Carl Phillips is the author of 17 books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North (2024) and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. His other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. 

Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). 

He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length collections of poetry and seven chapbooks! In this episode she and I are reading from her latest collection, Unrivered from Sundress Publications, published in 2025. Her recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Salamander, and many other journals. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.

Donna hosts the online poetry reading/interview series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey, which maintains a YouTube archive. 

Grant Clauser's poems have appeared in journals including The American Poetry Review, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Kenyon Review, and Tar River Poetry. He’s published six poetry collections: Temporary Shelters by Cornerstone Press; Muddy Dragon on the Road to Heaven, Reckless Constellations, The Magician’s Handbook; Necessary Myths, and The Trouble with Rivers. 

Grant is featured in Season 1, Episode 3. 

Han VanderHart is a queer writer living in Durham, NC. They are the author of Larks (Ohio University Press, 2025), winner of the 2024 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize, the chapbook Hawk & Moon (Bottlecap Press, 2025), and What Pecan Light (Bull City Press, 2021), and have poetry and essays published in Poetry Daily, Kenyon Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, AGNI, and elsewhere. Han hosts Of Poetry Podcast and co-edits River River Books.

Hannah Levy is a writer, poet, and editor of The Rebis, a print publication celebrating tarot & creativity. //understories// is where she shares personal work. when she’s not reading or writing, she’s hiking in the Northern California redwoods, horseback riding, and playing extensive make-believe games with her daughter. she is a recovering perfectionist and a deeply feeling human. find her elsewhere on the internet: hannaheve.com + instagram.

Hannah is featured in Season 1, Episode 4.

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of ten books of poems, including Civilians (Louisiana State University Press, 2025), and three books of creative nonfiction. She has co-edited two anthologies, The Book of Scented Things and Still Life with Poem. Her craft book, The Wounded Line: A Guide to Writing Poems of Trauma, was published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2025. Jehanne’s fourth book of creative nonfiction, Frivolity: A Defense, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Jehanne’s poems have appeared in POETRY, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Life in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, The Slowdown.

Jerry Wemple is an award-winning poet and prose writer who has published four poetry collections, most recently We Always Wondered What Became of You from Broadstone Books. His collection Artemas and Ark: the Ridge and Valley Poems chronicles the lives of two generations living in a small town in the central Susquehanna Valley. He is co-editor, with Marjorie Maddox, of the recently published anthology Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, and its predecessor, Common Wealth. Both published by Penn State Press. He also co-edited the anthology Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania., released earlier this year by Catamount Press.

Joel Showalter was born in Marion Indiana and spent the first 24 years of his life in that part of the state. He received his bachelor’s degree in English and writing from Indiana Wesleyan University. His work has been published or is forthcoming in The Carolina Quarterly, December, Delmarva Review, Mud Season Review, and The Christian Century. He works as editorial director at a marketing agency in Columbus, Ohio.

Poet, memoirist, and essayist Judith Sornberger earned her B.A. in University Studies at the age of 30 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln while a single mother raising twin sons. Her M.A. and Ph.D. in English are also from Nebraska. Sornberger is the author of four full-length books of poetry, five chapbooks, and a prose memoir. In episode one we talk with Judith about her 2025 book: Sorority of Stillness: A Gallery of Women in Art. 

Judith was our very first featured guest in Season 1, Episode 1. 

Justin Strawser’s debut collection is “Those Who Wait," a collection of 147 poems written between 2005 and 2025. Strawser, an award-winning journalist at the Daily Item in Sunbury, has covered news in Northumberland and Union counties since 2008. He currently covers Union County and specializes in the Hidden History series, an ongoing collection of stories exploring the storied past of the Susquehanna Valley.

Katie Manning is the author of Hereverent (Agape Editions), Tasty Other (Main Street Rag), and six chapbook collections: How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press), 28,065 Nights (River Glass Books), A Door with a Voice (Agape Editions), I Awake in My Womb (Yellow Flag Press), Tea with Ezra (Boneset Books), and The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Wipf & Stock). Her poems have been published in many anthologies and literary journals, including American Journal of Nursing, HAD, The Lascaux Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, Relief, So to Speak, Stirring, SWWIM, and Verse Daily. She has received the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award, The Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and The Thimble Prize, among other honors and nominations. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Whale Road Review.

Mai-Linh K. Hong is a Vietnamese American poet and literary scholar. Her work explores how refugees know, tell about, and creatively reimagine their worlds during and after migration. She has been a Voices of Our Nation Fellow and Tin House Scholar. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, American Association of University Women, and the Institute for Citizens & Scholars.​​ ​Dr. Hong's research on Asian American & refugee literatures can be found in Amerasia Journal, Verge, and other leading journals.

Marjorie Maddox has published 17 collections of poetry, including  most recently, Seeing Things (Wildhouse Publishing February 2024), Hover Here (Broadstone Books, January 2026);  Keystone Poetry: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania (Penn State University Press, 2025), and collaboration, Small Earthly Space with artist Karen Elias (Shanti Arts, 2025)

Micah James Bauman’s poems have been published in South 85 Journal, Whale Road Review, Anti-heroin Chic, and Sage Cigarettes and has poems forthcoming in the Keystone Anthology. His chapbook Mapping the Valley: Hospital Poems (Seven Kitchens Press, 2021) is a collaboration with his father, David J. Bauman.

Mitchell Nobis is a writer and K-12 public school teacher in Metro Detroit where he lives with his family and dog. He facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series for KickstART Farmington, and co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series. He is a past president of the Michigan Council of Teachers of English and former co-director of Red Cedar Writing Project, and he co-authored Real Writing: Modernizing the Old School Essay, a pedagogical text for writing teachers. For more, see mitchnobis.com or find him falling apart on a basketball court.

Monica Prince, Associate Professor of Activist & Performance Writing, serves as Director of Africana Studies at Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania. She is the author of Roadmap: A Choreopoem, How to Exterminate the Black Woman: A Choreopoem, Instructions for Temporary Survival, and Letters from the Other Woman, with another choreopoem, FORCE, forthcoming in Janaury 2026. Her work appears in Twisted Tongue, In Short, Wildness, The Missouri Review, The Texas Review, The Rumpus, MadCap Review, American Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. As one of the foremost choreopoem scholars, Prince writes, teaches, and performs choreopoems across the nation.

Philip F. Clark is the author of The Carnival of Affection (Sibling Rivalry Press, November 2017). His poems have appeared in Assaracus Journal of Gay Poetry, Poetry in Performance, The Good Men Project, The Conversant, HIV Here & Now, and Transition: Poems in the Aftermath, published by Indolent Press. His poetry reviews and interviews appear in Lambda Literary. Philip is an Adjunct Lecturer in English and Poetry at City College, NYC, where he received his MFA in Creative Writing in 2016. 

Saddiq Dzukogi is the author of Your Crib, My Qibla (Nebraska, 2021), winner of the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Julie Suk Award-- and shortlisted for the Nigeria Prize for Literature, and most recently, Bakandamiya: An Elegy (Nebraska, 2025).His poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, Guernica Magazine, Poetry London, Best American Experimental Writing Anthology, and Cincinnati Review. He has received fellowships from the Nebraska Arts Council, Mississippi Arts Commission, and Cave Canem.