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The Poetry Box LIVE (Sept 14 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – September Edition!

Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)

 

Featuring:

 

Enjoy the Video from the Show:

 

About the Featured Poets:

Sheila Sondik, poet and printmaker, explores moments in time and space that the casual observer might overlook. Both artforms are opportunities for her to work with the unexpected. Prints are always mirror images of the drawings on the printing plates and, in writing Golden Shovels, the poet knows the last word of a line before the rest of it is written. Sheila has always enjoyed word puzzles and has been a member of the National Puzzlers’ League since 2000. She lived in Berkeley, CA, with its lively literary scene centered in its world-famous bookstores, for over 30 years after graduating from Harvard. In 2008, she moved to Bellingham, Washington in search of new landscapes and was happy to find a welcoming community of prolific poets. Her first chapbook, Fishing a Familiar Pond: Found Poems from The Yearling, was published by Egress Studio Press in 2013. Her Western and Japanese style poetry appear in many journals and anthologies.

You can learn more about Sheila’s chapbook HERE

 

Kim Peter Kovac began writing poetry in 2012, toward the end of his career in national and international theater for young audiences (TYA), starting work on his first Poetry Barn asynchronous online workshop on the plane home from a festival in Okinawa, just barely beating a typhoon.

He has commissioned and produced 100+ new TYA plays and musicals as Artistic Director of Kennedy Center Theater for Young Audiences, including from Pulitzer Prize and Tony award winning playwrights and composers.

Kim co-founded and co-produced (with Deirdre Kelly Lavrakas) the Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices, an award-winning program that assisted in the development of 111 new plays, musicals, and operas from 97 playwrights and 38 composers, working with 61 U.S. and 12 international theater companies. He spent 12 years on the governing board of ASSITEJ, the international TYA association, with national centers in 80+ countries, and currently works as part of the leadership team and webmaster for Write Local Play Global, the international network for writers of new work for young audiences, with members in 50+ countries.

Kim’s first poetry collection, Border Sounds: Poem & Dispatches from Other Timezones, was published in January 2021. He also has 150+ pieces in print and online in journals from Australia, Bangladesh, England, India, Ireland, Korea, Poland, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, United Arab Emirates, and the USA.  He has a BA in Theatre from Whitman College in Walla Walla, WA, an MFA in Theatre Directing from the University of Texas at Austin and is a Fellow of the College of Fellows of the American Theatre.

You can learn more about Kim’s book HERE

 

Sher A. Schwartz is a published essayist, poet, old time fiddle musician, singer, and retired professor. She was born in Georgia, raised in Virginia, and spent many summers in rural West Virginia with her mother’s family. Her vocal training, beginning at twelve, and later rhythm guitar playing in an old-time string band laid the foundation for the musicality in Schwartz’s poetry. Schwartz has written country and mountain folk songs and composed classical hymns. She lived for many years in a cabin on the beach in Alaska while teaching in the humanities department at the University of Alaska in Ketchikan. Her band Red Hoochie and the Tomcods played at festivals and events around Southeast Alaska.

In 2011, she retired from academic life and moved to Eastern Oregon, where she’s trained and competed with her hunting dogs, and helped restore two hundred acres on an old farm to native grasslands and pollinator plants. Schwartz has continued to perform with the old-timey Sugar Hill Band throughout the Columbia River Gorge though she writes more poetry these days than songs and essays.

You can learn more about Sher’s chapbook HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE (May 11, 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – May Edition!

Saturday, May 11, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)

 

Featuring:

 

Enjoy the Video from the Show:

 

About the Featured Poets:

At the age of nine, Anara Guard was hired to mind a corner news stand, where she read all the tabloid papers. Later, she worked as a small-town librarian, textbook fact-checker, and editor, among other jobs. A Midwesterner at heart, she writes from her home in northern California.

Anara’s poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and, improbably enough, won both a John Crowe Ransom prize and a Jack Kerouac prize. Kansas, Reimagined is her second poetry collection. She and her sister perform poetry and offer writing workshops together as Sibling Revelry. Anara’s novel, Like a Complete Unknown, won Book of the Year Honorable Mention from the Chicago Writers Association, as well as other accolades. It draws upon her memories of that city and the music that provided a soundtrack to the late 1960s.

You can learn more about Anara’s chapbook HERE

 

Laura Esther Sciortino writes poetry, fiction, and lyric essay. Her work has appeared in The Comstock Review, Muse/A Journal, great weather for MEDIA’s Escape Wheel Anthology, Dadakuku, The Flying Dodo, and Unleash Lit. Along with her husband, son, and their three affable cats, Laura lives in Portland, Oregon.

You can learn more about Laura’s chapbook HERE

 

Susan Landgraf received an Academy of American Poet Laureates grant, resulting in A Muckleshoot Poetry Anthology: At the Confluence of the Green and White Rivers, which she curated; Washington State University Press published it in early 2024. Her other books include Crossings (Ravenna Press), The Inspired Poet (Two Sylvias Press), What We Bury Changes the Ground (Tebot Bach), and Other Voices. More than 400 poems have appeared in Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Third Wednesday, and others. Landgraf served as Auburn’s Poet Laureate from 2018-2020. She has given more than 150 workshops in the US and abroad and is the recipient of a Theodore Morrison Scholar Poetry Award for Breadloaf and Artist Trust, Jack Straw, and King County Arts Commission grants. A former journalist, she taught at Highline College for 30 years and at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She loves epiphanies and believes poetry can save you.

You can learn more about Susan’s chapbook HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE (Apr 13, 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – April Edition!

Saturday, April 13, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)

 

Featuring:

 

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

 

 

About the Featured Poets:

Carol Parris Krauss lives in an 83-year-old multi-generational home, that also includes many pets, in Virginia. This Clemson graduate is a high school English teacher. She enjoys employing place and nature as vehicles for her varied themes. She was honored to be recognized as a Best New Poet by UVA. In 2021 her book of poems, Just a Spit Down the Road, was published by Kelsay Books. Some venues where her work has been published include Louisiana Lit, One Art, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Story South, Highland Park Poetry, and Susurrus. Carol was selected for Ghost City Press’ 2023 Micro-Chap Summer Series.

You can learn more about Carol’s chapbook HERE

Stephanie A. Marcellus is a professor of English at Wayne State College. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University and a PhD in Nineteenth-Century British Literature from The University of South Dakota. Her work has appeared in Plainsongs, Three Drops from a Cauldron, Alligator Juniper as well as two other chapbooks, All That I Thought Was Light and What Is Left Behind: Garden Elegies. She lives in Wayne, Nebraska with her husband, two cats, and dog. She enjoys spending time on the family farm, being out in nature, and finding time to read in her hammock.

You can learn more about Stephanie’s chapbook HERE

 

Janet Steward took advantage of retirement to write, learn Spanish, and collect memories with her husband, Larry. She decided she wasn’t destined for a long-term relationship, but fortunately Larry convinced her to try again. Their age difference of sixteen years made being a caregiver a probability, but she was surprised to find deepening intimacy, affection, and personal growth far outweigh the frustrations and loss that come with that role.

You can learn more about Janet’s chapbook HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE (Mar 9, 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – March Edition!

Saturday, March 9, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)

 

Featuring:

 

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

 

About the Featured Poets

Emily-Sue Sloane is an award-winning poet who published her first full-length collection, We Are Beach Glass, in 2022. She has won first-place awards from Calling All Writers, the Long Island Fair, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society, Performance Poets Association and Princess Ronkonkoma Productions. Her poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies, including Amethyst Review, The Avocet, Bards Against Hunger, Boston Literary Magazine, Corona, Evening Street Review, Front Porch Review, Long Island Sounds Anthology, Mobius Magazine, MockingHeart Review, Nassau County Poet Laureate Society Review, Panoplyzine, The Poeming Pigeon, PoetryBay, The RavensPerch and Shot Glass Journal. Sloane holds a B.A. in Anthropology from Vassar College and lives in Huntington Station, NY, with her wife, singer-songwriter Linda Sussman. In addition to writing, she enjoys reading, yoga and exploring her native Long Island’s natural beauty.

You can learn more about Emily-Sue’s chapbook HERE

James K. Zimmerman is an award-winning, neurodivergent writer, frequently a Pushcart Prize nominee. His poetry appears in Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, december, Folio, Lumina, Nimrod, Pleiades, Rattle, and Salt, among many other publications, and is also featured on websites such as The Poetry Foundation, American Life in Poetry, and Vallum. He is also the author of “Little Miracles” (Passager Books) and “Family Cookout” (Comstock Press Books), winner of the Jessie Bryce Niles Prize. He resides at the crepuscular edge between this universe and the one next door, often with one foot in each, and, in his spare time, cultivates roses, orchids, and paradoxical questions.

You can learn more about Jim’s chapbook HERE

 

Sue Fagalde Lick escaped life as a Silicon Valley journalist to write, sing, and wander the beaches and forests of the Oregon coast. Her previous publications include The Widow at the Piano: Poems by a Distracted Catholic, Gravel Road Ahead, and the forthcoming collection Dining Al Fresco with My Dog, along with poems in Cirque, Rattle, The MacGuffin, Sage Soup, Cloudbank, New Letters, The American Journal of Poetry, and other literary journals. In addition to performing both poetry and music as much as possible, Sue is a Catholic music minister, playing piano and guitar for Masses, funerals, potlucks, and other festivities. She travels with a notebook and sheet music in one hand and a guitar in the other and has learned that doesn’t leave much room in the trunk for clothing, strangers ask questions when you walk in with a guitar, and everything is better with music.

You can learn more about Sue’s chapbook HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE (Feb 10, 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – February Edition!

Saturday, February 10, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

[3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)]

 

Featuring our 2023 Poetry Box Chapbook Prize Winners:

  • Richard Jordan (Massachusetts) – author of The Squannacook at Dawn (1st Place)
  • Kirsten Morgan (Colorado) – author of Inside Out (2nd Place)
  • Carol Barrett (Oregon) – author of Reading Wind (3rd Place)

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

 

About the Featured Poets

 

A Ph.D. mathematician by training and data scientist by vocation, Richard Jordan has been an avid reader of poetry for almost as long as he can remember and has been writing poetry for twenty years. His poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Tar River Poetry, Rattle (finalist for the 2022 Rattle Poetry Prize), Little Patuxent Review, Sugar House Review, New York Quarterly, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Rappahannock Review and Valparaiso Poetry Review. When not doing math or reading & writing poetry, he is most likely at a river or lake somewhere casting away. He resides in Littleton, Massachusetts, a short drive from the Squannacook River.

You can learn more about Richard’s winning chapbook HERE

 

Kirsten Morgan has taught poetry to children in an independent school, elders in a lifelong learning program, and clients of The Gathering Place, a day shelter for homeless and impoverished women. She is a longtime member of Denver’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, has published many poems in literary journals and was a finalist for The Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Press. She is the author of Without Skipping a Beat: A Child’s Heart Transplant Journey, editor of One Day, One Night at a Time: Women Write of Poverty, Homelessness and Hope, and co-editor of An Uncertain Age: Poems by Bold Women of a Certain Age. Kirsten hikes, snowshoes, reads incessantly and writes prose and poetry delightedly, in Denver and snuggled into her house deep in the mountains.

You can learn more about Kirsten’s winning chapbook HERE

 

Carol Barrett has taught Poetry and Healing courses for several universities, having earned doctorates in both Clinical Psychology and Creative Writing. She began writing poetry to support widows in counseling. Her book Calling in the Bones won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, following Drawing Lessons from Finishing Line Press. Carol also published creative nonfiction, Pansies, with Sonder Press, the first book in English about the Apostolic Lutheran community for outsiders.

Growing up, Carol played piano and clarinet; poetry became her music after several years as a choreographer and dancer. An NEA Fellow in Poetry, she has published in a wide range of venues, including JAMA, The Women’s Review of Books, Poetry International, Christian Century,  and Poetry Northwest. She also has scholarship in psychology, women’s studies, gerontology, education, and dance and art therapy. She recently began a program at Union Institute & University for students who are ABD, to enable completion of the Ph.D.

You can learn more about Carol’s winning chapbook HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE (Jan 13, 2024)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – January Edition!

Saturday, January 13, 2024 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

[3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)]

 

Featured Poets:

  • Wendy Erd (Alaska) – author of It’s a Crooked Road, but Not Far, to the House of Flowers
  • Steven Croft(Georgia) – author of At Home with the Dreamlike Earth
  • Penelope Scambly Schott(Oregon) – author of gOD: A Respectfully Divergent Testament

 

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

 

About the Featured Poets

 

For twenty years, Wendy Erd traveled between Alaska and Asia supporting indigenous and seldom heard communities to voice their stories through exhibit and film. Now at home in Alaska, mornings begin in front of the wood stove with coffee, a stack of poetry books and her husband as they read poems aloud to begin each day.

Her writing appears as prose on road signs in Alaska’s Copper River watershed and as poems along an estuary trail in Homer, Alaska. She’s received several statewide literary awards. Her work has been published by the Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Quarterly Review, New Rivers Press, Cirque, and anthologized in Out on the Deep Blue: Women, Men and the Ocean They Fish. In collaboration with her dear friend, Lê Phương, their poetry translations were published in The Defiant Muse: Vietnamese Feminist Poems from Antiquity to the Present. She envisioned and coordinated Poems in Place, a project that placed poetry by Alaskan poets on signs in Alaska’s state parks.

You can order Wendy’s new book HERE

 

Steven Croftlives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. He is the author of three previous chapbooks: Coastal Scenes (The Saltmarsh Press, 2002), Moment and Time (The Saltmarsh Press, 2015), and New World Poems (Alien Buddha Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in Willawaw Journal, San Pedro River Review, Chestnut Review, North of Oxford, Anti-Heroin Chic, The New Verse News, Soul-Lit, and other places, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

You can order Steven’s new book HERE

 

Penelope Scambly Schott worships daily by climbing Dufur hill and sitting on her favorite rock. From there she can see two states and five mountains. She is a past recipient of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry.

You can order Penelope’s new chapbook HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE (Nov 11, 2023)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – November Edition!

Saturday, Nov 11, 2023 @ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

3pm (Alaskan) / 5pm (Mountain) / 6pm (Central) / 7pm (Eastern)

 

Featured Poets:

Enjoy a Video from the Show:

About the Featured Poets:

CoverFront-The Hill Around are Dust and LIght

AuthorPhoto-KarenGookin

Karen Gookin grew up in the wheat farming country of North Central Montana. Daughter of a schoolteacher and a wheat farmer, and youngest of three children, she followed her siblings to the University of Montana, where she studied with Richard Hugo, Madeline DeFrees, and Jim Crumley. After graduation Karen taught high school English, then wrote for two newspapers. Later she and her husband Larry, whom she’d met in band at UM, moved to Oregon, then Washington, where they raised their daughters Jen and Amy. Karen received her MA in English and taught at Central Washington University for 30 years—20 of them playing flute and piccolo in the semi-professional Yakima Symphony Orchestra. Several of her poems have appeared in regional publications and online journals. Awards include the 2022 Tom Pier Prize for five themed poems in the Yakima Coffeehouse Poets chapbook. Always Montanans, Karen and Larry return to hike, camp, and stargaze in Glacier National Park every summer. She and her sister still farm their father’s land.

You can order Karen’s new book HERE

front cover of book, Self Dissection, by Amelia Diaz Ettinger. Shows a embroidered skeleton torso with flowers inside, on a black background

Born in Mexico and raised in Puerto Rico, Amelia Díaz Ettinger has written poems that reflect the struggle with identity often found in immigrants. She began writing poetry at age three, dictating poems out loud to the adults in her life who wrote them down for her. Amelia continued writing poems and short stores throughout her life, while working as a high school science and Spanish teacher. She is the author of Learning to Love a Western Sky, Speaking at a Time/Hablando a la Vez, and Fossils on a Red Flag.  Her poems, essays, and short stories have appeared in many journals, reviews, and anthologies. She recently earned an MFA in Creative Writing. Presently, she lives in Eastern Oregon with her partner, two dogs, two cats, and way too many chickens.

You can order Amelia’s new book HERE

CoverFRONT-JumpStraightUp

AuthorPhoto-Jarold Ramsey with mountains in background

Jarold Ramsey grew up on a ranch north of Madras, Oregon, and earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon, and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Washington. For nearly thirty years he taught Shakespeare, Modern Poetry, Creative Writing, and Native American Literature at the University of Rochester in New York State. He and his wife Dorothy, also a teacher, have three children and five grandchildren. After retirement, in 2000 Jerry and Dorothy moved back to the family ranch in Central Oregon, where they assumed the roles of “Groundskeepers Emeriti.”

Ramsey’s books of poems include Love in an Earthquake (1973), Hand-Shadows (1989), and Thinking Like a Canyon: New and Selected Poems (2012). His collection of Northwest Indian traditional stories, Coyote Was Going There (1977) is still in print. Since moving back to Central Oregon, he has written two books on the region’s local history, New Era (2003) and Words Marked by a Place (2016), and he serves as Advisory Editor of the local history journal, THE AGATE. His poetry has won numerous awards, including the Lillian Fairchild Award and the Quarterly Review International Poetry Prize; and in 2017 he was given the C.E.S. Wood Award for Lifetime Achievement as an Oregon Writer.

You can order Jarold’s new book HERE

 

 

The Poetry Box LIVE – UPROOTING (Wed Oct 25)

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The Poetry Box LIVE – Special Edition!

Book Launch  for Uprooting: Leaving the Abuse Cycle

PLUS Open Mic

Wednesday, Oct 25, 2023 @ 7:00 PM (Pacific)

 

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. To help break the silence and give voice to those who are suffering and those who have survived, we are proud to host a reading and open mic to launch Uprooting: Leaving the Abuse Cycle curated/edited by Jade Rosina McCutcheon and Kristin Thomas.

Featured Readers/Artists:

Shannon Rose Riley • Sherri Levine • Candice Campo • Rachel Mae (Rmae) • Dale Champlin • Marilyn Johnston • Susan Woods Morse • Summer Harlan • Diana Blackstone-Helt • Jade Rosina McCutcheon • Kristin Thomas • Shawn Aveningo Sanders

Open Mic:

Here at The Poetry Box, we are strong believers that when we share our truth and our stories, we can help each other heal. Therefore, directly following the featured readers portion of the show, we will have an open mic for those who would like to share a poem. Poems shared should be related to the topic of domestic or sexual abuse/trauma.  This is a safe space for any woman who’d like to share her experience and break the silence in the spirit of helping other women find a sisterhood and support for recovery.

Host/Emcee:

Shawn Aveningo Sanders, publisher at The Poetry Box®

 

Enjoy the Video from the Launch:

 

 

Uprooting: Leaving the Abuse Cycle

More details about the book (and ordering) HERE:

Uprooting: Leaving the Abuse Cycle is a full-color anthology of poems, visual art, and stories from survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. The book is framed around Portia Nelson’s famous poem “Autobiography in Five Chapters” (from the memoir There’s a Hole in My Sidewalk) and offers helpful information and resources for women looking to leave and recover from a cycle of abuse.

Jade Rosina McCutcheon and Kristin Thomas are the curating editors of Uprooting: Leaving the Abuse Cycle. They are passionate about volunteering their time to help women escape dangerous environments and get the help needed to recover from the trauma of abuse. As writers and artists themselves, they know how the act of creation and sharing can be a powerful force for healing, and therefore reached out to their communities to invite poets, writers, and artists to share their work as it relates to this important topic.

McCutcheon and Thomas have also done extensive research to include helpful information for leaving the cycle of abuse including how to build healthier relationships, recognize the dynamics of power & control and gaslighting, the effects of trauma on the brain and behavior, healthy exercises for healing, navigating the legal system, uplifting encouragement, and a vast list of resources for finding additional support.