Elizabeth Sylvia's second collection, Scythe (2026), is out now from River River Books. Her first book, None But Witches: Poems on Shakespeare’s Women (2022), won the 2021 3 Mile Harbor Press Book Award. Her chapbook My Little Book of Domestic Anxieties (2025), available from Ballerini Books, was a runner-up for the Kari Ann Flickinger Memorial Prize. Elizabeth has been a semi- or finalist in competitions sponsored by the Burnside Review, C&R Press, DIAGRAM, Thirty West, Rare Swan and Wolfson Press, and is a reader for SWWIM Every Day. She has received fellowships from the New York Public Library, the West Chester University Poetry Center and the Longleaf Writers Conference. Elizabeth has led workshops at MassPoetry, Lit Youngstown, and Tell it Slant. She is the winner of the 2023 riverSedge Poetry Prize.

Elizabeth grew up on Martha’s Vineyard and currently teaches in Southeastern Massachusetts, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and extravagantly demanding garden. Learn more at: elizabethsylviapoet.net

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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You can read "Persimmons" by Li-Young Lee on the Poetry Foundation's website.

Kathryn Petruccelli is a Pushcart-, Best of the Net-, and Best Small Fictions-nominated poet with roots in spoken word and a degree in teaching English language learners. She is also the host of Melody or Witchcraft, a podcast where a poet reads a work of their own and an Emily Dickinson poem of their choosing that contributed to their work. The podcast is based on the idea that poetry can be a launchpoint to discuss the pressing issues of today.

Kathryn's poetry has appeared in places like the Massachusetts Review, Whale Road Review, RHINO, About Place Journal, and Anacapa Review. You can find her prose at places like SweetLit, Switch, Fictive Dream, The Los Angeles Review, and Wrong Turn Lit. Kathryn recently relocated with her family to the west of Ireland which she enjoys greatly besides missing her former job as tour guide at the Emily Dickinson Museum. She teaches online, pay-what-you-can workshops that aim to build community. Come say hello via her website: poetroar.com, or at her Substack newsletter, Ask the Poet.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com

Owen Lewis is the author of four collections of poetry, Marriage Map, Sometimes Full of Daylight, Field Light, and most recently Prayer of Six Wings, along with three chapbooks. best man was the recipient of the 2016 Jean Pedrick Chapbook Prize of the New England Poetry Club. Field Light was a “Must Read” selection of the Massachusetts Books Awards. Major prizes include: The E.E. Cummings Prize (2024), The Rumi Prize for Poetry/Arts & Letters (2023), The Guernsey International Poetry Prize (2023), and The International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine (2016). Other prizes include: Second Prize 2018 Wigtown (Scotland) International Poetry Competition and Finalist, 2017 Pablo Neruda Award. His poetry has appeared in Nimrod, Poetry Wales, The Mississippi Review, Southward, The Four Way Review, Cider Press Review, and Arts and Letters. He is a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in the Department of Medical Humanities and Ethics and lectures extensively on topics of Narrative Medicine.

Learn more at: www.owenlewispoet.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com

Ken Haas grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York City but has lived for 50 years now in San Francisco, where he works in healthcare. He received an AB in History and Literature at Harvard College, and received an MA in English literature at the University of Sussex, U.K., where he wrote his thesis on Wallace Stevens. A life-long poetry writer, Ken has spent the majority of his career as a hi-tech executive and biotech venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. His first poetry book, Borrowed Light, won the 2020 Red Mountain Press Discovery Award, as well as a 2021 prize from the National Federation of Press Women. Ken has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes, has won the Betsy Colquitt Poetry Award, and serves on the Board of the Community of Writers. His poems have appeared in over 50 journals and numerous anthologies.

Check out the Penn Sound poetry archive mentioned in this episode at https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/.

Learn more about Ken at www.kenhaas.org.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com

Summer J. Hart is an interdisciplinary artist and writer from Maine living in the Hudson Valley, New York. She is the author of two books of poetry: Boomhouse (2023, The 3rd Thing Press), which won the 2024 Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and What Came Down in the Smoke (forthcoming in 2026 from JackLeg Press). Her creative work has been supported by Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MacDowell, NYSCA/NYFA, and Vermont Studio Center.

Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2023 (Alternating Current Press), Allium, Ballast, Bedfellows, Grist, Heavy Feather Review, Jet Fuel Review, The Massachusetts Review, North American Review, Northern New England Review, Tyger Quarterly, Waxwing, Wild Roof Journal, and elsewhere. Her mixed-media artworks have been featured in exhibitions across the United States. They are included in the permanent collections of The University of Hartford and The University of Southern Maine.

Summer is an enrolled member of the Listuguj Mi’gmaq First Nation.

Learn more at www.summerjhart.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com

Jeri Theriault is a Franco-American poet who grew up in Waterville, Maine, and graduated from Colby College, later earning degrees from USM (MS in Instructional Leadership) and Vermont College of Fine Arts (MFA in Poetry). Her teaching career spanned thirty-four years, including seven years in Prague, six of them as English Department chair at the International School of Prague. She lives now in South Portland with my husband, the composer, Philip Carlsen.

Learn more at www.jeritheriault.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community. In 2024, he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book, collaborations in writing and visual art (Brynmorgen Press).

He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, The Sun, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.

Stuart was the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine for over twenty-five years, and was elected an honorary fellow of the American Craft Council in 2006. More recently, working with the Libra Foundation, he designed and implemented a residency program for artists and writers called Monson Arts.

Learn more at stuartkestenbaum.com.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website for more episodes: https://poetry-medicine-for-the-soul.simplecast.com/

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Get in touch with us at: info@poetrymedicineforthesoul.com