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.
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.
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.
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.
We were so happy to host Iain and Nathan on October 21 for a reading and conversation. Iain’s newest book, All the Possible Bodies, was published this fall.
We welcomed Valerie Smith & Monica Lee Weatherly to The Notebooks Collective in August. We were thrilled to have these two poet-educators join us to talk about working in community, sharing cultural histories, and the importance of place.
A long-time friendship across continents. Both with roots in Washington, D.C. and with a deep attention to the world. Watch this In Conversation to learn about their new work and relationship with writing. And a very special crow.
We celebrated the launch of Incidental Pollen, the debut full-length collection from Ellen Austin-Li in June. She was joined by her friend and mentor, poet Pauletta Hansel. Enjoy some poems and some conversation around the making of this beautiful new collection.
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.
When two long-time friends talk poems, writing, and promotion, you know it’s going to be a treat. Sarah and Cynthia first met more than 20 years ago in London, where they were both active in the open mic scene. In this In Conversation event they talk about both creativity and process: the structures of their respective collections as book-length “projects,” how their own journeys with OCD/anxiety have impacted their work; form and the relationship of form to writing in other genres (specifically how their recent collections opened the door for prose), and the benefits of joining forces this past year on book tour and book promotions.
What a joyful event! Dzvinia & María Luisa read poems and talked about multilingualism, translation, and poetry as church. While their relationship started as one of mentor and student, they now call one another cherished friends with a shared passion for exploring how primary languages shape identity and existence.
On January 28, 2025, poets Carolyn Oliver and Hannah Larrabee read from their respective collections and discussed both creativity and craft. Throughout the event, the two poets shared a reverence for science and deep wonder for–and curiosity in–the world (both seen and unseen).
The Notebooks Collective invites you to an evening of poetry and remembrance hosted by Eric Doise, husband of late poet Saara Myrene Raappana. Eric will be joined by Lauren K. Carlson and Halley Cotton, all of whom will read from Saara’s collected work, Chamber After Chamber, which was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry. Saara was also the author of the chapbooks A Story of America Goes Walking (Shechem Press) and Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press).
A gifted poet and teacher, Saara left a legacy of not only powerful and award-winning poetry, but also as an educator, mental health pioneer and animal lover. Her great warmth, intelligence and kindness was evident to all who knew her and will be celebrated in this one-of-a-kind reading.
This event is free and all are welcome; we also invite you purchase her book. Please use the code CHAMBER at checkout to receive a 30% discount. A donor has offered to contribute $10 for every book purchased at a reading to her scholarship fund. If you already have her book, we also invite you to make a gift in her honor by donating to her scholarship fund.
This event is virtual. RSVP to receive the Zoom link.
Free
About the Readers
Lauren K. Carlson is the author of the chapbook Animals I Have Killed (Comstock Review Chapbook Prize 2018). Her work has recently appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salamander Magazine, Terrain, The Windhover and Waxwing. In 2021 she won the Levis Stipend from Friends of Writers for her full-length collection Steelhead (forthcoming 2025). Lauren currently serves as editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal and holds an MFA in poetry from the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Halley Cotton is the managing editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review, contributing editor for NELLE, and production manager for both publications. Her work has appeared in places such as The Greensboro Review, Poetry South, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Cotton teaches in the English department at UAB. When she’s not busy kayaking or finding four-leaf clovers, she’s studying folklore and writing/reading poetry.
Eric Doise is an associate professor of English at Southwest Minnesota State University. His work has appeared in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma and journals including South Central Review, Extrapolation, and Film Criticism.
About Saara
Born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Saara Myrene Raappana served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in southern China before moving to Southwest Minnesota. Her newest book, Chamber After Chamber, won the 2023 Juniper Prize and was nominated for the National Book Award. She also wrote the chapbooks A Story of America Goes Walking (in collaboration with artist Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton, Shechem Press, 2016) and Milk Tooth, Levee, Fever (Dancing Girl Press, 2015). Her poem “Letter To My Teenaged Self: You Are a House, You Are a Hammer, You’re the Momentum of the Nail” was selected as a Best of the Net Winner by Kazim Ali. She received grants and scholarships from the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Southwest Minnesota Arts Council, and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.
We welcomed poets Leah Umansky & Melissa Fite Johnson to The Notebooks Collective to celebrate their new books on May 14, 2024. They talked about their love of pop culture, forms, how they cultivate their writing practice, and more.
“What does it mean to live in a country at war with itself–historically, spiritually, politically? Where does this sickness originate? In poems both personal and sweeping in scope, Umansky opens the door to all the possible answers, pointing outward but also in, to the twists and turns of our collective psyche.”
“Midlife Abecedarian is a nostalgic collection that takes the reader on a journey through time. It provides a template for a life well-lived, even if you’re only halfway through. Conjuring memories and a sense of satisfaction and comfort, Midlife Abecedarian is a map to things remembered and things best left forgotten.”
On April 16, 2024, the Notebooks Collective held its first collective reading. We did so in honor of National Poetry Month and to celebrate the collective impact we can have when we work together. This reading allowed us to share the brilliant words of our collective while raising money for direct aid to Gaza. With the help of guests and readers, we raised $600 dollars to donate across three fundraisers. As the situation worsens, new ways to help are being added to the Operation Olive Branch spreadsheet. Please consider giving time or money to this urgent need.
Featuring!
The reading features the work of Quintin Collins, Sara Moore Wagner, Lisa Allen, Claire Schwartz, Sarah Ghazal Ali, Kathi Aguero, Jessica Johnson, Suzanne Frank, Anne-Marie Oomen, Meg Kearney, jason b crawford, M. Soledad Caballero, Marcia Karp, Eileen Cleary, Rebecca Kirk Connors, Karen Rigby & Jessica Cuello.
We were so honored to host Portland, OR writers Jennifer Perrine and Jen Shin in October. After their reading, they delved into healing modalities, grief, writing and the body, and more. Please enjoy the event!
