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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.

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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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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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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.

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