Poet Talk on WMUA

WMUA Podcasts

Join Ellen Miller-Mack and her co-host Kevin Carberry every week as a poet from the fertile fields of Western Massachusetts joins us in our WMUA studio. They share a beloved poem by another poet and some of their own poems, followed by  a deep discussion about their work and life as a poet.

  1. 2d ago

    M.A. Scott

    M.A. Scott is the author of the Hunger, little sister (Ghost City Press, 2024). Her work has received nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and has recently appeared or is forthcoming in A-Minor Magazine, Harbor Review, Crab Creek Review, Birdcoat Quarterly, and New Ohio Review. M.A. also works in analog collage to create visual poetry, and is a classically trained clarinetist. Currently living in New York's Hudson Valley, M.A. grew up in Rhode Island, and remains haunted by the landscapes and lore of New England.

  2. Oct 9

    Clay Ventre

    Clay Ventre's book, It's Not Love Till Someone Loses an Eye, was a finalist for the Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize. His second book, Excellent Wildlife Photos (2025,lilypoetryreview.blog) collects 13 years of poetry. He has work published in Iterant, Jubilat, Lily Poetry Review, Soundings East, The Arts Fuse, and others.

  3. Oct 2

    Corwin Ericson

    Corwin Ericson is the author of Swell, a novel, the collection Checked Out OK, and the forthcoming chapbook Proctors of Hush. Recent work of his appears in Posit, Sortes, Trampoline, Volt, and Tough Poets Review. He lives in a small, rural town north of Amherst where he is a trustee of the town library. This semester he’s teaching Writing in Engineering at UMass and has previously taught writing in the School of Management and at Smith College.  He has an MFA in writing from UMass and spent five years as the managing editor of the Massachusetts Review, a literary journal.

  4. Sep 25

    Yona Harvey

    Yona Harvey is the author of You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, winner of The Believer Book Award in Poetry, and Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University and finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award.  Between the publication of her first two poetry books, Harvey co-wrote Marvel Comics’ World of Wakanda, which earned an Eisner Award for best limited series, and co-wrote the comic book series Black Panther & the Crew. Her third poetry collection is the recently released Leap & Grow Feathers.Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora, The Best American Poetry, Letters to the Future: Black Women/Radical Writing and A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry.She’s the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Japan Creative Artists Fellowship, the Heinz Foundation’s Carol Brown Award, and the inaugural Lucille Clifton Legacy Award from Saint Mary’s College of Maryland.

  5. Sep 18

    Eileen Cleary

    Eileen Cleary (she/her/hers) is the author of Child ward of the Commonwealth (2019) which won honorable mention for the Sheila Margaret Motton Award,  2 a.m. with Keats (Nixes Mate, 2021) and Wild Pack of the Living (Nixes Mate, 2024), long listed for the Massachusetts Book Award. She founded and is editor in chief of Lily Poetry Review Books and the  "Lily Poetry Review".

  6. Sep 12

    Sara Eddy

    Sara Eddy’s second full-length collection, How to Wash a Rabbit is forthcoming from Cornerstone press. Her third chapbook, Jewelweed: Poems about Plants, is also forthcoming, that one from Finishing Line press. She is author of Ordinary Fissures (Kelsay Books, 2024), Tell the Bees: Poem About Bees & Beekeeping (A3 Press, 2019), and Full Mouth: Poems about Food (Finishing Line Press, 2020).  Her poems have appeared in many literary journals, including Threepenny Review, Baltimore Review, SWWIM, Raleigh Review, and Spank the Carp, among others.  Sara grew up in Amherst, Massachusetts, where she attended the public schools. She went on to get a BA in English from Connecticut College and an MA/PhD in American Literature from Tufts University. At Connecticut, she studied poetry writing with Charles Hartman; at Tufts she worked with Deborah Digges. After stints in Washington D.C., Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Watertown, and Arlington, Massachusetts, Sara finally returned to Amherst in 2005. She is now Assistant Director of the Jacobson Center for Writing, Teaching, and Learning at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin with a white dog named Sully and a black cat named Luna.

  7. Sep 4

    Marissa Quintero

    Poet, public speaker, and long-distance runner dedicated to mental health advocacy, domestic violence awareness, and personal empowerment. A resilient storyteller who uses poetry, performance, and athletics as vehicles for healing and community impact. Experienced in public readings, published anthology work, and culturally rooted creative expression incorporating bilingual elements (English/Spanish).

  8. Aug 21

    Robin Becker

    Robin Becker was born in Philadelphia and earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Penn State.Becker’s many collections of poetry include Personal Effects (1977); Backtalk (1982); Giacometti’s Dog (1990); All-American Girl (1996), which won a Lambda Literary Award; The Horse Fair (2000); Domain of Perfect Affection (2006); Tiger Heron (2014); and The Black Bear Inside Me (2018), and Midsummer Count: new and selected poems ( 2026).Becker’s range of subjects has been described as a “vibrant miscellany.” Her poems reflect her Russian-Jewish heritage and queer identity, her interest in art history and visual art, the experience of growing up in 1950s America, and the legacy of the 1960s. In The Horse Fair, her subjects range from the painter Rosa Bonheur to the Torah and personal tragedies. Poet Kathleen Aguero has said that Becker’s poems are “richly populated by friends, lovers, family” as they “chronicle a search for community.”Becker’s interest in narrative springs from her family background, including a childhood spent listening to her grandmother’s stories, learning from her the nuances of storytelling and her family’s history in Ukraine. Becker was also greatly influenced by the women writers whose poetry was available in the 1970s, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Susan Griffin. Poet Stephen Dunn regards Becker as achieving “what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection.”Becker’s work has appeared widely in magazines and journals, including American Poetry Review, the Boston Globe, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is a contributing editor to Ploughshares and poetry editor for the Women’s Review of Books, where she writes a column called “Field Notes.” Becker also teaches workshops at the Fine Arts Center in Provincetown. She has won fellowships from the Bunting Institute, the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2000 she was honored with Penn State's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served as Penn State Laureate in 2010-11.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

Join Ellen Miller-Mack and her co-host Kevin Carberry every week as a poet from the fertile fields of Western Massachusetts joins us in our WMUA studio. They share a beloved poem by another poet and some of their own poems, followed by  a deep discussion about their work and life as a poet.

Information

  • Creator
    WMUA Podcasts
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    114
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © WMUA Podcasts
  • Show Website
    Poet Talk on WMUA

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