The Poetry Box LIVE – November Edition

Nov 14, 2020@ 4:00 PM (Pacific) / 7:00 PM (Eastern)

Enjoy the video from November’s show:

November Featured Poets:
• Doug Stone (Oregon), author of SITTING IN POWELL’S WATCHING BURNSIDE DISSOLVE IN RAIN 
• Tiel Aisha Ansari (Oregon), author of THE DAY OF MY FIRST DRIVING LESSON—1st Place Winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize, 2020
• Rebecca Smolen (Oregon),  author of EXCORIATION and WOMANHOOD & OTHER SCARS 

ABOUT THE POETS 

Doug Stone is a fourth generation Oregonian and lives with his wife amid hop yards and vineyards near the Willamette River in Benton County, Oregon.  In past lives he has worked on a county road crew, been a grocery store clerk, a case worker, and an analyst and a consultant on public policy issues to state governments, AARP, and the Civil Rights Division of the US Department of Justice.

He has won the Oregon Poetry Association’s Poet Choice Award.  His poems have been published in numerous journals and in the anthology, A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford.  He has written two collections of poetry, The Season of Distress and Clarity, and The Moon’s Soul Shimmering on the Water.

Order Doug’s book HERE

Tiel Aisha Ansari is a Sufi warrior poet. She works as a data analyst and professional curmudgeon for the Portland Public School District and is President Emerita of the Oregon Poetry Association. She now hosts the Wider Window Poetry show, promoting the work of poets of color on KBOO Community Radio, (https://www.kboo.fm/program/wider-window-poetry)

Her work has been featured by Fault Lines Poetry, Windfall, KBOO, and an Everyman’s Library anthology, among others. Her collections include Knocking from Inside, High-Voltage Lines, Country Well-Known as an Old Nightmare’s Stable, and Dervish Lions (forthcoming from Fernwood Press). She drinks coffee in the morning and tea at night.

Order Tiel’s book HERE

Rebecca Smolen is a writer based in Portland, Oregon transplanted from New Hampshire in 2014, and is a mom of two adorable little gingers. She grew up on a dead-end road exploring drainage pipes and pond life. She has a strong feminist voice that sometimes gets trapped within society’s confines, but vows to teach her son and daughter that there are no confines.

Smolen has a degree in creative writing and philosophy and works as veterinary technician. She is trained and certified in the Gateless Method and leads writing workshops employing this method, which was scientifically created to avoid provoking the fight or flight reaction generating a safe place to produce raw, new writing that will spotlight the strongest aspects of that material.

Her first chapbook, Womanhood and Other Scars was published by The Poetry Box in 2018. Her poetry and essays can be found most recently in Allegory Ridge, Feminine Collective, Tiny Seed, The Inflectionist Review, Unchaste Anthologies, Hip Mama, Mutha Magazine, VoiceCatcher: a journal of women’s voices & visions, The Poeming Pigeon: Cosmos, and the anti-fascist anthology, Shout.

Order Rebecca’s book HERE

The Poetry Box LIVE – October Edition

Oct 10, 2020@ 4:00 PM (Pacific) / 7:00 PM (Eastern)

Enjoy the video from October’s show:

October Featured Poets:
• Christopher Bogart, author of BREAKPOINT and THE EATER OF DREAMS (New Jersey)
• Kaja Weeks, author of MOUTH QUILL (Maryland)
• Wendy Colby, reading on behalf of Joan Colby author of THE KINGDOM OF BIRDS (Illinois)

ABOUT THE POETS 

Christopher Bogart is a retired educator and a working poet and writer with an MA in Creative Writing from Monmouth University. His poetry has been published in Voices Rising from the Grove, Spindrift, WestWard Quarterly, Saggio Poetry Journal, The Howl of Sorrow and others. His chapbook 14: Antología del Sonoran, was awarded 3^rd place in The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize in 2018. He is presently working on his first novel, tentatively titled The Beast, about the plight of two Honduran teenage migrants who flee poverty and crime of Central America in search of a better life in the United States of America.

Order Christopher’s books:

The Eater of Dreams | Breakpoint | 14: Antologia del Sonoran

Kaja Weeks is a poet, essayist and classically trained singer whose writing contemplates music and healing as well as identity through multiple generations. She is the American born daughter of World War Two refugees from Estonia. Moved by the pain and beauty of its history, she also loves the alliterative sounds, mythic lore and world views in that ancient Finno-Ugric culture. Many of these motifs, found in thousands of runic verses and long preserved by oral transmission, come alive in Kaja’s creative work. Nick-named a “little songbird” when she was five, she is a clinic-based music educator in Maryland who engages young children with autism to their earliest communications with playful singing. Kaja’s writing has appeared in The Sugar House Review; Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, Under the Gum Tree, The Potomac Review, and elsewhere.

Order Kaja’s book HERE

Joan Colby, was a masterful poet and avid bird lover, who suddenly learned she had stage-4 lung cancer and passed away in August 2020. Her daughter Wendy Colby will be reading from Joan’s latest book, The Kingdom of Birds, which was released by The Poetry Box in September.  Joan Colby had published widely in journals such as Poetry, Atlanta Review, South Dakota Review, Spillway and others. Awards include two Illinois Arts Council Literary Awards and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Literature. She has published 22 books including Selected Poems which received the 2013 FutureCycle Book Prize and Ribcage which was awarded the 2015 Kithara Book Prize. Joan was a senior editor of FutureCycle Press and an associate editor of Good Works Review.

Order Joan’s book HERE

Joan’s daughter, Wendy Colby, will be reading from the collection to celebrate her mother’s poetry in The Kindgom of Bird, her last book.

The Poetry Box LIVE – September Edition

Sept 12, 2020@ 4:00 PM (Pacific)

Enjoy the video from September’s show:

September Featured Poets:
• Joanne Godley, author of PICKING SCABS FROM THE BODY HISTORY (Virginia)
• Pamela Anderson-Bartholet, author of JUST THE GIRLS: A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies; A Drift of Honeybees (Ohio)
• Marshall Witten, author of MY MIND’S EYE (Vermont)

ABOUT THE POETS 

Joanne Godley, author of Picking Scabs from the Body History (The Poetry Box, 2020) is a practicing physician, poet and writer whose work is informed by social injustices. She is a native of Detroit residing in Alexandria, Virginia. She is convinced she is a descendant of nomads because traveling is one of her great passions (along with art collecting, salsa dancing and cycling). She spent time working in Africa as a Peace Corps medical officer. Godley’s lyric memoir was a finalist for the Kore Press Memoir contest and the Sunshots Press Prose Contest, and it received honorable mentions in the National Woman’s Book Association Contest. She completed an online novel writing certification program through Stanford University. Her first novel was ranked finalist in Kimbilio’s annual novel writing contest. She is a member of the Women’s Fiction Writing Association, the Author’s Guild and the NWBA.

Order Joanne’s book HERE

Pamela Anderson-Bartholet, author of Just the Girls (The Poetry Box, 2020) is a poet, lover of blues music, traveler, hiker, and yoga practitioner who grew up in Warren, Ohio, in an area once known as The Steel Valley. Much of her writing focuses on the Holocaust, reflecting stories her father recounted from his service as a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne during WWII. Her Holocaust poem “My Brother’s Coat” won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Intro Journals Project Award. Her poetry also has appeared in Whurk, Mason’s Road, Atticus Review, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in English Literature from Kent State University and an MFA from the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA), which awarded her a Bisbee (Arizona) Travel and Study Fellowship. She has been a ghostwriter, grants writer, and fundraiser for public radio. When she is not traveling with her husband to far-flung places to snap pictures of windows, doors, and lightbulbs, you can find her in Northeast Ohio; Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley; or Charlotte, North Carolina.

Order Pamela’s book HERE

Marshall Witten is author of My Mind’s Eye (The Poetry Box, 2020). Having practiced law for more than 50 years, has turned on his retirement to writing poetry. The natural world inspires many of his poems, as do politics, philosophy, travel, human relationships, aging, and death. His poems have appeared in The Mountain Troubadour, published by the Poetry Society of Vermont. One of his poems was awarded honorable mention in the 2016 W.B. Yeats Society of NY international competition. In 2016 he published a chapbook, Meditations on Change. As an elected public servant, Marshall served as Bennington County State’s Attorney, and later in the Vermont House of Representatives chaired the Vermont House Appropriations Committee. He was a founding director and later served as chair of the Vermont Community Foundation. He now lives with his wife, a professional artist who has illustrated his three books. They live at the end of a road in rural Vermont, take long walks with their dog; he shovels snow when necessary, and writes because it’s always necessary.

Order Marshall’s book HERE

Enjoy a video of the show: