The Hive Poetry Collective

Nicelle Davis is a California poet, collaborator, and performance artist. Her poetry collections include The Language of Fractions (Moon Tide Press 2023). The Walled Wife (Red Hen Press, 2016), In the Circus of You (Rose Metal Press, 2015), Becoming Judas (Red Hen Press, 2013), and Circe (Lowbrow Press, 2011).Penguin Noir recently won the Changing Light Novel in Verse Prize from Livingston Press and will be released Summer of 2025. Her poetry film collaborations with Cheryl Gross have been shown across the world. She has taught poetry at Youth for Positive Change, an organization that promotes success for youth in secondary schools, MHA, Volunteers of America in their Homeless Youth Center, Red Hen’s WITS program, and with MEP. She currently teaches Middle School in the High Desert of southern California.Also mentioned in the episode: Plants Painting and Poetry, A Youtube Channel by Nicelle Davis and Anthony M Sannazzaro.

Julie Murphy, Addie Mahmassani, and Dion O'Reilly read poems from En•Trance Journal , a journal dedicated to altered states and the lyric moment. We read and discuss poems by Ellen Bass, Dorianne Laux, Julie Murphy, Deborah Gorlin, Emily Ransdell, Jessica Cuello, and Jim Moore. There are fifteen fabulous poets in the the first issue of Entrancejournel.net. We wish we could have discussed them all at length, but we had less than an hour to plumb the depths of pure being!!! To read the rest of them go here. The first issue of En*Trance Journal also features art by Frank Galuszka and a podcast component, where poets read and discuss their poems.

Recorded in June 2025, during the 6th month of the Trump administration, while American bombs rained down on Iran, Addie and Dion read war poems. They read "We Lived Happily During the War," by Ilya Kaminsky," Convergence," by Joseph Stroud, "The People of the Other Village," by Thomas Lux, "Anywhere you Look," Jane Hirshfield, Samuel Hazo's "Intifada," and Khải Đơn's "Daughter of Many Wars."

Jack Gilbert (1925-2012) sat tangential to The Beats but was singularly distinct from them. As a self-described "serious romantic, “ Gilbert roared onto the scene with his book Views of Jeopardy, earning him a Guggenheim Fellowship and a loyal following. We look at books from The Great Fires as well as earlier work. An outsider poet, In 2013 he was posthumously selected as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

January Gill O’Neil reads and discusses Lucille Clifton's "Won't You Celebrate with Me" and also poems from January's newest book, Glitter Road.January Gill O’Neil is a poet whose work explores the afterlives of history in American landscapes and intimate lives. Her poems trace how place, memory, and moral inheritance shape identity across generations, joining lyric precision with documentary attention and restraint.She is the author of four poetry collections published by CavanKerry Press: Glitter Road (2024), Rewilding (2018), Misery Islands (2014), and Underlife (2009). Glitter Road received the 2024 Poetry by the Sea Best Book Award and the Julia Ward Howe Prize and was a finalist for several honors, including the Massachusetts Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, American Poetry Review, and the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series.A Cave Canem fellow, O’Neil is a professor at Salem State University and teaches graduate poetry writing in the summer program at Middlebury College’s Bread Loaf School of English. She served as executive director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival from 2012 to 2018 and was the 2019–2020 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. She is a former chair of the AWP Board of Directors and its longest-serving current board member. She earned her B.A. at Old Dominion University and her MFA. at New York University.

In this episode of The Hive Poetry Collective, poet Cate Lycurgus opens the show with a reading of “Jacaranda” by Shirley Kaufman, setting the tone for a conversation attuned to beauty, impermanence, and change. Host Julie Murphy then speaks with Cate about her chapbook Seacliff and her new manuscript, Radiance, Despite.Moving poem by poem, they explore erosion and belonging, caregiving and grief, fractured faith, and the intimate question at the heart of her work: what is care but where we put our hands?Cate’s poems are precise, unflinching, and luminous — attentive to the ways love reshapes us, and to how even what has been broken may still shine.

This conversation reeks with the funk of gratitude! Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s new collection of poetry, The New Economy, was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award in Poetry. Other collections include The Last Time I Saw Amelia Earhart, Apocalyptic Swing, and Rocket Fantastic, which is the winner of the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. They serve on the Board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and live in Old East Durham, NC, where joy, compassion, and social justice are at the center of their personal and poetic practice. 

José and Dion read "Entrance" by Rainer Maria Rilke and then from José's new book Haunt Me. José Enrique Medina earned his BA in English from Cornell University. His book Haunt Me won the 2025 Rattle Chapbook Prize. His second book, Man Without a Skirt, was selected by Ellen Bass as the runner-up for the 2025 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in USA Today Hispanic Living Magazine, Best Microfiction 2019, The Los Angeles Review, Redivider, and other publications. He is a VONA fellow and the founder of the Chickens & Poetry Residency for Writers. You can connect with him on Instagram @MedinaWrites or at www.MedinaWrites.com.

After their first time reading together, poet-pals Lynne and Patricia sit down with a seriously sleep-deprived Dion at the Dream Inn in Santa Cruz, California to read and discuss their poems as the sound of waves pulses in the background.Lynne Thompson was the 4th Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. Thompson’s honors include the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award (poetry) and the Stephen Dunn Prize for Poetry as well as fellowships from the City of Los Angeles, Vermont Studio Center, and the Summer Literary Series in Kenya. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Poem-A-Day (Academy of American Poets), New England Review, Colorado Review, Pleiades, Ecotone, and Best American Poetry, to name a few.Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner 2025), winner of the National Book Award for Poetry; Unshuttered; Incendiary Art, winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the 2017 Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the 2018 NAACP Image Award, and finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize; Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets; Blood Dazzler, a National Book Award finalist; and Gotta Go, Gotta Flow, a collaboration with award-winning Chicago photographer Michael Abramson. Her other books include the poetry volumes Teahouse of the Almighty, Close to Death, Big Towns Big Talk, Life According to Motown; the children's book Janna and the Kings and the history Africans in America, a companion book to the award-winning PBS series.  Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, The Baffler,  BOMB, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Tin House and in Best American Poetry and Best American Essays.Smith is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and a former Distinguished Professor for the City University of New York.

Join translator Niloufar Talebi as she talks with Farnaz Fatemi about her new book, Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems of Ahmad Shamlou, iconic Iranian 20th poet, Ahmad Shamlou, an innovator in Persian poetry and socially conscious writer. Extras: A companion YouTube playlist for this episode, which features original Persian recitations by Ahmad Shamlou alongside English translation readings and interviews about Shamlou by Niloufar Talebi. Fiind it here. Bios: One of the most influential cultural figures of Iran in the latter half of the twentieth century, Ahmad Shamlou (1925–2000) authored more than 70 books, including 18 volumes of poetry. Sometimes known by his pen name, Alef Bamdad, Shamlou’s innovations brought on a transition from classical forms to free verse and made him a flag-bearer of the Iranian vanguard, which included the poet Forough Farrokhzad. Shamlou’s synthesis of Eastern and Western poetic traditions and high and low styles democratized the literary mode without simplifying it. Championing the “everyman,” Shamlou’s work reflects his deep engagement with social issues and the human condition.Niloufar Talebi is an author, educator, producer, and multidisciplinary storyteller whose work spans literature, opera, performance, and cultural translation. Her practice is rooted in reinvention—transforming language and lived experience into art that awakens, stirs, and liberates. Niloufar is the editor and translator of Elegies of the Earth: Selected Poems by Ahmad Shamlou (World Poetry, 2025), a sweeping centennial edition of Iran’s iconic twentieth-century poet of liberty, whose work shaped modern Persian poetry. Her memoir Self-Portrait in Bloom (l’Aleph, 2019), praised as “a hybrid wonder” (The Rumpus), combines personal narrative with her award-winning translations of Nobel Prize–nominated Iranian poet Ahmad Shamlou. The book inspired the acclaimed opera Abraham in Flames (2019), which she commissioned, produced, presented, and co-created in collaboration with composer Aleksandra Vrebalov and director Roy Rallo.

We read and discuss "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats and poems from her newest book Burn, published in 2025 by Pitt Press.Barbara Hamby was born in New Orleans and raised in Honolulu. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and The New York Times. She is the author of seven poetry collections including Holoholo (2021), Bird Odyssey (2018), On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems (2014), All-Night Lingo Tango (2009), and Babel (2004). Her second book, The Alphabet of Desire (1999) won the New York University Press Prize for Poetry. Her first book, Delirium (1995), won the Vassar Miller Prize, The Kate Tufts Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award.The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation honored Barbara as a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry. Her short story collection Lester Higata’s 20th Century won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award.Barbara edited an anthology of poems, Seriously Funny (Georgia, 2009), with her husband David Kirby. She teaches at Florida State University where she is a Distinguished University Scholar.

Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders Courtney Le Blanc reads from her latest book, ⁠Her Whole Bright Life and also the poem, ⁠"Where No One Says Eating Disorder⁠" by ⁠Kelly Grace Thomas⁠ from Thomas's collection ⁠Boat Burn ⁠ ⁠ Courtney LeBlanc⁠ is the author of the full-length collections ⁠Her Whole Bright Life; Exquisite Bloody, Beating Heart; and Beautiful & Full of Monsters.⁠ She is the Arlington County Poet Laureate, a Virginia Center for Creative Arts fellow, and the founder and editor-in-chief of Riot in Your Throat, an independent poetry press. She loves nail polish, tattoos, and a soy latte each morning.  Dion plugs the podcast Maintenance Phase, an excellent source of information on fat shaming, bogus diets, and our society's screwed up attitudes toward body size and food.

Roxi Power talks with co-editor Dion O’Reilly about poems in the second volume of En•Trance, an online journal about altered states, in particular, those that arise from entering “the lyric moment” in surreal and visionary poetry.  As always, we laugh, accepting “there is always more dark” as we enter the shadow in strangely humorous poems. In Liz Cambra’s “Survey,” she asks librarians, marmosets, anglerfish, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning whether they welcome “the return of the dark” when “volcanos shut off” in Iceland. Kim Adonnizio takes us on a journey into the chimeric dream images of childhood where “a man might be half-scorpion, a woman half fish” in “Kansas, 4:00am.”  We travel through the ears of a dreamer “like looking down a well-lit hallway into another room” in Sally Ashton’s “Form is the opposite of dream.”  And then we travel even further into earthly and unearthly realms, through the mythical soundscapes of Marc Vincenz’s “The First Gods,” seeing “omens/in the curdled milk/of the fat-tailed sheep.” Join us on our entrancing journey into the strange music ofpoetry where  “There is another world, and it’s this one.”  –Paul Éluard.  Entrancejournal.net

We read from Matthew's newest book and also the poem My Father's Locker by James Ciano.Matthew Nienow’s recently released collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), has been recommended by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post Book Club, Publishers Weekly, and Poetry Northwest. He is also the author of House of Water (Alice James Books, 2016) and three earlier chapbooks. His poems and essays have appeared in Gulf Coast, Lit Hub, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry, and have been recognized with fellowships from the Poetry Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Artist Trust. He lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his wife and sons, where he works as a mental health counselor.

Three “bees” from The Hive Poetry Collective warm your minds with cozy—and existential–conversation about winter poems as we draw closer to the Winter Solstice.  Roxi Power talks with Julia Chiapella and Parker Shabala live in the Santa Cruz KSQD radio station about poetry ranging from Shakespeare’s sonnet to his beloved about aging to Elizabeth Robinson’s new poetry about members of the unhoused community surviving frostbite. We talk about winter’s philosophical soundscapes  in Louise Glück’s “bone dice/of blown gravel clicking” and in the U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze’s “world of being [that] is like this gravel:/ you think you own a car, a house, /this blue zig-zagged shirt, but you just borrow these things.” Tune in and let us borrow an hour of your time to enjoy Kenneth Patchen’s spiritual and erotic snowscapes, laugh about Anne Sexton’s branches that “wear the sock of God,” and contemplate Wallace Stevens’  “mind of winter” that beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

Santa Cruz County Poet Laureate Nancy Miller Gomez founded the Rising Voices Program, providing Santa Cruz County high school students with workshops led by local poets devoted to introducing poetry to teens. Listen in to hear some of the students read their poetry and learn from the teachers participating how poetry is affecting young lives.

Jane and Dion plumb the mysteries when they read and discuss Hirshfield's newest book, The Asking: New and Selected, which recently came out in paper book. Award-winning poet, essayist, and translator Jane Hirshfield is the author of ten collections of poetry, including The Asking: New and Selected Poems (2023); Ledger (2020); The Beauty (2015), longlisted for the National Book Award; Come, Thief (2011), a finalist for the PEN USA Poetry Award; and Given Sugar, Given Salt (2001), a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Hirshfield is also the author of two collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry (1997) and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World (2015), and has edited and co-translated four books collecting the work of world poets from the past: The Ink Dark Moon: Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu, Women of the Ancient Court of Japan (1990); Women in Praise of the Sacred: Forty-Three Centuries of Spiritual Poetry by Women (1994); Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems (2004); and The Heart of Haiku (2011). 

Listen in as Farnaz Fatemi and Maggie Paul preview this year's Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry Reading, taking place Thursday November 20, 2025 at UCSC, featuring Ellen Bass. To register for this week's event go to ⁠thi.ucsc.edu⁠Find out about the history of this reading series and the accompanying annual $1000 poetry prize. Hear poems from Morton Marcus and several of the past featured poets and prize winners. To read Maggie Paul's interviews with several of the featured readers over the last 15 years, check out her website.For an archive of the series, check out ⁠https://www.mortonmarcus.com/history-of-reading-orig⁠

Ruth Mota joins Julia and provisional Hive member Hannah Tool to read and discuss Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill and share selections from her debut chapbook, Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, which is available for pre-order here. You can hear more of Ruth’s poems on December 4th at “The Power of Her Voice,” a poetry benefit for Santa Cruz Community Health, at Temple Beth El in Aptos - tickets available here.Ruth Mota currently lives in the redwoods of Santa Cruz, California after residing a decade in northeast Brazil and working as an international health trainer throughout Latin America and Africa. Now she devotes her time to writing poetry and facilitating poetry circles to groups in her community like veterans, seniors or men in jail. Her poem “The Sloth” is nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Connecticut River Review, and over sixty of her poems have been published in online and print journals. Her first chapbook, entitled Kitchen Table Midwife of the Dispossessed, is available for pre-order now through Finishing Line Press.

Victoria Bañales joins the Hive Live! at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Tuesday Feb 10, 2026 at 7pm. Event information here. Join our non-spamming email list here to keep up with Hive events. Victoria (Vicky) Bañales is the 2025-2027 Watsonville Poet Laureate. A Chicanx educator and writer, she is the author of the poetry collection, The Sun Will Not Harm You by Day, Nor the Moon by Night (Jamii Publishing, 2025), and the founder of Journal X, a social justice literary arts magazine, which was awarded the Superior Distinction by the National Council of Teachers of English. Her writing has been supported by Hedgebrook, Storyknife, Macondo, Vermont Studio Center, and other artist residencies. She holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Feminist Studies from UCSC, and teaches composition and creative writing at Cabrillo College, where she also serves as the Faculty Senate President. More at vickybanales.com.