Planet Poet - Words in Space Sharon Israel

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX broadcast (aired March 26th, 2024) featuring award-winning poet Sam Truitt.   Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit:  samtruitt.com, samtsong.com, Station Hill Press
 Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He is the author of the ten works in the Vertical Elegies series, among others in print and other media, including most recently TOKYOATOTO and the forthcoming STATE/SHAFT SHAFT/STATE. Among other recognitions, he is the recipient of numerous Fund for Poetry awards, a Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia, and a Howard Fellowship. He is also the maker of numerous works in mixed media, including the aforementioned STATE/SHAFT SHAFT/STATE and other series like DICTE and numerous works in Intermedia with musicians and filmmakers. Truitt earned a PhD in English from the University at Albany and a MFA in Creative Arts from Brown University. The director of Station Hill Press and president of the Institute for Publishing Arts (including, among other projects, the podcast Baffling Combustions and the Station Hill Intermedia Project), he lives in Woodstock, NY, where he is the co-founder of the non-profit Woodstock Center for Awakening, which will host the second Woodstock Community Festival of Awakening in August, and is a volunteer ambulance driver for the Woodstock Rescue Squad. 
 On TOKYOATOTO
“Sam Truitt has added a wonderful new innovative example of one of my favoirte genres – travel poetry. By way of two ‘T squares’ (Times and Tiananmen) on the way to Japan, he generously expands the notational into double accordion-fold expanses; one typed and sculptural, one handwritten, drawn notation condensing sound, thought, perception and time.  The reader is invited into the poet’s process alternating between quicksilver caught thought to poems lifted to the next level of line-break shape and form…”
---- Lee Ann Brown, author of Philtre: Writing in the Dark 1989-2020
 “…the intimacy of writing as note-taking feels palpably present.  We intrude on those personal pages, even in facsimile. By contrast, the public-facing presentation of the typeset texts feels bold, exposed, declaratively blunt in its directness..”
----Joanne Drucker, author of Diagrammatic Writing

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX broadcast (aired February 13th, 2024) featuring award-winning poets Carey Salerno and Stacy L. Spencer, who are on the show to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Alice James Books, an important Press solely dedicated to poetry.
Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit Alice James Books
 Carey Salerno is the executive director and publisher of Alice James Books. She is the author of Shelter (2009) and Tributary (2021), and her poems, essays, and articles about her work as a publisher can be found in places like American Poetry Review, NPR, The New York Times. She has poems forthcoming in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Los Angeles Review, and ONLY POEMS. Salerno serves as the co-chair for LitNet: The Literary Network and occasionally teaches poetry and publishing arts at the University of Maine at Farmington. In 2021, she received the Golden Colophon Award for Independent Paradigm Publishing from CLMP for the leadership and contributions of Alice James Books in indie literature.
 Stacy L. Spencer is a poet, fiction writer, and nonprofit consultant. After attending the Interlochen Arts Academy where she studied with Jack Driscoll, she graduated from Amherst College and received her doctorate from the University of Michigan in American Studies. At Amherst she won the Collin Armstrong Poetry Prize. Her positions in New York City nonprofits, where she focused on fundraising, include Barnard College, The Public Theater, the Apollo Theater, and the Museum of the City of New York. She has also taught arts management at the Lubin School of Business at Pace University. Since 2016 Stacy has served on the board of Alice James Books. Her poems have appeared in Thimble Literary Magazine, Topical Poetry, and Detroit Lit Mag. Stacy is currently writing a novel. 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired December 19th, 2023) featuring award-winning poet and activist MARY GILLILAND, who discusses and reads from her latest poetry collection The Devil’s Fools and from her forthcoming collection Ember Days. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s erudite and entertaining Poet-at-Large, also joins us on the show.  Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit: marygilliland.com.
 Mary Gilliland is the author of two award-winning poetry collections: The Ruined Walled Castle Garden (2020) and The Devil’s Fools (2022). Her latest collection Ember Days is forthcoming from Codhill Press in 2024. Mary’s poems are widely published in print and online literary journals and most recently anthologized in Wild Gods: The Ecstatic in Contemporary Poetry and Prose, and Nuclear Impact: Broken Atoms In Our Hands. After college she apprenticed to Gary Snyder in the Sierra foothills where she studied Buddhism and helped to build a wood- framed public school. Mary retired early from teaching at Cornell in order to devote herself to poetry. 
 “Mary Gilliland’s magisterial new collection, The Devil’s Fools, opens in myth and magic, but its vast reach is deeply rooted in her reverence for earth and all earthly creations…. At once eco-sensual and erudite, Gilliland writes a nuanced poetry that richly investigates humanity’s contradictory capacities to destroy and to love…. From first to last, I am spellbound by the largesse of vision and the beauty of this wondrous collection.” -- Cynthia Hogue
 “Mary Gilliland brings to her work the rich flavors of the natural world, yet her destination is clearly news of the inner self, its perceptions, its relationships with others.  She is not afraid of delight, neither does she shirk the hard tasks of anger, pain, and deep caring.” —Mary Oliver

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired November 21st, 2023) featuring Maureen Buchanan Jones, poet, writer and Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) Training Director, who discusses and reads from her books blessed are the menial chores and Maud & Addie. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large also joins us on the show. Visit: Sharonisraelpoet.com. Visit Maureen Buchanan Jones.
 Maureen Buchanan Jones is Training Director and former Executive Director of Amherst Writers & Artists. Maureen has led workshops with diverse writers including people who have experienced domestic violence, high school students, the bereaved, those who are in recovery, veterans, sexual assault survivors, and members of the LGBTQIA2S+ community. She leads writing workshops and retreats online and in Massachusetts and California. With a PhD in English Literature and a Phi Beta Kappa, Maureen has taught at, Holyoke Community College, Westfield State College, the University of Massachusetts, The Conway School of Environmental Design, and the Pre-College Writing Program at Smith College. Her poetry has appeared in Woman in Natural Resources, 13th Moon, Peregrine, North Dakota Quarterlyamong others. Her prose has appeared in Every Day Fiction, and Orion. Her poetry book, blessed are the menial chores was published by Amherst Writers & Artists Press. Her novel, Maud & Addie, was published by Regal Publishing House. Visit Maureen Buchanan Jones
 About blessed are the menial chores:   “…Jones’ poems teach us the ways to hold close and how we must learn to let go.  Should anyone ask what poetry is, hand them a copy of this book.”  --Sue Brannan Walker, Poet Laureate of Alabama 2003-2012, her author of Blood Will Bear Your Name won Book of the Year from Alabama State Poetry Society.
 About Maud & Addie:  "An absorbing tale of two young sisters from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who are swept out to sea and their trials and risk-taking as castaways. [...] With confident pacing that rises and falls like the waves, the book charts the girls’ progress as they enter survival mode, growing more resilient and resourceful with each test." —Kirkus Reviews 

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired Oct. 10, 2023) featuring poet Pui Ying Wong and her new collection Fanling In October, and co-host poet Lee Slonimsky. 
 Poet Pui Ying Wong’s new collection, Fanling In October has just been published by Barrow Street Press. She’s also the author of three other collections: The Feast, An Emigrant’s Winter and Yellow Plum Season along with two chapbooks: Sonnet For a New Country and Mementos. She has received a Pushcart Prize. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, Plume, Chicago Quarterly Review, New Letters, Zone 3 among many others. Born in Hong Kong she now lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts with her husband, the poet Tim Suermondt.

Lee Slonimsky’s latest books are Pythagoras and the Animals in Greece, translated by Stamatis Polenakis and Caterina Marikoupou, Pythagoras in Love in Italy, translated by Enrico Bernard, and Bright Yellow Buzz in the United States.  On November 2, he will lecture at the Keats/Shelley House Museum in Rome on the historical connections among Pythagroras, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and John Keats.  His wife, Carol Goodman, two time winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award, is just out with her latest literary thriller, The Bones of the Story.

Planet Poet-Words in Space – NEW PODCAST!  LISTEN to my WIOX show (originally aired September 26th, 2023) featuring the wonderful poet, writer and visual artist, Anique Sara Taylor who reads from and talks about her new, award-winning Chapbook Civil Twilight. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s Poet-at-Large is also on the show, bringing us her unique insights into poetry and poets. 

Anique Sara Taylor’s chapbook Civil Twilight won the 2022 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her full-length poetry book Where Space Bends was published in May 2020 by Finishing Line Press.  Anique’s other chapbooks include When Black Opalescent Birds Still Circled the Globe, chosen Finalist by Harbor Review’s Inaugural 2023 Jewish Women’s Prize; Feathered Strips of Prayer Before Morning, chosen Finalist by Minerva Rising Chapbook Competition 2023 and Cobblestone Mist, Longlisted Finalist for the 2023 Harbor Editions’ Marginalia Series. Her Holocaust poem “The Train” was a 2019 Charter Oak Award Finalist for Best Historical Poem. https://aniquesarataylor.com
Anique Sara Taylor's award-winning collection is mesmerizing. Thirty poems, thirty words each, shimmer with a refined intensity at once both taut and expansive. Within this tight form, her emotional richness is as lyric as it is restrained. Grief's shadow, loss-yet love of the stubborn, simple glories of existence, emerge as gifts of her inner iconography. These resonate with Taylor's organic allusions to the natural world, her outer landscape. Starfish, eagles, crickets, thunderstorms, a sycamore tree-all conspirators in her survival story. "Half daughter, half swallow," she writes, "if only I could tie down the corners of the air." In Civil Twilight, she has done just that.- Leslie T. Sharpe, Author of The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills
 …these brief poems filled, line by line, with such rich diction. [Her] formal gestures--30 words, five lines--keep the poems taut, & with stresses, the insistent spondees throughout, emphasize the emotional resonance underlying the book: shy mouth nailed shut / sheets creased white / cockroach shells / quill-shaped mist / bones break naked / beaks crave rain / …so many lovely phrasings, all toward expressing & containing the undercurrent of grief. "Bittersweet," [she] says, yes. - Michael Waters, innerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020)
 Civil Twilight is a stunningly crafted sequence of small poems that deliver both an architecture and music reminiscent of the stanza. Here, the reader…enters room after room of discovery…These poems, like little vestibules, exist between…moments that illuminate the inner life…between daylight and darkness, past and present, between the living and the dead, between a daughter and the memory of a father. Taylor's poems are keenly attuned to the language of the natural world and to all the mysteries that come with it. - Sean Nevin, Author of Oblivio Gate