Emeritus of Sullivan County, New York. You'll hear Eric discussing his tenure as Poet Laureate, reading his poems and talking about his life as a sculptor and teacher.  Planet Poet's Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce, also joins us on the program. Eric Baylin, poet and sculptor, lives in Sullivan County, NY, in the village of North Branch. He served as Sullivan County Poet Laureate for 2021-22, a role sponsored by the Sullivan County Library Association. Eric taught visual art for 52 years, working with all ages from pre-school through college, and recently retired after 37 years at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn.  As Poet Laureate, Eric sought to give poetry a public face in Sullivan County and to encourage the reading and writing of poetry among county residents of all ages.  To fulfill his goals, Eric gave workshops, organized and presented poetry events including the first Sullivan County Youth Poetry Festival, held at Bethel Woods in April 2022 and Sylvan Land: The Spirit of Sullivan in Word and Song, at the Tusten Theatre in Narrowsburg, among other his other numerous duties. In his work as a sculptor Eric uses elements from nature, tree branches and stones gathered from nearby fields and streams to create temporary site-specific installations exhibited at galleries in Sullivan County.  Eric is also a long-time meditator, a practice that fuels and sustains both his poetry and art.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my podcast (broadcast on WIOX radio January 3, 2023) featuring award-winning poet Alison Carb Sussman, who will discuss and read from her new poetry collection, Black Wool Cape.  Planet Poet's Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce, also joins us on the program. In addition to Black Wool Cape, Alison's new poetry collection published by Unsolicited Press, the poet, a 2015 Pushcart Prize nominee, has garnered numerous awards and publications throughout her writing career.  Her chapbook, On the Edge, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2013.  Alison won the Abroad Writers' Conference/Finishing Line Press Authors Poetry Contest and read her winning poems as their guest in Dublin, Ireland in 2015.  Her poem “Dirty” was a finalist in Naugatuck River Review's 11th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest in 2019.  Her poem “Anhedonia” (now “Anhedonic Woman”) was a finalist in the 49th Parallel Award for Poetry in Bellingham Review's 2016 Literary Contests.  Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, Gargoyle, The New York Times, Rattle, Southword and other publications.  She lives and writes in New York City. “Alison Carb Sussman is a truth-teller, whether she is singing in the voice of an Israeli soldier, or in the voice of her younger self facing family cruelty.  Her lines bear righteous anger subtly -- and transport joy in the small details of a life mapped out with immaculate craft…” -- Marilyn Kallet, poet, editor and former Knoxville Poet Laureate.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my podcast featuring author Ellen Greene Stewart, who will read from and discuss her latest non-fiction book, ELEPHANTS – Up Close and Personal, a truly entertaining and affecting exploration of the author's experiences as a volunteer in South Africa's Knysna Elephant Park.  (Also a poem by Dan Chiasson!) Ellen's poignant portraits of individual elephants combined with her comprehensive and deeply considered compilation of often surprising scientific research on elephant physiology, psychology and the importance of elephants to humanity, emphasize the looming tragedy of their possible extinction. In addition to ELEPHANTS – Up Close and Personal, published by Toplight – an imprint of McFarland & Co., Ellen is the author of Kaleidoscope (about the intersection of art therapy and dementia), Magnolia Street Publishing; Superheroes Unmasked (an emotional literacy curriculum for grade school children), Youthlight Publishing; and Mental Health in Rural America, Routledge Publishing, as well as numerous articles in peer-reviewed journals.  Ellen has volunteered at Knysna Elephant Park several times.  She lives and works as an art therapist in rural upstate New York.

NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired October 5th, 2022) featuring award-winning poet Lissa Kiernan, who will read from and discuss her most recent poetry collection, The Whispering Wall.  Planet Poet's Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce, also joins us on the show.  The Whispering Wall, Lissa Kiernan's second full-length poetry collection, won the 2020 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize and was a semi-finalist for Tupelo Press Dorset Prize. Her previous books are Glass Needles & Goose Quills, winner of the Nautilus Gold for lyric prose, and Two Faint Lines in the Violet, finalist for the Julie Suk Award and IndieFab Award. She received her MFA at Stonecoast and holds an MA in Media Arts from The New School. She founded and directs The Poetry Barn, a pollinator habitat for poetry in the Catskills, and AIM Higher, a nonprofit organization dedicated to elevating women artists. She volunteers with Flying Cat Music and, with her husband, Chris Abramides, is an enthusiastic herder of a fluctuating number of felines. lissakiernan.com “Besotted with, weighted with Beauty, The Whispering Wall constructs delicious sonic tangles and brutally candid testimonies. Kiernan's lyric recording of multiple losses—of father, fertility, beloved natural places, sheer breathing spaces destroyed by human encroachment—provides the elegant architecture guiding each poem. Seductions and menacing of drink, of violence, shadow the speaker's journey. Guiding all is the gorgeous dreaminess in Kiernan's voice, pouring into us its alchemies: art itself is the elixir that distracts from, or miraculously surpasses, illusion or myth. A witchy and sardonic wit's at work, too, in these poems, singing with Stevie Smith, and with Plath. What a great gift of solace and heart this book is.”—Judith Vollmer, author of The Sound Boat: New and Selected Poems “Elegiac and alive with all five senses, plus whatever sixth sense allows us to perceive the metaphysical mysteries of life and death, Lissa Kiernan's The Whispering Wall limns the mists of grief and memory and delineates the lucidity of having a body.”—Kathleen Rooney, author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk and Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey   “...Kiernan deftly weaves her own personal narrative into the lives of other artists (including Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini, and Leonora Carrington), historical events, computer systems, mythological figures, and even aerodynamics concepts, so that the collection subtly expands the dimensions of what the self means... “—Christien Gholson, author of All the Beautiful Dead and winner of The Bitter Oleander Press Library Of Poetry Book Award Yours in Radio, Sharon

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 13th, 2022) featuring award-winning poet Cammy Thomas who discusses and reads from her most recent poetry collection, Tremors, published by Four Way Books.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's endlessly interesting and erudite Poet-At-Large, also joins us on the show!  Cammy Thomas' first book of poems, Cathedral of Wish, received the 2006 Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America.  A fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation helped her complete her second book, Inscriptions. Her third book, Tremors, came out in September 2021.  All are published by Four Way Books. Her poems have recently appeared in Image, Poetry Porch, Amsterdam Quarterly, Gravel, and Compose, and in the anthologies, Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books), and Echoes from Walden (edited by David Leff, from Wayfarer Books). Her poem, "French Toast," was featured on Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2021. Two of her poems are the text for Far Past War, a choral work by her sister, composer Augusta Read Thomas, which was performed by the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, March 13, 2022. “Thomas explores how poetry in narrative form can draw from various sources and frames. The tremors in the title have to do with facing the fears that lie beneath the surface. They are also about hoping for a steady hand, taking a deep breath, and summoning the courage to write, despite the quivering scrawl on the page.” —Joyce Wilson - Poetry Porch, 2022 “The poems in Cammy Thomas's wonderful collection, Tremors, individually and collectively form a coherent, insightful, and very moving arc from the wrong beginnings of a childhood marked by privilege and abuse, whose traumatic dependencies were/are only partly tempered by ambivalent love and belated understanding, to a complex, mature and at times visionary grasp of the intricacies and inextricabilities of beauty and loss, desire and separation, without either side of the equation diminishing the power (for good or ill) of the other. The artistry of the poems is part and parcel of the maturity of the poet. This is a book to live with and cherish.”—Alan Shapiro As always, thanks for listening Yours in Radio, Sharon

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired August 16, 2022) featuring Canadian poet Lisa Richter who reads from and discusses her poetry collection Nautilus and Bone, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's endlessly interesting and erudite Poet-At-Large, also joins us on the show!  Lisa Richter is a Canadian poet, writer and educator. She is the author of two books of poetry, Closer to Where We Began (Tightrope Books, 2017), and Nautilus and Bone (Frontenac House, 2020), winner of the National Jewish Book Award for Poetry, the Canadian Jewish Literary Award for Poetry, and the Robert Kroetsch Award for Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and a National Magazine Award, and appeared in numerous publications and anthologies, including The Literary Review of Canada, CV2, The Malahat Review, The New Quarterly, Rogue Agent and Crab Creek Review. She lives and writes in Toronto.  Canadian Jewish Literary Awards: "Nautilus and Bone (Frontenac House) by Lisa Richter is a poetic tour de force. It is a reclamation project of Jewish literary history as well as an act of radical empathy. A reimagining of the unconventional life of the celebrated Yiddish poet, Anna Margolin, this collection has all the ambition, romance, and ferocity of its subject, a moving exploration of how a wild spirit searches for beauty and love. We return to it with pleasure and admiration."  National Jewish Book Award for Poetry: “In Nau­tilus and Bone, Lisa Richter races around the life and work of Yid­dish-lan­guage poet Anna Mar­golin (1887 – 1952) until her “words are wild­ing.” The poet­ry super­sedes the mere bio­graph­i­cal and show­cas­es the tri­umphs of the genre: in forms includ­ing son­net crowns, cen­tos, and homo­phon­ic trans­la­tions, Richter keeps up with Margolin's escapades from Brisk to the Low­er East Side. Poems such as “Flew the Pea­cock Off-Gold­en” com­bine icon­ic themes of Yid­dish poet­ry with Richter's exu­ber­ant syn­tax: “above sleep I became the peacock/my rest­less eye flew away you bow.” Lan­guage flaunts itself across his­to­ry — with epigraphs rang­ing from Lor­ca to Liz­zo, the col­lec­tion memo­ri­al­izes Margolin's lega­cy across time. Richter's exhil­a­rat­ing achieve­ment doesn't mere­ly bring Mar­golin to life — it dares the read­er to live as ful­ly as Margolin.”

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired June 21, 2022) featuring Cheryl Clarke, remarkable poet, activist, educator and co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills.  Planet Poet's intrepid Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the show!  CHERYL CLARKE is a black lesbian feminist poet and the author of five books of poetry, the literary study ‘After Mecca': Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement, and the collection, The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry, 1980-2005. She co-edited with Steven G. Fullwood To Be Left with the Body, a literary publication of the AIDS Project Los Angeles for men of color having sex with men.  SINCE 1979, her writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters, African-American Review, and most recently The Georgia Review and Paideuma: a publication of the National Poetry Foundation; and the iconic anthologies: This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color and  Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. For nine years, she was an editor of Conditions: A Magazine of Writing for Women with an Emphasis on Writing by Lesbians. She is a member of the editorial board of the long-running lesbian journal, Sinister Wisdom.  SHE is a co-organizer of the annual Hobart Festival of Women Writers in Hobart, the Book Village of the Catskills. “In By My Precise Haircut, Cheryl Clarke collects histories that are all, in effect, personal.  Whether the tone is wily or grieving, wise or wise-ass, the reader is drawn closer by the page and into a world that may be Black, Lesbian middle-aged, sister of a deceased Sgt. J.L. Winters, daughter of the Black Elder – but is certainly a threshold for all.” –Kimiko Hahn, author of foreign Bodies, Toxic Flora and Brain Fever

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my May 24th, 2022 WIOX show featuring poet and performance artist Mike Jurkovic.  Mike will read and perform poetry from his latest collection of poetry mooncussers and other works. “From suburban streets to worldwide events, Jurkovic fights back with humor, ranging from dry to hilarious. Everything is political, and Jurkovic doesn't care what you think. He'll keep writing dis-turbing notes and speak his mind. His new collection, mooncussers, provides entertaining lessons for us to emerge from the matrix that keeps our minds imprisoned.” - Patricia Carragon, Curator/Editor in-chief Brownstone Poets, Brooklyn, NY, author of Angel Fire (Alien Buddha Press).  “A poet of intense precision, a collection of little daggers that head straight to the heart of things.”-John Pielmeier, Playwright (Agnes of God), Screenwriter, Novelist (Hook's Tale)  Mike Jurkovic's poetry collections include mooncussers (Luchador Press 2022),  AmericanMental, (Luchador Press 2020) Blue Fan Whirring, (Nirala Press, 2018); and smitten by harpies & shiny banjo catfish (Lion Autumn Press, 2016).  Anthologies include Mightier - Poets for Social Justice and Calling All Poets 20th Anniversary Anthology, (CAPS Press); Reflecting Pool: Poets & the Creative Process (Codhill Press, 2018); Like Light: 25 Years of Poetry & Prose (Bright Hill Press, 2018); WaterWrites: A Hudson River Anthology, (Codhill Press, 2009) among others. A 2016 Pushcart nominee, he is President of Calling All Poets, now in its 23rd year, in the Hudson Valley. Mike's radio show New Jazz Excursions can be heard on WIOX 91.3FM.  He loves Emily most of all.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my April 26th 2022 WIOX show featuring Jerrice J. Baptiste, a poet of exceptional lyricism.  Jerrice will discuss and read from her upcoming poetry collection, Coral in the Diaspora.  Planet Poet's endlessly interesting and erudite Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the show!  Jerrice J. Baptiste is the author of eight books. She's a poet in residence at the Prattsville Art Center in NY. Jerrice was also the recipient of a residency at the Omega Institute for the Women's Leadership program in 2019.  She has been extensively published in journals and magazines such as The Yale Review; Kosmos Journal; The Caribbean Writer; Mantis and many others.  She lives in NY where she joyfully teaches poetry.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my April 12th, 2022 WIOX show featuring returning guests, poet, essayist and novelist Sparrow to discuss his books Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies and The Princeton Diary, and novelist and essayist Violet Snow to discuss her new novel To March or to Marry.  Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in the salutary hamlet of Phoenicia, New York. He has published 10 books, the most recent being Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies (Monkfish Publishing). Sparrow plays tonette in the axiomatic pop group Foamola. Violet Snow wrote regularly for the Woodstock Times for 17 years. She has been published in the New York Times “Disunion” blog, Civil War Times, American Ancestors, Jewish Currents, and many other periodicals. Her fiction and memoir have appeared in Otter Magazine, Pilgrimage, Tinker Street, and the podcast series “The Strange Recital.” An excerpt from her historical novel, To March or to Marry, has been published in the feminist journal Minerva Rising.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my March 15th, 2022 WIOX show featuring returning guest, the unique poet and novelist Lee Slonimsky, who will read from and discuss his latest erudite and poignant poetry collection, Bright Yellow Buzz. This show has a  fascinating range - from Pompeii and the Lisbon Earthquake to Pythagoras, Vermeer, and the DNA commonality of trees and humans. “Lee Slonimsky's poetic achievement in Bright Yellow Buzz is more than technique, more than memory, though master technique and master memory are everywhere in this work: it is nothing less than ‘spirit's truth;'…his landscape is written as though pen touched on bough.”  Dr. Robert Basner LEE SLONIMSKY's sonnet sequence, Pythagoras in Love, has been translated into French and Greek, was published in Polish this summer and will soon be translated into Italian.  His poem “Dragonflies in Love” was included in the new anthology BuzzWords: Poems About Insects, Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series, edited by Kimiko Hahn and Harold Schechter.  Lee's newest American collection, Bright Yellow Buzz, was just published by Spuyten Duyvil Press.  Lee earns a living managing a hedge fund called Ocean Partners LP.”  

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my December 21st, 2021 WIOX show for my conversation with poet Elizabeth J. Coleman and photographerMichael Craig Palmer on their beautiful new book, Experiencing Autumn, and their unusual and imaginative collaboration.   Elizabeth J. Coleman is the editor of HERE: Poems for the Planet (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), with a foreword from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She is the author of two poetry collections, published by Spuyten Duyvil Press (PROOF and THE FIFTH GENERATION), and translated Lee Slonimsky's sonnet collection PYTHAGORE, AMOUREUX into French (Folded Word Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Colorado Review, Rattle, and Bellevue Literary Review, and in a number of anthologies.  Elizabeth's website is www.elizabethjcoleman.com.  Michael Craig Palmer is a photographer who has explored the architectural legacy of the German Jewish exodus from Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, he was unable to continue with architectural projects. Luckily, in September 2020, he was invited to join the Hudson Valley camera excursions hosted by the noted photographer Jade Doskow of Peekskill, New York. Over the three months of autumn 2020, Michael photographed the vibrant and changing fall colors up and down the Hudson. In the snow and cold of January and February, he assembled these pictures into the statement of 

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my February 15th, 2022 WIOX show featuring returning guest, the remarkable poet and teacher Geoffrey Nutter. Geoffrey reads poems from his latest collection, Giant Moth Perishes, and shares his brilliance and exuberance about poetry including his lightheartedly profound wrangling of the comparative mysteries of Wallace Stevens' “Anecdote of the Jar” and Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale.” Planet Poet's endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us on the show with her entertainingly erudite musings on a common obsession among writers: their typewriters! Geoffrey Nutter is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers' Residency. Geoffrey's poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d'été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water's Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my January 18th, 2022 WIOX show featuring Maria Mazziotti Gillan, poet, teacher, artist and visionary founder of the renowned Poetry Center at the Passaic Community College in Patterson, N.J., on her new book, When the Stars Were Still Visible.  Planet Poet's erudite and endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce also joins us with her musings on poetry, art and life. On When the Stars Were Still Visible “… It is as if this book rose out of an alchemist's compound comprised of Calabrian limestone and the cement of the back stoop on 17th Street in Paterson, New Jersey, where Mazziotti Gillan grew up.  By the end of this poignant and resonant book, the poet accepts her double heritage with all is pain and obstacles and with all its beauty and grace.” – Stephen F Austin  State University Press, Nacogdoches, Texas Maria Mazziotti Gillan, American Book Award recipient for All That Lies Between Us (Guernica Editions) and author of twenty-four books, founded the Poetry Center in Paterson, NJ, is editor of the Paterson Literary Review and is Professor Emerita of English and creative writing at Binghamton University- SUNY. Her newest poetry collection is When the Stars Were Still Visible (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2021). Other recent publications include What Blooms in Winter (NYQ 2016) and the poetry and photography collaboration with Mark Hillringhouse, Paterson Light and Shadow (Serving House Books, 2017).

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my November 23rd, 2021 WIOX show for my conversation with poet, music critic and founder of Parnassus Records, Leslie Gerber on his collection of poems Losing Tara, An Alzheimer's Journey, published in 2020 by Post Traumatic Press, in honor of his late wife, writer Tara McCarthy. Leslie and I will also listen to and discuss recordings released under his independent label Parnassus Records. “The spouses and loved ones of patients with dementia experience a devastating emotional burden as they watch them decline.  Leslie Gerber has taken the unusual and compelling step of publishing the poems he wrote in honor of his wife during her tragic course.  This is an eloquent way to memorialize their times together and also her most human qualities, which dementia progressively destroys.” - Dennis J. Selkoe MD, Coates Professor of Neurologic Diseases, Harvard Medical School Leslie Gerber was born in Brooklyn in 1943.  He was graduated from Brooklyn College with a degree in creative writing.  For 39 years he ran a mail-order classical music business, Parnassus Records, while writing thousands of music reviews and articles.  Leslie's most recent CD release is “Black Swans,” recordings of the earliest African American classical performers.  In 1970 he moved to Ulster County and has lived there ever since.  He began writing poetry in 1999. In addition to his latest book, Leslie had published two earlier poetry collections, Lies of the Poet and The Edge of Sleep, both published by Post Traumatic Press.  Leslie has three daughters, two granddaughters and one great granddaughter.  He is a proud member of the Goat Hill Poets, founded by Cheryl A. Rice and himself.  He lives in Woodstock New York with his dog Winnie.  Website: www.lesliegerber.net.   Planet Poet's erudite and endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce will also join the show this month with her musings on poetry, art and life.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my October 26th, 2021 WIOX show with my in-studio guest, poet, essayist, translator and teacher, Philip Pardi who will read from and discuss his prize-winning poetry collection, Meditations on Rising and Falling and talk about his life as writer, activist and teacher.  Philip Pardi is the author of Meditations on Rising and Falling (University of Wisconsin Press), which won the Brittingham Prize and the Writers' League of Texas Award for Poetry. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared widely in journals and anthologies. His most recent project, completed with the support of the NEA, is a volume of selected translations by the Salvadoran poet Claudia Lars. He teaches at Bard College and serves on the Advisory Board of LIDE, a non-profit organization devoted to empowering and educating Haitian girls through the arts.On Meditations on Rising and Falling: “A truly exceptional volume of poems. Wry, wise, and powerful, this work offers highly nuanced sketches and shrewdly observed scenes of profound human reckoning. With a child's awe and an adult's caution—and compassionate care—the speaker in these calm and elegantly philosophical poems wins our trust time and time again. The measured, lyric ease of these poems is matched only by their superb tonal complexity and masterful, celebratory ease.”—David St. John, Brittingham Prize judge

LISTEN to my March 31st, 2021 WIOX show with my guest co-host, the erudite poet and novelist, Lee Slonimsky.  Lee invited poet and eminent physician Robert Charles Basner to read and discuss his evocative and original poetry.  Robert Charles Basner, holds the titles of Professor Emeritus of Medicine, Columbia University, and Special Lecturer in Medicine, Columbia University Irving Medical Center. He is an internationally recognized physician and biomedical researcher, author, editor, editorialist, and educator. A former faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and current faculty member of his alma mater, the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, he is a laureate of an NIH Academic Career Award of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and of the Sidney Zolot Music Award of the City College of New York. He has published poetry in numerous journals including the Columbia Review, Promethean, and Chronogram and is working on a first collection of verse, “Ancient, Autumnal” as well as a sequence of musical settings for voice and viola.  Lee Slonimsky has published nine full-length volumes of poetry.  His third book, Pythagoras in Love, has been translated into French by Elizabeth J. Coleman, Greek by Stamatis Polenakis, and most recently into Polish by Henryk Cierniak.  With his wife, Hammett and Mary Higgins Clark award winning mystery writer Carol Goodman, under the pen name Lee Carroll, Lee has co-written the Black Swan Rising trilogy featuring vampire hedge fund manager and poet Will Hughes.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my September 28th, 2021 WIOX radio conversation with remarkable poet and teacher, Geoffrey Nutter by phone from Manhattan to read from and discuss his latest poetry collection, Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), and share his brilliance and exuberance about poetry and living in this world. Geoffrey Nutter is the author of Giant Moth Perishes (Wave Books, 2021), A Summer Evening (winner of the 2001 Colorado Prize), Water's Leaves & Other Poems (Winner of the 2004 Verse Press Prize), Christopher Sunset (winner of the 2011 Sheila Motton Book Award), The Rose of January (Wave Books, 2013), and Cities at Dawn (Wave Books, 2016). He recently traveled in China, giving lectures, workshops, and readings as a participant in the Sun Yat-sen University Writers' Residency. Geoffrey's poems have been translated into Spanish, French, and Mandarin. Soir d'été, a bilingual edition of his poems translated into French by poets Molly Lou Freeman and Julien Marcland, was recently published in France, and a German translation of his book Water's Leaves & Other Poems will appear in 2021. He has taught poetry at Princeton, Columbia, University of Iowa, NYU, the New School, and 92nd Street Y. He currently teaches Greek and Latin Classics at Queens College. He runs the Wallson Glass Poetry Seminars in New York City. from Wave Books: With exquisite detail and humble sensibilities, Geoffrey Nutter's sixth collection of poetry offers myriad delights in language and the imagination. In cityscapes, nature, books, and color, we find respite in the complexities of the commonplace—from clocks to teardrops to moths. Here are poems that teach us how to live in the world with curious attention. And at the heart of this daydreaming is a spectacular earnestness, firmly embedded in the idea that the landscape of poetry is limitless and wild. Planet Poet's erudite and endlessly interesting Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce will also join the show this month with a fascinating talk on collage in art and in writing.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my August 3rd, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with Robert Milby, poet, teacher and freelance thinker.  Milby was Poet Laureate of Orange County, NY from 2017 to 2019.  He's given over 500 featured readings and hosted 30 poetry series including Calling All Poets in the Hudson Valley. He's been published in over 2 dozen magazines and 25 anthologies, including: Home Planet News, Chronogram, Waymark, and on many websites. His chapbook, Gothic, Orange  (poems inspired by Orange County, NY) was published through the County Historian's office, in October 2018.  Milby was the 2020 winner of the Wild West Poetry Contest sponsored by Flying Monkey Productions in Kingston, NY. His latest collection, Corona d'état:  The Pandemic Poems, 2020 was published by Lion Autumn Music Publishing in 2021.  And, each October, since 2003, Milby and Ulster County, NY Artist, Carl Welden haunt the Hudson Valley as the duo Theremin Ghosts!    Robert Milby lives in Florida, New York in the Hudson Valley.             

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my June 8th, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with poet, editor and publisher Jared Daniel Fagen on his forthcoming poetry collection, The Animal of Existence and two books from his literary press, Black Sun Lit:  I am writing you from afar by Moyna Pam Dik and Apostasy by Katy Mongeau.  Jared Daniel Fagen is the author of The Animal of Existence, which is forthcoming from Black Square Editions in 2022. His prose poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Lana Turner, Asymptote, Prelude, and Caesura, among other places. Currently residing in Arkville, he is the editor of Black Sun Lit, a PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center, and an English instructor at the City College of New York.  More @ jareddanielfagen.com Jared Daniel Fagen on Black Sun Lit  ... We propose a renewed aestheticism that values beauty- not communication or identification – as the end of literature.  Beauty is for us the experience of the limit, an autonomy beyond that of life itself.  We search for it in all forms of extreme expression: whether in minimalism or maximalism, ultramodernism or neotraditionalism, in the experimental or in the archaic, in a desire that exceeds the body or in the longing for boredom.   Beauty is the encounter between the saint and the hedonist, the prostitute and the Buddha: a truth that, like staring into the face of Medusa, petrifies the gaze into a contemplation of nothingness.  We value beauty that can be discerned in the fragmentary and the sacred, the dysfunctional and the erotic, the derelict and the obsessive… 

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my 2017 WIOX Radio conversation with transcendent poet Rosaly DeMaios Roffman on poetry's power to “fix, change and heal things real life cannot.” Rosaly DeMaios Roffman, internationally acclaimed poet and writer, is Professor Emerita at Indiana University of Pennsylvania where she taught creative writing, myth and literature, Japanese and Chinese Literature in Translation and founded the IUP Center for the Study of Myth and Folklore in the 1970's.  In 2002, Roffman established the Rossaly DeMaios Roffman Collection Center for the Study of Myth and Folklore, which grew into the IUP Dessy-Roffman Myth Collaborative, formally dedicated on April 24th, 2021 (https://www.iup.edu/news-item.aspx?id=294439&blogid=6121).   Among her myriad accomplishments, Roffman co-edited the prize-winning LIFE ON THE LINE, and is the author of Going To Bed Whole, TOTTERING PALACES, THE APPROXIMATE MESSAGE and, IN THE FALL OF A SPARROW. Her latest book I WANT TO THANK MY EYES was published by Tebot-Bach in 2012. As the recipient of a distinguished faculty award in the arts, Roffman was guest poet on the BBC program “Writer from Abroad.” Roffman collaborated extensively with other writers, artists and composers and has facilitated Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill Poetry Workshop since 2099.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my May llth, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with the original and exuberant poet Roberta Gould on her latest collection Woven Lightning (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019) and other works.   “The tension between the lyrical and the practical, the soaring and the quotidian give her poetry its arresting and archetypical energy.  A procession of gongs and silences, powerful and affecting.  A poet to the bone.  – Stanley Nelson, winner of the Thomas Wolfe Poetry Award.  “Roberta Gould is a poet who brings all her senses to her work …the focus is beautifully and lovingly on the familiar…poems that are full of spirit and inventiveness.”  --Donald Lev Planet Poet's Poet-At-Large Pamela Manché Pearce will also join the show this month to talk about Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and spirituality in art and poetry.

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my April 13th, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with poet, essayist, novelist and blithe spirit Sparrow on his new book Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies.  Sparrow urges us to “dance your way to health” among other spiritually whimsical (or whimsically spiritual) suggestions for better living. Hear Sparrow's original musical offering “Bungalow Bop” performed by Sparrow (words, flute/guitar) and Robert Burke Warren (music, vocals/guitar). Sparrow lives in a doublewide trailer in the salutary hamlet of Phoenicia, New York. He has published 10 books, the most recent being Small Happiness & Other Epiphanies (Monkfish Publishing). Sparrow plays tonette in the axiomatic pop group Foamola.  Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet's Poet-At-Large, also joins the conversation with a fascinating segment on the art of collage in jazz, art and poetry.

LISTEN  to Planet Poet-Words in Space for my conversation with poet Maxima Kahn on her  intriguing and deeply felt debut poetry collection Fierce Aria (Finishing Line Press, 2020).  “I have learned to walk into the valley of my fears and losses,” writes Maxima Kahn, and the evidence of what she has learned is all over these amazing poems. Fierce Aria is a book with a post-Wallace Stevens mission: to coax the still perfection of ideas out of the abstract realm, so they can take shape in the messy wilderness of reality. Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn's poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit.  Taste them.–Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my 20016 WIOX Radio conversation with renowned, award-winning poet, Arthur Vogelsang.  Vogelsang is the author of seven books of poetry, including Twentieth Century Women and Cities and Towns, which received the Juniper Prize. His work has been included in numerous anthologies such as The Best American Poetry, The Pushchart Prize, The New Breadloaf Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, and American Hybrid. Arthur was coeditor of the Norton anthology The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. He is the recipient of a California Arts Council fellowship and three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry. Arthur's newest book, Orbit was published by University of Pittsburgh Press. "Part vaudevillian, part shaman, Arthur Vogelsang celebrates the tenacious hopes of the hopeless and repeats aloud the snarling prayers of the lost. Voice-driven and maximal, each its own tonal high-wire act, Arthur Vogelsang's poems sear the imagination while either touching or ripping out the reader's heart." - David St. John

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my January, 2021 WIOX Radio conversation with Bruce Weber to discuss his life as a poet, poetry event organizer and art historian, and to delve into his new book There Are Too Many Words In My House recently published by Rogue Scholars Press. Bruce Weber is the author of five previously published books of poetry: “These Poems are Not Pretty” (Miami: Palmetto Press, 1992), “How the Poem Died” (New York: Linear Arts, 1998), “Poetic Justice” (New York: Ikon Press, 2004), “The First Time I Had Sex with T. S. Eliot” (New York: Venom Press, 2004), and “The Break-up of My First Marriage” (Rogue Scholars Press, 2009). Bruce's work has appeared in numerous magazines, as well as in several anthologies, including “Up is Up, But So Is Down: Downtown Writings, 1978- 1992” (New York: New York University, 2006), “Riverine: An Anthology of Hudson Valley Writers” (New Paltz, New York: Codhill Press, 2007), and “The Unbearables Big Book of Sex” (Autonomedia, 2010). He has performed regularly in the Tri-State area, both alone and for many years with his former performance group, Bruce Weber's No Chance Ensemble, which produced the CD, “Let's Dine Like Jack Johnson Tonight” (http://members.aol/com/ncensemble). A former museum curator and director of research and exhibitions for a major gallery in New York, he has organized many exhibitions and authored numerous publications on American art. Currently Bruce is lecturing, writing and curating exhibitions revolving around the historic Woodstock art colony. For twenty-five years, Bruce produced the Alternative New Year's Day Spoken Word / Performance Extravaganza in New York City. Bruce moved with his wife, the artist and writer Joanne Pagano Weber, to Saugerties in 2018. This January 1st marked the second Hudson Valley New Year's Day Spoken Word/Performance Extravaganza . The first was held at the Beverly Lounge in Kingston, N.Y.  and he hopes to return there next January 1st, This year because of the pandemic, Bruce organized Perfect Pitch -a live stream that took place New Year's Day with curators including Teresa Costa, Phillip Levine, Sam Truitt and Mikhail Horowitz, and David Schell a Green Kill Performance Space in Kingston, which featured 36 writers and musicians from the Hudson Valley area, each performing from 6 to 8 minutes, that was broadcast on You Tube:  Perfect Pitch   Yours in Radio, Sharon  Planet Poet – Words in Space:  A WIOX Community Radio Production Planet Poet theme music by Robert Cucinotta 

Planet Poet-Words in Space  – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon.  Hear his views on poetry, teaching, and on the process and challenges of producing last year's Sharon Springs Poetry Festival (the Festival's fourth year) virtually during Covid.  Please note that the Festival was upcoming when this show was initially broadcast in October. A great highlight of the show:  Hear Paul Muldoon read his poem, “The Bannisters” from his 2020 poetry collection Frolic and Detour. Paul Muldoon is the author of 14 major collections of poetry, innumerable smaller collections, works of criticism, opera libretti, books for children, song lyrics, radio and television drama.  His poetry has been translated into twenty languages. The Times Literary Supplement has described Paul Muldoon as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War”.  Roger Rosenblatt, writing in The New York Times Book Review, described Paul Muldoon as “one of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems – word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy.  And angry.  Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” Also featured: Planet Poet's Poet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce and composer Robert Cucinotta' s recent work - “Wagner Night at Brighton Beach.”            Yours in Radio, Sharon  Planet Poet – Words in Space: A WIOX Community Radio Production Planet Poet theme music by Robert Cucinotta 

LISTEN to my 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with poet and award-winning artist Anique Sara Taylor on her splendidly lyric debut poetry collection, Where Space Bends (Finishing Line Press, 2020).

LISTEN to my November 10,, 2020 WIOX Radio conversation with writer and playwright Nina Shengold on her new book out this year from Syracuse University Press, Reservoir Year-A Walker's Book of Days.  Nina Shengold's books include Clearcut (Anchor Books), a Book Sense Notable selection; River of Words: Portraits of Hudson Valley Writers (SUNY Press); and 14 theatre anthologies for Vintage Books and Viking Penguin.  Shengold won a Writers Guild Award for her teleplay Labor of Love and the ABC Playwright Award for Homesteaders.  She teaches creative writing at Vassar College. Shengold has profiled more than 150 writers for Chronogram, Poets & Writers, and Vassar Quarterly. She's a founding member of the theatre company Actors & Writers, author series Word Café, and Hudson Valley Writers Resist. She was born in Brooklyn, grew up in New Jersey, escaped to Alaska, and now lives and works in the foothills of New York's Catskill Mountains.  “Nina Shengold's memoir explores a reservoir of feelings. Accompanied by her elegant, unpretentious prose, the reader comes upon surprises: a bear, an eagle feather, a crimson forest. Filled to the brim with subtle revelations, of sun-washed illuminations but also the poignant history; a drowned town lies below the shimmering surface. Expect to be moved, and then overcome by the tenderness and variety of Shengold's emotional literary palette.” —Laura Shaine Cunningham, author of Sleeping Arrangements and A Place in the Country  Planet Poet'sPoet-At-Large, Pamela Manché Pearce talks about workshopping her poem “Black Iris” and reads the poem in its final, powerful version.