Of Poetry Podcast

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).
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Read: "Inheritance" and "Homecoming, Rich Square, NC" (Fourway Review)

Purchase: Composition (Button Poetry, 2023)

Junious 'Jay' Ward is a poet and teaching artist from Charlotte, NC. He is a National Slam champion (2018), an Individual World Poetry Slam champion (2019), author of Sing Me A Lesser Wound (Bull City Press 2020) and Composition (Button Poetry 2023). Jay currently serves as Charlotte's inaugural Poet Laureate and is a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Ward has attended Breadloaf Writers Conference, Callaloo, The Watering Hole and Tin House Winter Workshop. His work can be found in Columbia Journal, Four Way Review, DIAGRAM, Diode Poetry Journal and elsewhere.

Recommended Reading and Listening:

Year of the Dog by Deborah Paredez (Boa Editions)

Look by Solmaz Sharif (Graywolf Press)

Zong! by M. nourbeSe philip (Graywolf Press)

Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante (Noemi Press)

Whereas by Layli Long Soldier (Graywolf)

Catherine Rockwood's Episode 44: Of Pirates, the Event of the Image, and Angelic Sex

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google and elsewhere

Read: "Unicorn Kidz Dance Under the Moonlight, Too" at SplitLip

jason b. crawford (They/Them) is a writer born in Washington DC, raised in Lansing, MI. Their debut chapbook collection Summertime Fine is out through Variant Lit. Their second chapbook Twerkable Moments is out from Paper Nautilus Press. Their third chapbook, Good Boi, is out from Neon Hemlock press. Their debut Full Length Year of the Unicorn Kidz will be out in 2022 from Sundress Publications. crawford holds a Bachelor of Science in Creative Writing from Eastern Michigan University and is the co-founder of The Knight’s Library Magazine. crawford is the winner of the Courtney Valentine Prize for Outstanding Work by a Millennial Artist, Vella Chapbook Contest, and Variant Lit Chapbook Contest. They were a finalist for the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid 2021 Poetry Contest and the 2021 OutWrite chapbook contest winner in poetry. Their work can be found in Split Lip Magazine, Glass Poetry, Four Way Review, Voicemail poems, FreezeRay Poetry, HAD, among others. They are a current poetry MFA candidate at The New School.

Purchase: Year of the Unicorn Kidz(Sundress Publications, 2022)

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).
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Purchase: Your Mother's Bear Gun (River River Books, 2025)

Read: "You're Hoarding Guns, I'm Growing Herbs" (Kenyon Review)

Corrie Williamson was born on a small farm in southwestern Virginia. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Your Mother’s Bear Gun, which is newly out from River River Books. Her other books are The River Where You Forgot My Name, in the Crab Orchard Series, which was named a 2019 Montana Book Award Honor Book by the Montana Library Association; and Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. She is also co-editor, with poets Anne Haven McDonnell and Kamella Cruz, of the in-progress eco-poetry anthology A Literary Field Guide to the Rocky Mountains.

She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, with a BA in Poetry and Anthropology, and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas, where she was a recipient of the Walton Fellowship, and a Director of the Writers in the Schools Program. She has taught writing at the University of Arkansas, Helena College, and Carroll College, and worked as an educator in Yellowstone National Park. She was the recipient of the 2020 PEN Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, spending seven and a half months writing and living off-grid in a remote section of the Rogue River in southwest Oregon. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and many others. You can also find her work in anthologies such as Cascadia Field Guide; Environmental and Nature Writing Volume II: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology; The Ecopoetry Anthology: Volume II; and Bright Bones: An Anthology of Contemporary Montana Writing. She lives in Lewistown, Montana.

Recommended Reading:

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and The Abundance

Elizabeth Bradfield

The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice

Charles Wright

Listen: On Apple, Spotify, Google and elsewhere

Read: "Must Learn Neither," at Poetry Daily

Purchase: An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023)

Lauren Mukamal Camp, New Mexico Poet Laureate, is the author of seven poetry collections, most recently An Eye in Each Square (River River Books, 2023) and Worn Smooth Between Devourings (NYQ Books, 2023). She was awarded a 2023 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Other honors include a Dorset Prize and finalist citations for the Arab American Book Award, the Housatonic Book Award and the Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry. In 2022, she was Astronomer in Residence at Grand Canyon National Park. Lauren is the recipient of fellowships from Denver Botanic Gardens, The Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities and Black Earth Institute. She was a visiting writer at the Mayo Clinic, and artist in residence at Lowell Observatory and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthologies, including Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review, Missouri Review, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day.

Reading/Viewing Recommendations:

Agnes Martin

Vija Celmins

Read: "Psychology for Black Folk" at Jasper Project

Purchase: Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane (Main Street Rag, 2023)

Len Lawson is author of Negro Asylum for the Lunatic Insane (Main Street Rag, 2023), Chime (Get Fresh Books, 2019), and the chapbook Before the Night Wakes You (Finishing Line Press, 2017). He is also co-editor of The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry (Blair Press, 2021) and Hand in Hand: Poets Respond to Race (Muddy Ford Press, 2017). South Carolina Humanities awarded him a 2022 Governor's Award for Fresh Voices in the Humanities. He has received fellowships from Tin House, Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Callaloo Barbados, Vermont Studio Center, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts among others. His poetry appears in African American Review, Callaloo, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, Verse Daily, Poetry Northwest, and has been translated internationally. Len earned a Ph.D. in English Literature and Criticism at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. A South Carolina native, he is currently Assistant Professor of English at Newberry College.

More reading recommended from this episode:

Joshua Bennett's Being Property Once Myself

Nikky Finney's Love Child's Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and ArtifactsHonorée Fannon Jeffers The Age of Phillis