Becca

Two poets who have crossed paths in readings and at conferences and have found that they write about something that shows up differently for each of them — maternal estrangement. This conversation covered how our work evolves as we age and how writing such a viscerally personal experience can also be universal.

The Video

About the Guests

Lisa Allen (she/her) is the author of It’s What I’ve Got Left (Lily Poetry Press). Her work can be found in Pinch, December Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, Bear Review and MER, among others. She has received multiple Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations and was a 2022 Best of the Net finalist for her poem “Prolapse: Etymology,” published by South 85 Journal. Lisa holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the Solstice Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program at Lasell University, where she was a Michael Steinberg fellow. With Poet Rebecca Connors, she co-founded and co-directs the online creative space The Notebooks Collective.

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Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of three full-length collections, most recently Midlife Abecedarian (Riot in Your Throat, 2024). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, Whale Road Review, SWWIM, and elsewhere. Melissa, a high school English teacher, is a poetry editor for The Weight, a journal for high school students, and Porcupine Lit, a journal for and by teachers. She and her husband live with their dogs in Lawrence, KS, where she co-hosts the Volta reading series at the Replay Lounge.

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Marianne and Traci have both baked lines full of flavor and memory into their poems and talked about how food and poems can both influence and have symbiotic overlap. From meals that are portals to personal history, to the ingredients both food and poems need to make something memorable, Traci and Marianne discussed when they started connecting the two creative processes—cooking and writing—and how it has shaped their work. They also talked about issues around food insecurity and in what ways art can directly address social issues like food access.

The Menu

The Video

The Prompts

Traci and Marianne provided food-related prompts to inspire you.

Soledad’s newest collection, Flight Plan, and Catharina’s memoir in essays, Unexploded Ordnance, both speak to each other about women’s bodies, about women’s experiences, about war–whether on a nation or a person’s sexuality or a woman’s blood, about love, about family–all curves that cut all the other curves, all experiences that rocket us from one place to another, from ourselves to each other.

The Video

About the Guests

M. Soledad Caballero is a Macondo, CantoMundo, and StoryKnife fellow, winner of Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts’ 2019 Joy Harjo poetry prize and the 2020 SWWIM’s SWWIM-For-the-Fun-of-It contest. She’s been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes. Her poems have appeared in the Missouri Review, the Iron Horse Literary Review, Ninth Letter, and other venues. Her essays have been published in The Hopkins Review, Cagibi, and elsewhere. I Was a Bell (2021) won Red Hen Press’s 2019 Benjamin Saltman poetry prize, was the 2022 International Association of Autoethnography and Narrative Inquiry book of the year, and was a 2022 International Latino Book Award winner. Her second collection, Flight Plan, was published by Red Hen September 2025. She teaches at Allegheny College. She’s an avid tv watcher and a terrible birder.

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Catharina Coenen came to the United States from Germany as a Fulbright Scholar to attend graduate school. She now teaches biology at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania. Her essays have appeared in The Threepenny Review, The American Scholar, The Christian Science Monitor, Best of the Net, and other literary magazines. Catharina is the recipient of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, the Flash Nonfiction Prize awarded by The Forge, the Appalachian Review’s Denny Plattner Creative Nonfiction Prize, a Creative Nonfiction Foundation Science as Story Fellowship, and Residencies at Hedgebrook and at Millay Arts. Her first book, Unexploded Ordnance, is on the longlist for the 2026 PEN/America Jean Stein Award. It explores how the experiences of her mother, grandmother, and aunt during the bombings of World War II in Germany shaped her life and reverberate in the present.

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