Poetry Centered
Episodes
Prageeta Sharma: Clairvoyant Presence & Future
18 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Prageeta Sharma selects recordings by poets who shaped her as a writer, and who have also shaped the landscape of contemporary American poetry by blen...
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis: Refugee Poetics
04 Feb 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis curates poems that illuminate characteristics of refugee poetics. He introduces Mai Der Vang on the displacement of the self ...
Philip Metres: The Enduring Work of Poetry
21 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
Philip Metres introduces poems that speak to the enduring work of poetry to carry us toward life. He shares W.S. Merwin reflecting on how we not only ...
July Westhale: The Truest Sense
07 Jan 2026
Contributed by Lukas
July Westhale shares poems that unfold into moments of clarity and questioning. They introduce Carl Phillips’ reflection on truth (“Continuous Unt...
Bonus: Radical Reversal in Birmingham II
05 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Radical Reversal is a program that installs performance and recording spaces in detention centers and correctional facilities where they conduct poetr...
Samyak Shertok: Conjure What Was Never There Before
08 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Samyak Shertok curates poems that shift between image and narrative, between sound, silence, and simile as they create something wholly new. He introd...
Dawn Lundy Martin: Our Present, Long Moment
24 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Dawn Lundy Martin selects poems of urgency, tension, and devotion. She shares Daniel Borzutzky responding to massacres with a poem that must be writte...
Leila Chatti: How Lucky to Have Lived
10 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Leila Chatti chooses poems illuminated by a heart left often to life here on Earth. She introduces us to Linda Gregg’s fierce and incandescent hones...
Samuel Ace: Rage, Complicity, and the True Nature of Amends
27 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Samuel Ace introduces poems that speak to today with raw honesty, truthfulness, and bravery. He shares Angel Dominguez wrestling with atrocity and emp...
Harmony Holiday: Against Sentimentality
13 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Harmony Holiday selects poems that shed the skin of nostalgia, testing the boundaries of cruelty as they push toward clarity. She introduces Robert Ha...
Nicole Sealey: Love’s Big Ideas
30 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In our fiftieth episode, Nicole Sealey chooses poems that speak to the lasting power of big ideas offered generously to one’s community. She shares ...
Kwame Dawes: Cleansing as Fire
29 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Kwame Dawes introduces poems that interrogate loss and violence, transforming them in the flame of irony, elegy, and empathy. He discusses Lucille Cli...
Mackenzie Polonyi: Mycorrhizal Love
15 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Mackenzie Polonyi selects poems that engender bell hooks’ idea of love as a verb—a mycorrhizal, persistent, and complicated act linking us to past...
Abigail Chabitnoy: The Field
01 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Abigail Chabitnoy curates poems that dwell in fields of searching, connecting, and being. She introduces Michael Wasson communing with those who are n...
Diego Báez: Three Gabriels
11 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Diego Báez introduces us to three Gabriels connected by themes of reclamation and new beginnings. He shares Gabriel Dozal approaching the US-Mexico b...
Valerie Hsiung: Breath Mover
27 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Valerie Hsiung selects poems that disorient as they open us to the vital, visceral present. She introduces Roberto Tejada and the poem as a breaking f...
Geffrey Davis: The Drive to Connect
13 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Geffrey Davis selects recordings that reveal the bold, risky, and relentless work of attention and connection that poetry undertakes. He shares Lisel ...
Vickie Vértiz: Path to a Future
07 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Vickie Vértiz curates poems that chart a path to a collective future where we can survive crises, connect with others, and see life’s beauty. She i...
Eugenia Leigh: Proclaim a Rising
24 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Eugenia Leigh introduces poems that speak from a particular moment into our own time, offering possibility amidst struggle. She shares John Murillo’...
Mary Jo Bang: Astonishment
10 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Mary Jo Bang brings together poems united by astonishment at the continuation of a world that seems utterly self-destructive. She shares Claudia Ranki...
Olatunde Osinaike: Nobody Gets to Question What I Feel
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Olatunde Osinaike curates poems that meld comedy, cultural scrutiny, and self-imagination. He introduces Patricia Spears Jones clearing a path for des...
Sawako Nakayasu: Grief Textures
31 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Sawako Nakayasu selects poems that confront griefs personal and national, told directly and obliquely. She introduces Timothy Liu documenting the atro...
Jake Skeets: Saad, Where We All Started
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Jake Skeets curates poems by Diné poets centering on translation and the way that the Diné language orients its speakers to the world, which exists ...
Sally Wen Mao: Poetic Awakening
29 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sally Wen Mao shares poems that trace her awakening as a poet, invoking teachers both in person and on the page. She introduces Claribel Alegría on h...
Lauren Camp: Our Little Perfections
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Lauren Camp selects poems that each inhabit a place, a music, another person—shaping a cosmos large or small in language. She introduces Beckian Fri...
Sophia Terazawa: Enemy, Beloved
26 Jul 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Sophia Terazawa introduces poems that lead us to encounter both the beloved and the enemy, seeing them blurred and intertwined—seeing them as human....
Bonus: Radical Reversal in Birmingham
12 Apr 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Radical Reversal highlights the reformative abilities of the arts by bringing poetry, music, and music production workshops—along with performance a...
Manuel Paul López: Small and Immense Mysteries
29 Mar 2023
Contributed by Lukas
Manuel Paul López curates poems that draw us into the nourishing mysteries of water. He shares Ofelia Zepeda’s evocation of moisture’s deep ties ...
Evie Shockley: Courage to Speak, Courage to Hear
24 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Poet and professor Evie Shockley introduces poems woven together by a subtle thread of committed attention to place and what happens there—the place...
JD Pluecker: Always Returning
10 Aug 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Undisciplinary writer and translator JD Pluecker curates recordings that circle around themes of return, transformation, history, and the future. Plue...
Juan Felipe Herrera: Humanity, Compassion, Action, Protest
27 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera shares poems that consider the questions, what exactly is poetry? What does it do? Herrera crafts an exp...
Matthew Zapruder: Poems for Passengers
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Matthew Zapruder selects poems that employ the powers of song, memory, and imagination as points of reflection and comfort amidst the Russian invasion...
Khadijah Queen: Keywords
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Khadijah Queen homes in on her selections by following three keywords through the archive: disobedience, Detroit, and joy. She introduces Rachel Zucke...
Sara Borjas: A Particular 'Us'
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Sara Borjas introduces poems that focus on the connections between a particular, collective ‘us’—people connected by lineage or language, by pla...
Chet’la Sebree: Liminality
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Chet’la Sebree leads us to acknowledge liminal spaces, those places that are not quite one thing or another, moments of transition and not-yet that ...
Anthony Cody: Necessary Discomfort
02 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Anthony Cody selects poems that ask hard questions about war, borders, gender, power, US history, and ourselves—questions asked in order to remind u...
Wendy Xu: Why Write
19 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Wendy Xu curates poems that underscore the necessity of attention for the writing of poems, reminding us that to write is to think, to look, and to be...
Eduardo C. Corral: The Possibilities
13 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Eduardo C. Corral introduces recordings by poets who create and encourage possibilities for others through their inquisitive teaching, their artistic ...
Sumita Chakraborty: Odes to the Overlooked
29 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Sumita Chakraborty curates poems that draw our attention to the overlooked: to the body’s cycles, to cruelty, to deep attention, to trauma and what ...
Silvina López Medin: Writing about Writing
15 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Silvina López Medin introduces poems that reflect on the writing process and the openings we encounter therein when boundaries blur between speaker a...
Adam O. Davis: Sonic Road Trip
01 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Adam O. Davis selects and shares poems that engage with journeys—across time, through mystery, into the past, or to shape a future. He introduces Na...
Adrian Matejka: Cruelty
18 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Adrian Matejka reflects on cruelty as manifested in American institutions, history, private lives, and the public realm of the past year. He opens wit...
Joanna Klink: A Blazing Intensity
04 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Joanna Klink curates poems that blend dream and waking, sparking ordinary life with visionary fire. She shares Jon Anderson wrestling with the desire ...
Rosa Alcalá: Bodies, Presence, Performance
05 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Rosa Alcalá curates poems in which the body plays a central role as a performing presence. She selects and shares Roberto Tejada’s exploration of c...
Bojan Louis: The Poem, Listening
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Bojan Louis shares poems that embody deep listening and engagement with particular realities. He introduces Alan Dugan’s grasp of each moment’s tr...
Peggy Robles-Alvarado: Whistle, Hum, and Heartbeat When Negotiating Identity
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Peggy Robles-Alvarado introduces poems that embody complex identities with honesty, exuberance, and strength. She shares Toi Derricotte’s frank look...
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke: Belonging and Being
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke curates poems by writers who have influenced her own writing through their creative leadership, mentoring, or poetics of bel...
Francisco Aragón: A Speaking Voice
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Francisco Aragón shares poems alive with the vibrancy of a particular voice addressed to a particular audience. He introduces Francisco X. Alarcón’...
Jane Hirshfield: The Hinge of Possibility
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jane Hirshfield curates poems that look into the abyss with brave clarity and complex humility. Hirshfield shares Eavan Boland’s probing into the pl...
Douglas Kearney: Not a Melody, but a Thorn
27 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Douglas Kearney discusses recordings that give rise to reflections on human interaction and the potential for both connection and violence held there....
Cynthia Cruz: Quotidian, Transcendent
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cynthia Cruz introduces poems that mingle “the everyday with the mystical, the unreasonable,” the poems' meaning and beauty transcending the ...
Jack Jung: Echoes of Yi Sang
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Jack Jung shares poems in which he hears echoes of the themes, musicality, and imagery of Korean modernist poet Yi Sang. Shadow selves recur in each s...
Michelle Whittaker: Sound and Story
02 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Michelle Whittaker presents recordings of poems that display their writers’ skill with both narrative and sound as they each consider the body as a ...
Oliver Baez Bendorf: Showing Up in Our Own Lives
18 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Oliver Baez Bendorf shares recordings of poets that encourage him to “show up in [his] own life” through both their poetry and the way they themse...
Randall Horton: Instruments for Change
04 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Randall Horton introduces poems that ask us to consider intensely difficult situations, seeing anew their complexity and the humanity of the people in...
Bonus: Inspiring K-12 Students with Voca
14 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Teaching artists from the Poetry Center’s Writing the Community program offer ideas for using recordings from Voca to inspire K-12 students. Kristen...
TC Tolbert: Deep Presence
09 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
TC Tolbert shares recordings that express a willingness to be deeply present, including a poem by Akilah Oliver that records intimacy with grief (“S...
Maggie Smith: A Conversation with Our Own Minds
26 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Maggie Smith approaches poems as a poet’s best teacher in this episode, calling poems “a conversation we have with our own minds.” Smith shares ...
Urayoán Noel: Radical Imagination
12 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Urayoán Noel introduces recordings of Ai engaging with war through necessary fury (“The Root Eater”), Lehua M. Taitano composing a lifeline to co...
Hanif Abdurraqib: A Brilliant Unfurling
29 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hanif Abdurraqib presents poems that offer listeners an invitation to reflection via rich details, repetition, and rhythm. He discusses his admiration...
Ada Limón: A Way Forward
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ada Limón shares poems that speak to finding a way forward through moments of crisis and struggle. She discusses Lorna Dee Cervantes on being courage...
Alison Hawthorne Deming: The Big Story of Life on Earth
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Alison Hawthorne Deming introduces recordings of Diane Ackerman reading a love poem for an extraterrestrial (“Ode to the Alien”), Cornelius Eady c...
Introducing Poetry Centered
16 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Poetry Centered is a new podcast featuring curated selections from Voca, the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s online audiovisual archive of mor...