In Conversation: Iain Haley Pollock & Nathan McClain

Iain Haley Pollock is the author of three poetry collections, Spit Back a Boy (2011), Ghost, Like a Place, and the forthcoming All the Possible Bodies (Alice James, September 2025).  He has received several honors for his work including the Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Poetry, the Bim Ramke Prize for Poetry, and a nomination for an NAACP Image Award.  His poems have appeared in many literary outlets, including African American Review, American Academy of Poets Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times Magazine, PoetrySociety.org and The Progressive. Outside of publishing poems, Pollock has performed his work widely, from the Dodge Poetry Festival to libraries and art centers; he curated the Rye Poetry Path, a public poetry installation in Rye, NY; he serves on the editorial board at Slapering Hol Press and on the board of Tiger Bark Press; and he edits the literary journal Inkwell. Pollock directs the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Manhattanville University in Purchase, NY and lives in the Lower Hudson Valley.

Nathan is a poet, editor, and educator living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), and his poems and prose have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, The Critical Flame, and upstreet, among others.  He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review.