We are excited to bring together two poets and artists from Texas, Katherine D. Oldmixon Garza and Octavio Quintanilla, introduced by friend Marcela Sulak. Octavio’s Book of Wounded Sparrows and Katherine’s Life Afterlife / A Book of the Hours have shared themes of grief, loss, and mourning. Katherine wrote about the two books as singing together, or rather, “By sing, I might mean keen, not as a wild wailing but sometimes as a wild ceremony, sometimes as a ceremony in the wild.” We then added an additional dimension: their multiple languages and modalities used to produce their work. Octavio added, “I am interested to see how our work converges and diverges in terms of how we write grief, joy, closure.”
We were so honored to have poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi visit us for an event. They chose to be in conversation with filmmaker Sasha Waters, who has made a new documentary about Mary Oliver, called Saved by the Beauty of the World. It was an amazing time with preview clips of the film, readings by Gaby and a bunch of questions from friends.
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.
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!
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.
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 Taylor Byas & jason b. crawford to The Notebooks Collective in September. We were thrilled to have these two brilliant poets join us to talk about craft, friendship, using poetry as a means to reckon with oppression and more.
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.
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.
Massachusetts poets and friends Richard Hoffman and January Gill O’Neil joined The Notebooks Collective for an evening of craft, conversation, and literary citizenship.
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.
