Becca

Lisa & Melissa’s Conversation

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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Traci and Marianne’s Conversation

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.

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Soledad & Catharina’s Conversation

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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Here’s to 2026!

An exciting line-up of wonderful poets and writers will visit The Notebooks Collective over the course of the year. We are so excited to have these people in conversation as we learn about what drives them to create and how they do it. Plus, we can sit back and enjoy as they read from their work that has brought them to join us.

We couldn’t be more thrilled and we hope you check out the good news here and head over to the events page to register for events!

Good News: 2025 Edition

Above: Dzivinia Orlowsky discusses her new book, Those Absences Now Closest, during our February event.

Here we are at the end of 2025 — we made it! We’re thrilled to provide this round-up of all the awesome things folks have been doing out in the world.

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Allison Adair has been selected as Brookline, Massachusett’s poet laureate.

Ellen Austin-Li’s heroic crown of sonnets, The Fourth Column, has been accepted for 2027 publication by Milk & Cake Press. Her poem “You’ve Started Wearing Cologne Again” has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize byYearling: A Poetry Journal from Working Writers. Ellen’s in-person monthly reading series in Cincinnati, OH, has changed venues to Urban Artifact and is now titled Poetry at Artifact (formerly Poetry Night at Sitwell’s). She hopes you’ll visit on the first Tuesday of every month at 7 p.m. ET if you’re in Cincy!

Fleda Brown has a new book out, End of the Clockwork Universe, published by Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Eileen Cleary‘s book Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate Review) was a longlist nomination for the Massachusetts Book Award.

Quintin Collins‘s book Lord, Don’t Tell Me the Scale of My Unknowing, was a longlist nomination for the Small Harbor Publishing Laureate Prize.

Jessica Cuello’s first translation, While Percival Fell, is out from Tiger Bark Press in February and is available for preorder.

Meg Kearney‘s new heroic crown of sonnets, Cardiac Thrill, was released by Green Linden Press in September, and her 2020 heroic crown, The Ice Storm, went into its fourth printing this fall.

Michael Kleber-Diggs‘s poem Gloria Mundi was featured on The Slowdown.

Danusha Laméris‘ third book, Blade by Blade was released in 2024 by Copper Canyon Press. Her poem, “Night Bird” received a Pushcart Prize, while “Second Sight” appeared in The Best American Poetry 2025. She also launched Litfield, a writing community that meets four times a month and includes writing together from prompts, an open mic, a conversation with a beloved guest poet and a deep read of their work, as well as small feedback groups. To learn more or get on the wait list, go to www.Litfieldwriters.com. She has also been announced as part of the 2026 roster of curators for The Academy of American Poets‘s runaway hit program Poem a Day! She will curate April’s selections.

Jennifer Martelli’s book, Psychic Party Under the Bottle Tree (Lily Poetry Review) was a longlist nomination for the Massachusetts Book Award.

January Gill O’Neil‘s book Glitter Road (CavanKerry Press) received the Poetry Honor from the Mass Book Awards.

Anne-Marie Oomen and co-author Linda Nemec Foster, have learned that the Lake Huron Mermaid, the second tale-in-poems in the Great Lakes Mermaid series, is a finalist for Book of the Year in Poetry, selected by the Chicago Writers Association.  

Ali Kinsella and Dzivinia Orlowsky were finalists for the 2025 PEN America Award for Translation in Poetry and long-listed for the 2025 ALTA National Translation Award for their co-translation from the Ukrainian of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press). Dzivinia has three new poems “Giving it Away” “Moths Eat My Giorgio Armani Dress” and “Ode to Hairy Legs and Hot Pants”  in Plume Poetry Issue #170, October 2025.

Jennifer Perrine‘s fifth book, Beautiful Outlaw, was published by Kelsey Street Press this summer after winning their QTBIPOC Book Prize.

Sun Yung Shin was awarded a 2025 McKnight Fellowship for Writers in Creative Prose from The Loft Literary Center and her book, Heart Eater: A Memoir of Immigration, Belonging, and How We Find Ourselves in Language is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in May, 2026.

Mark Turcotte was named as the 6th Illinois Poet Laureate.

The State of Illinois has a new Poet LaureateDownload

Marcela Sulak has started a new podcast! FROM POEM TO BOOK. She has an open call for recent TNC guests with new books to put themselves forward to be considered on the podcast. In the podcast, she talks about how we make books–how to revise, how to structure, how we know we have books. In addition, her translation of a book length elegy, Music of the Wide Lane by Sharron Hass, is out from the University of Texas Press.

Sara Moore Wagner‘s poem “The Vampire Wife” has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

Monica Lee Weatherly‘s second poetry chapbook was released on October 14, 2025 titled, “Summer In Kosciusko: Poems.” Summer In Kosciusko is a poetry collection rooted in the black southern experience, displaying all its joy and sorrow. It’s about looking at life through the eyes of a child and the adults they become. It’s about neighborhoods and family. It’s about history that holds you up and haunts you all at the same time. It’s laughter through tears and beauty through surviving.

Zoë Ryder White‘s new book, The Visible Field, is available for preorder from one of our favorite small presses, River River Books.

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If you have good news to share, please reach out and we will update this post! We love hearing from you.

In Conversation: Nicole Callihan & Zoë Ryder White

On 11/11, longtime poetry collaborators, Zoë Ryder White and Nicole Callihan read from their collaborative works and discussed their process. The two began collaborating in 1999 and have two published chapbooks–A Study in Spring, winner of the Baltic Writing Residency Prize (2015) and Elsewhere, winner of the Sixth Finch Chapbook Prize (2020)–as well as many other works in progress.

Watch the Video

A Tribute to Poet Jennifer Martelli

Like so many in the poetry community, we were devastated to learn of Jenn Martelli’s passing. Not only was Jenn a Notebooks Collective guest (in conversation with Kathleen Aguero), she was a literary citizen we deeply respected and learned from, watching her cheer on and champion others as she wrote luminous, incisive, insightful poems that left us, often, in awe.

Her legacy of an abiding love for poetry–and for poets–is one we’ll long remember and do our best to honor. It’s been a balm of sorts to see journals and poets share her poems these last couple of days. In that spirit, here’s a video of Jenn reading her poem, “The Angels of Hanover Street,” from her conversation with Kathi.

She was a welcoming, spirited, and inclusive force in the poetry community and will be deeply missed.

In Conversation: Jennifer Funk & Megan Pinto Video

Two poets interested in affairs of the heart and the abiding loneliness at the center of the human experience. Two poets who overlapped at Warren Wilson’s MFA program yet who have different styles of writing.

This conversation touches on maintaining a creative practice alongside life’s many competing demands (both in school and after it), what a first book changes and does not change, and the importance of literary/poetry friendships.

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In Conversation: Fleda Brown & Anne-Marie Oomen Video

Emotional openness. An invitation to think together. Fleda Brown and Anne-Marie Oomen aren’t just contemporaries; they’re friends and deep admirers of each other’s work.

Both acclaimed poets and essayists, Fleda and Anne-Marie are also both teachers, Michganders, and friends. They admire one another’s work because they see and listen deeply and make space for each other to explore the written word in various forms. There’s something magical about creatives who are so knowledgeable about each other’s work, and that’s the kind of conversation this was: intimate, warm, curious and generous. Enjoy.

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