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).
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.
Fleda says that she can “trust Anne-Marie’s poems and prose to struggle admirably with the same issues I struggle with–how to say it, how it was, including the ambient sounds and textures. There is no posturing in her work.” And Anne-Marie says “Fleda’s poems invite me to think with her, to watch the spirals of thought we all experience–but she finds a way to reveal how they just might be insights to daily life.”
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 promises to be: intimate, warm, curious and generous. We hope you’ll join us.
Fleda Brown’s Doctor of the World (forthcoming this March) won the Finishing Line Press Chapbook Contest for 2024. Her eleventh full-length collection, The End of the Clockwork Universe will be out from Carnegie-Mellon University Press this fall. Previously, Flying Through a Hole in the Storm (2021) won the Hollis Summers Prize from Ohio University Press and was an Indie finalist. Earlier poems can be found in The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, chosen by Ted Kooser for the University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her poems have been used as texts for several prizewinning musical compositions performed at Eastman School of Music, Yale University, and by the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. She has won the New Letters and the Ohio State Univ/The Journal awards for creative nonfiction. Her third collection of memoir-essays, Mortality, with Friends was published by Wayne State University Press (2021) was an MIPA Winner and Midwest Book Award winner in memoir. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she taught for 27 years and directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, where she writes a monthly poetry column for the Record-Eagle newspaper. She is retired from the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.
Anne-Marie Oomen received the Michigan Author Award for Lifetime Achievement, 2023-24. As Long as I Know You: The Mom Book won AWP’s Sue William Silverman Nonfiction Award (University of Georgia Press), Michigan Notable Book Award, and a silver IPPY award. The Long Fields, (Cornerstone Press), is her most recent essay collection. Love, Sex and 4-H, (Next Generation Indie Award for memoir); Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, (Michigan Notable Books)—all focus on rural Michigan culture. She wrote Uncoded Women (poetry) and co-wrote the award-winning The Lake Michigan Mermaid and Lake Huron Mermaid with poet, Linda Nemec Foster. She also edited Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Nonfiction (Michigan Notable Book). She has written seven plays, including award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, winner of the CTAM contest. She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president and current board member of Michigan Writers, and serves as instructor at Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She appears at conferences throughout the country. She and her husband, David Early, have built their handmade home on wild acreage formerly stewarded by the tribes of the Three Fires Confederacy near Empire, Michigan, and beloved Lake Michigan. www.anne-marieoomen.com
Poets Cynthia Marie Hoffman and Sarah Kain Gutowski will read from their collected works, with an emphasis on their newest respective collections, both of which are cohesively themed (Cynthia’s is a memoir in prose poems, Sarah’s is a fabulist narrative in poems).
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’ll 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.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Exploding Head, an OCD memoir in prose poems. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI. www.cynthiamariehoffman.com.
Sarah Kain Gutowski is the author of The Familiar, a fabulist narrative-in-poems about female existential crisis, and Fabulous Beast: Poems. Her poetry has appeared in various print and online journals, including The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited-edition audio project. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her criticism has been published by Colorado Review, Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women, and New York Journal of Books. http://www.sarahkaingutowski.com.
Multi-lingual poets Dzvinia Orlowsky and María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado will read from their respective bodies of work and discuss their poetry and creative processes. 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.
Of Dzvinia, María Luisa says: “I was researching MFA programs with poets as mentors who would take the cultural languages of my experiences seriously, who would understand that some of my poems code-switched in Puerto Rican Spanish or German or Farsi were inspired by real relationships. A narrative poet, I immediately connected with Dzvinia’s online faculty bio and the lyrical pacing of her poems. Imagine my exponential joys in working with Dzvinia as my workshop leader who startled me and my peers with her uncannily spiritual way of responding to the heat in some of our lines and her gentle weeding of words that muffled the music in a poem.”
Of María Luisa, Dzvinia says: “María Luisa’s writing continues to move me with its depth and courage, imbued with the cultural language of her experiences and a rare sensitivity to the demands of storytelling. Her lyrical narratives delve into profound themes: grappling with familial violence, witnessing eruptions of public and political violence, and reflecting on the complex interplay of gender roles and cultural identity. I am drawn to her aspiration to connect with the universe on a spiritual level, seeking bonds that transcend Immediate reality, and I look forward to exploring in conversation how these shared ambitions shape our work.”
Dzvinia Orlowsky, a Pushcart Prize poet, translator, a Four Way Books founding editor, has authored seven poetry collections with Carnegie Mellon University Press including Bad Harvest, a 2019 Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read” in Poetry and her most recent, Those Absences Now Closest. She is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Poetry Grant, a New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Motton Book Award, co-recipient of a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts, and her first collection, A Handful of Bees, was reprinted as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series. Her poem sequence “The (Dis)enchanted Desna” was a winner of the 2019 New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Prize selected by Robert Pinsky.
Ali Kinsella and Dzvinia’s co-translations from the Ukrainian of Natalka Bilotserkivets’s Eccentric Days of Hope & Sorrow was a finalist for the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the 2022 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, ALTA’s 2022 National Translation Award and winner of the 2020-2021 AAUS Prize for Translation. They received a 2024 NEA Translation Fellowship for their translation of Halyna Kruk’s Lost in Living (Lost Horse Press, 2024), and their co-translation of Oleksander Dovzhenko’s novella, Enchanted Desna, is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in 2025.
Born in Manatí, Puerto Rico and raised in Springfield, MA, María Luisa Arroyo Cruzado received a BA from Colby College and an MA from Tufts University in German, her third language. The opportunity to work with poets Dzvinia Orlowsky and Laure-Anne Bosselaar under poet Meg Kearney’s transformational leadership led her to pursue her MFA at Pine Manor College (July 2015). Currently she is a Clark Diversity Fellow joyfully pursuing a PhD in Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.
María Luisa writes poetry and prose that code-switch between American English, Puerto Rican Spanish, German and Farsi, the cultural languages of her experiences. Her collections include Thought Here Would Cure Me of There (Lily Poetry Review Books, 2024), Landscapes: photos & poems (MultiCreative Wisdom, 2023), Resistencia: Resilience: essays & poems (Human Error Publishing, 2023), Destierro Means More than Exile: a tribute to 32 women poets (2018); and Gathering Words: recogiendo palabras (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2008). In 2024, she curated and published Pán•o•ply, the inaugural MultiCreative Wisdom anthology featuring creative writers who identify as women or non-binary; and as BIPOC.
For 18+ years of facilitating poetry workshops and readings, many in partnership with the Springfield City Library, she was named the inaugural Poet Laureate of Springfield, MA (2014-2016) and a New England Public Radio’s Arts and Humanities recipient (2016). In May 2024, she received an honorary degree in fine arts from Smith College in recognition of her impact as a multilingual Boricua poet and intersectional feminist educator.
Poets Carolyn Oliver and Hannah Larrabee will read from their respective collections and discuss both creativity and craft. Like us, Carolyn read Hannah’s collection and asked herself–more than once–how did they do that? And Hannah wants to know how Carolyn’s poems take us places beyond reach and into the warping of spacetime.
These poets share a reverence for science and deep wonder for–and curiosity in–the world (both seen and unseen). Hannah says: “We’re hoping to geek out a bit about science and plan to talk through poems that explore the spellbinding world around us–here, on Earth, and in the cosmos.”
Carolyn adds: “It’s such luck to call Hannah my friend, and I look forward to talking about space and darkness and flowers (and perhaps a tree frog or two?) with this kind and wise and luminous poet.”
Carolyn Oliver is the author of The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024), Inside the Storm I Want to Touch the Tremble (University of Utah Press, 2022; selected for the Agha Shahid Ali Prize), and three chapbooks, including, most recently, Night Ocean (Seven Kitchens Press, 2023). Her poems appear or are forthcoming in TriQuarterly, Image, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Consequence, and elsewhere. She lives in Massachusetts.
Hannah Larrabee’s Wonder Tissue won the Airlie Press Poetry Prize and her new book—The Observable Universe—was longlisted for a Massachusetts Book Award. Hannah was selected by NASA to write poetry for the Webb Telescope program at Goddard Space Center and she participated in the Arctic Circle Residency in Svalbard. She’s had poems and reviews in Whale Road, EcoTheo, Adirondack Review, Glass Poetry Journal, among others. Hannah lives in Salem, Massachusetts and is an editor at Nixes Mate Review.
Poets and co-founders of Bear Review, Marcus Myers & Rivka Clifton have grown together as poets, even as their own work is aesthetically different. As Marcus says, “This sharing and cheering each other on, discussing craft and aesthetics, swapping and giving books with and to each other has led, in some ways directly and in others indirectly, to our creating Bear Review.”
We welcomed poets Karen Rigby and Danika Stegeman to The Notebooks Collective for an evening of poetry and conversation. The discussion explored musings on second books, ars poetica, and more!
Marcus
Rivka and I have a unique bond as poets and co-editors. We met in 2012, during Rivka’s first and my last year in the MFA program at UMKC. Before, during and after we formed Bear Review, we’ve shared work and encouraged one another. This sharing and cheering each other on, discussing craft and aesthetics, swapping and giving books with and to each other has led, in some ways directly and in others indirectly, to our creating Bear Review. While co-editing Bear Review, we learned each of our appetites and affinities moved us to appreciate poets from very different parts of the contemporary U.S. poetic fractal. Rivka’s aesthetic choices often led us to accepting more avant garde / experimental poems, which I appreciated or learned to appreciate, while mine led us to poems expressive of personal experiences. I can only speak for myself, but I definitely noticed Rivka’s tastes making an impression on me, in particular her brave embrace of the surreal, abject and grotesque.
Rivka
When I met Marcus, I saw poetry as a way to escape my body. I didn’t know the term dysphoria then, but poetry was a way for me to be other than what I was. When I read Marcus’ poetry, I admired how deeply he looked into his own life, how he was unafraid to face it. The more medical transitioning has aligned my body with my self-image, the less I feel compelled to run away through poetry, the more compelled I feel to see my experience as continuous with my self as a writer and artist. Marcus has always been a teacher for me in that regard; his poems laid the groundwork for me to be more autobiographical. Poetry feels most itself when it lands somewhere between autobiography and completely disconnected from the writer’s life. I believe having this conversation around aesthetics, subject matter and poetic arcs will be help clarify things for me as a trans writer and may be beneficial for other writers thinking through their aesthetics as well.
This event is Free, with a suggested donation of $5.
Marcus Myers lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where he teaches and serves as co-founding and managing editor of Bear Review. Author of the chapbook Cloud Sanctum (2022), his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Common, Contemporary Verse 2, The Florida Review, Fourteen Hills, The Los Angeles Review, Mid-American Review, RHINO, Salt Hill, Southeast Review, and elsewhere.
Rivka Clifton is the author of Muzzle (JackLeg Press) as well as the chapbooks MOT and Agape (from Osmanthus Press). She has work in: Pleiades, Guernica, Black Warrior Review, Colorado Review, and other magazines.
We welcomed poets Eugenia Leigh & Diannely Antigua to The Notebooks Collective for an evening of conversation about creativity and connection. We are thrilled to host this In Conversation, in which the poets discussed their newest books, Bianca and Good Monster respectively, among other things.
Writers Jessica Johnson & Tyler Mills join the Notebooks Collective to discuss their new memoirs, Mettlework and The Bomb Cloud, which both invoke their family history and how the personal and the politic intertwine.
“…The resulting journey encompasses Johnson’s early memories, the story of the earth told in the language of geology, bits of vivid correspondence, a mothering manual from the early twentieth century, and the daily challenges of personal and collective care in a lonesome-crowded Pacific wonderland. Mettlework traces intergenerational failures of homemaking, traveling toward presence and relationship amid the remains of extractive industry and unsustainable notions of family.”
“A shimmering memoir defined equally by its lyrical prose and profound historical implications, The Bomb Cloud untangles the intersecting strands of information running through a family mystery shaped by national secrets…Extending from the poems in Mills’ Hawk Parable, this memoir wrestles with her grandfather’s likely involvement in a top-secret bomb wing that trained in the New Mexico desert, taking the reader to the very edge of the unknowable.”
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 November 7, 2023, the Notebooks Collective hosted Michael Kleber-Diggs & Danusha Laméris. Each read from their own poetry collections and discussed their friendship, poetry craft, what it means to revise and more.
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!
From the Introduction:
This is new for us at The Notebooks Collective. We’ve never hosted an artist before. We’re doing so tonight because Shu and Trish have collaborated on an exhibit that’s currently on display at the Hamilton Grange Library in New York City. Titled In a Garden of Small Dreams, Art + Poetry in Conversation, the exhibit is a study in collaboration, concision, and compromise in the best possible way.
It’s also about the blossoming of a friendship that started with a shared love of, well, gardens. And art. And words and the worlds we can enter when we speak to each other through art, through poetry, through the beauty and shine of life, the fear and underbelly of the darkness we all sometimes feel.
As individual creatives, Trish and Shu are accomplished, focused, fiercely loyal to their respective crafts. As collaborators, they learned to speak yet another language, one in which they learned to listen to and see each other not just as friends, but as artists with something to say. Together, they said those things in a way they may not have have, had they not accepted an invitation from Isaac Sorell at Hamilton Grange Library to display their work as an ekphrastic exhibit.
And this is why they’re here tonight: to talk about the genesis of this collaboration, how they worked together, what they learned from one another and how their friendship changed–or didn’t–through the process.
We were so honored to host Mark Turcotte and Suzanne Frank, two poets who have known each other over 40 years. They read from their collected works and discussed the importance of friendship and community in the writing life.
Poets and essayists Michael Kleber-Diggs and Danusha Laméris will read from their collected works and discuss the writing life. Learn more about these poets in the bios below.
Michael Kleber-Diggs (KLEE-burr digs) (he / him / his) is currently writing a memoir about his complicated history with lap swimming called My Weight in Water (forthcoming with Spiegel & Grau). He is a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Literature, a poet, essayist, literary critic, and arts educator. His debut poetry collection, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021), won the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, the 2022 Hefner Heitz Kansas Book Award in Poetry, the 2022 Balcones Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Minnesota Book Award. Michael’s essay, “There Was a Tremendous Softness,” appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars, edited by Erin Sharkey (Milkweed Editions, 2023). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies. Michael is married to Karen Kleber-Diggs, a tropical horticulturist and orchid specialist. They are proud of their daughter who recently graduated from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance Performance with a Concentration in Composition.
Photo credit: Ayanna Muata
Danusha Laméris, a poet and essayist, was raised in Northern California, born to a Dutch father and Barbadian mother. Her first book, The Moons of August (2014), was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her work has been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Orion, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Prairie Schooner. Her second book, Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pitt Poetry Series), was a finalist for the 2021 Paterson Poetry Award and recipient of the Northern California Book Award in Poetry. She was the 2018-2020 Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County, California, and is currently on the faculty of Pacific University’s low residency MFA program. Her third book, Blade by Blade, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press.
Poet Tricia Bogle and Artist Shu Tu will discuss their current ekphrastic exhibit, In a Garden of Small Dreams: Art + Poetry in Conversation, at the Hamilton Grange branch of the New York Public Library. Learn more about this poet and artist in the bios below.
Free
Shu Tu has earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Parsons School of Design and studied fashion accessories at the Cordwainers, London College of Fashion. For over 25 years, she held positions as a creative director and leader in the advertising and beauty industries. In recent years, she has expanded her work as an artist. This journey has enabled her to produce deeply personal work that communicates her story through multiple mediums, including traditional and digital art, floral arrangement, ceramics, and metalsmithing.
Shu is currently residing in Upper Manhattan. You might often spot her in the company of her children, Ander and Percy, engaging in the silliest conversations and sharing the wildest laughter.
www.shutucreative.com | hello@shucreative.com | IG @beingshu2
Tricia Bogle (Trish) has called NYC home since 1991. She holds a BA in Creative Writing & Philosophy from Loyola Baltimore, and an MA and PhD (in Political Theory and Philosophy) from Fordham University. For over two decades, she taught advanced courses in Writing, Philosophy, Bioethics, Political Science, and Great Books at various institutions, including Montclair State University, Stevens Institute of Technology, Fordham University, and the Johns Hopkins University CTY program.
In recent years she has expanded her work as a poet, exploring many of the same themes through poetry that engaged her for decades as an academic philosopher. Trish currently lives and writes in Washington Heights, and can often be spotted in Highbridge Park, watching the sunrise over the Bronx while sipping café con leche and reading translations of Basho out loud to the trees.
boglepoetry@gmail.com | IG & Twitter @boglepoetry
Poets Mark Turcotte and Suzanne Frank will read from their collected works and discuss the importance of friendship and community in the writing life. Learn more about these poets in the bios below.
Bonus: Each poet has graciously offered to gift one signed copy of their book to an attendee! Anyone who asks/chats a question during the Q&A segment of the program will be eligible to be randomly selected to receive either a signed copy of Exploding Chippewas by Mark Turcotte or Double Vision: Reflections on the Coastal Forest and the City We Love by Suzanne Frank and Angela Just.
Writer Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Band Anishinaabe) is author of four collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His poetry and prose have appeared in TriQuarterly,
POETRY, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, The Missouri Review and other journals, and is included in the first Norton Anthology of Native Nations poetry. He has been the recipient of awards from the Lannan Foundation and the Wisconsin Arts Board. He lives in Chicago where he is Distinguished Writer-In-Residence in the English Department at DePaul University.
Suzanne Frank has been writing and reading her poetry in Chicago for over 30 years. She has been a Chicago Poetry Slam team finalist, a two-time Puchcart Prize nominee, and her work has been published in many poetry journals and anthologies, including Sow’s Ear, Another Chicago Magazine, Stray Bullets, Power Lines, Appleseeds Anthology of Americana Poetry, Birds Thumb,
HAMMERS Magazine, and Arts Alive: A Literary Review.
She has featured in poetry venues across the city, from the infamous Green Mill Lounge to Printers Row Book Fair to the Guild Literary Complex where she directed and performed in the Women in Verse poetry cabaret.
She completed, with writer Angela Just, a residency at Shotpouch Cabin in the Oregon Coast Range, granted by Oregon State University’s Center for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word, which resulted in the publication of their chapbook of poems, prose and photographs, Double Vision (2019). Most recently, her collection of travel poems, All On the Same Blue Planet, was featured in Nowhere Magazine. Currently, Suzanne is finalizing a poetry collection, Woundwood, that gives voice to women whose lives were hijacked in the 1960s when flower children and free love collided with puritanical laws, unreliable birth control and backstreet abortions.
She has been writing with the Egg Money Poetry Collective for over 15 years.
What a joy to host three poets who know and love each other’s work. Poet Ellen Austin-Li moderated a beautiful conversation between Sara Moore Wagner and Pauletta Hansel, where they touched on persona and masks, cultural heritage, mentorship, and more.
On April 23, we invited Mark & May-Lan to be in conversation about their writing and friendship. They are champions of each other’s work and you can hear it in this conversation.
