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