KRCB-FM: WordTemple

Katherine Hastings presents a recording of the book release party for this timely anthology. Recorded live at the WordTemple Poetry Series at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in September 2017, over a dozen of the poets represented in the book read their work. Edited and published by Katherine (WordTemple Press), poets in the anthology include Devreaux Baker, Ellen Bass, Gillian Conoley, Sharon Doubiago, Camille T. Dungy, Annie Finch, Molly Fisk, Brenda Hillman, Jane Hirshfield, Lynne Knight, Mary Mackey, Jane Mead, Rusty Morrison, Melissa Stein, Laura Walker, Arisa White and many others, including several Sonoma County poets — Janine Canan, Sandy Eastoak, Terry Ehret, Kathleen Winter and more. Tune in and join the celebration of this terrific anthology of poetry written by women, but for everyone!

On today’s very special program, Hastings speaks with Cave Canem Fellow Cortney Lamar Charleston. His debut collection, Telepathologies, won the 2016 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, selected by D.A. Powell. In 2017, Charleston was a recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. Lamar began writing and performing poetry as a member of The Excelano Project when he was an undergraduate studying economics and urban studies at the University of Pennsylvania. His poetry is described as a marriage between art and activism, and a call for a more involved and empathetic understanding of the diversity of the human experience. His academic background, coupled with his upbringing spent bouncing between Chicago’s South Side and its South and West suburbs influence his written work, grappling with race, masculinity, heteronormativity, class, family, faith and how identity is, functionally, a transition zone between all of these competing markers. Charleston’s poems

WordTemple host Katherine Hastings airs a reading by Gregory W. Randall recorded at the WordTemple Poetry Series in June of 2017. Randall was celebrating the release of his first full-length collection of poetry, A Cartography of Selves. Susan Terris says “A Cartography of Selves is a series of complex, luminous poems. Some are in the voice of the poet, examining his many selves. Others are intimate views of the relationship of husband to wife, wife to husband, all told with a raw, loving, compelling urgency. There are also poems that delve into art, artists, music and nature, approaching these subjects with a similar sense of the transience of beauty.” Hastings says, “From the first poem in A Cartography of Selves where a young boy searches earnestly for the lunar Sea of Serenity as a place of refuge for himself and his mother, to poems where lovers discover each others bodies or “sit in lawn chairs in broad daylight/with shotguns and a case of beer,’ this collection offers a full palette of vulnerabil