March 10, 2024
INTERVIEW WITH VIVA LAS VEGAS [First, a note: this interview goes back a bit, and disappeared from the site during a rebuild in 2015. I owe a debt of gratitude to Archive.org for helping dredge it up. As of March 2024, Liv (aka Viva) is running for the mayor of Portland, Oregon. I'm...
September 04, 2015
David Biespiel is widely recognized as one of the leading poets of his generation, a liberal commentator on national politics, and an expert in teaching writing. He currently divides his teaching among three universities: in the fall as the Visiting Poet at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in...
September 04, 2015
Shaindel Beers’ poetry feels like the Midwest itself--open, rolling, as if a dust storm could blow through any moment. Her first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time, captures the sadness and longing of a never-ending landscape in rich language that evokes loss, flight, grace and humility. We spoke a...
September 04, 2015
Paulann Petersen’s work is deeply rooted in music and presence. Even her musings and reflections remain wrapped in the moment, which guides the reader through the navigable terrain of each poem. As the poet Vern Rutsala notes in the introduction to Kindle, Petersen’s latest collection: “There are forces in our...
September 04, 2015
When Brian Turner and I spoke a little while ago, he was preparing for a series of poetry workshops as well as revising his upcoming collection, Phantom Noise (also by Alice James Books). The poems in his first collection (Here, Bullet, © 2005, Alice James Books) reflect in lucid detail...