in conversation

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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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.

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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: Brandel France de Bravo & Marcela Sulak

July 22, 2025 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT

A long-time friendship across continents. Both with roots in Washington, D.C. and with a deep attention to the world. Join us for an In Conversation to discuss their new work and relationship with writing.

Marcela says, “What excites me about speaking to Brandel about Locomotion Cathedral is her mindful examination of the role of the I (as eye, as conductor and mediator, as ego, as interlocutor) not only within a poem, but also in the world. This attention makes a great poem! but it also feels like a necessary step in understanding our place in the natural world.”

Brandel adds, “I love talking to her about poetry because she reads voraciously, and as a literature professor has the uncanny ability to read something of mine and recommend ten poets whose work could inform or enrich my own. Like me, she has lived in many countries, speaks several languages, and has translated poetry. Our work shares an international perspective, humor, a willingness to incorporate prose in our poetry (we both have published many lyric essays), and a fascination with fairy tales and nursery rhymes.”

Free

About Brandel France de Bravo

Brandel France de Bravo’s third collection of poems, Locomotive Cathedral, was selected in the Backwaters Press contest, an imprint of the University of Nebraska Press (March 2025). She is the author of two previous poetry books: Provenance, and the chapbook Mother, Loose. Her poems and essays have appeared in Best American Poetry, 32 Poems, Barrow Street, the Cincinnati Review, The Georgia Review, Seneca Review, Southern Humanities Review and elsewhere. She is co-author of the parenting book, Trees Make the Best Mobiles, Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World, and editor of the bilingual anthology, Mexican Poetry Today: 20/20 Voices.

About Marcela Sulak

Marcela Sulak is the author of five poetry collections, most recently, The Fault, the National Jewish Book Awards finalist, City of Sky Papers, and the lyric memoir Mouth Full of Seeds (2020). She’s co-edited the Rose-Metal Press title Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of 8 Hybrid Literary Genres. A translator from the Czech, French, and Hebrew, Sulak’s work has been recognized by PEN and the NEA fellowship. Sulak is managing editor of The Ilanot Review, and she directs the Shaindy Rudoff Graduate Program in Creative Writing at Bar-Ilan University.

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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In Conversation: Jennifer Funk & Megan Pinto

June 17, 2025 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm EDT

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.

Expect them to talk about 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.

Free

About Jennifer

California born but in possession of a New England disposition, Jennifer Funk is always trying to prove her sunniness is not a joke nor her attachment to doing things the hard way a performance. She is a graduate of Bennington College and of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers, and she has received support from the Bread Loaf’s Writers’ Conference as well as The Frost Place. Her work has been spotted in many of those “something something Review,” and her debut collection of poetry, Fantasy of Loving the Fantasy, was published by Bull City Press in June 2023. Jennifer works as a School Adjustment Counselor in Concord, MA, and she lives with her husband in what had been her grandparent’s house.

About Megan

Megan Pinto is the author of Saints of Little Faith, her debut collection, just out from Four Way Books. Her poems can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Poets.org, Ploughshares, The Slowdown podcast and elsewhere. She has won the Anne Halley Prize from the Massachusetts Review and an Amy Award from Poets & Writers, as well as scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, the Port Townsend Writers’ Conference and Storyknife. Megan lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA in poetry from Warren Wilson College.

In Conversation: Cynthia Marie Hoffman & Sarah Kain Gutowski

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. 

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