Tennison S. Black is the author of Survival Strategies (winner of the National Poetry Series, UGA Press 2023). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in SWWIM, Hotel Amerika, Booth, Wordgathering, and New Mobility, among others. Black received their MFA at Arizona State University. They are the Managing Editor at Sundress Publications and Best of the Net and are the editor of the anthology on contemporary disability, A Body You Talk To. Though Sonoran born, Black resides in Washington state. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Brennan DeFrisco is a poet, teaching artist, editor, voice actor, & ekphrastic artist from the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s been a National Poetry Slam finalist, a Pushcart Prize nominee, Grand Slam Champion of the Oakland Poetry Slam, & regional coordinator for California Poets in the Schools, Poetry Out Loud, & the San Francisco Arts Commission. He’s the author of A Heart With No Scars, published by Nomadic Press, & has served as poetry editor on the mastheads of Lunch Ticket, Caesura & Meow Meow Pow Pow. His work has been published in Red Wheelbarrow, Oracle Fine Arts Review, Drunk in a Midnight Choir, JMWW Journal, Words Dance, & elsewhere. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a focus in poetry from Antioch University Los Angeles. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Loreena McKennitt, currently on a North America, Europe, and United Kingdom tour, is a multi-faceted Canadian artist known for her unique blend of pop, folk, and worldbeat music, often described as “eclectic Celtic.” With over 14 million records sold worldwide, she has achieved gold and platinum status in 15 countries. McKennitt owns her record label, Quinlan Road, and has an extensive catalog that includes hits like “The Mummers’ Dance.” She has received numerous awards, including two Junos and a Grammy nomination. Not just a musician, she’s also an advocate for intellectual property rights and a philanthropist with her own charitable organizations. From small-town roots to global stardom, she’s a self-managed powerhouse in the music industry. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Carol Guess is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including Doll Studies: Forensics and Tinderbox Lawn. Forthcoming books include a short story collection, Sleep Tight Satellite (Tupelo Press), and a hybrid poetry collection, Infodemic (Black Lawrence Press). A frequent collaborator, she writes across genres and illuminates historically marginalized material. In 2014 she was awarded the Philolexian Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement by Columbia University. She is Professor of English at Western Washington University, where she teaches Queer Literature and Creative Writing. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Gabriel Dozal is from El Paso, Texas. He received his MFA in poetry from the University of Arizona. His work appears in Poetry magazine, Guernica, Bomb Magazine, The Iowa Review, The Brooklyn Rail, The Literary Review, Hunger Mountain, The Volta, Contra Viento, and more. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Brandon Rushton is the author of The Air in the Air Behind It (Tupelo Press, 2022), selected by Bin Ramke for the Berkshire Prize. Born and raised in Michigan, his individual poems have received awards from Gulf Coast and Ninth Letter and appear widely in publications like The Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades, Bennington Review, and Passages North. His essays appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Terrain.org, the critical anthology, A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, and have been listed as notable by Best American Essays. After earning his MFA from the University of South Carolina, he joined the writing faculty at the College of Charleston. Since the fall of 2020, he’s served as a visiting professor of Writing at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Caitlin Conlon is a poet and avid reader from Upstate New York. She holds a BA in English and a Creative Writing Certificate from the University at Buffalo and, while there, was chosen for the Friends of the University Libraries Undergraduate Poetry Prize, and the Arthur Axlerod Memorial Prize for Poetry. Her debut poetry collection, The Surrender Theory, was released in 2022 with Central Avenue Publishing. You can find her online almost anywhere @cgcpoems. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Roger Craik, Professor Emeritus of English at Kent State University, Ohio, has written four collections of poetry: I Simply Stared (2002), Rhinoceros in Clumber Park (2003), The Darkening Green (2004), and Down Stranger Roads (2014), along with two chapbooks, Those Years (2007), (translated into Bulgarian in 2009), and Of England Still (2009). His poetry has appeared in several national poetry journals, such as The Formalist, Fulcrum, The Literary Review, The Atlanta Review, The London Grip and The London Magazine. English by birth and educated at the universities of Reading and Southampton, he has worked as a journalist, TV critic, and chess columnist. Before coming to the USA in 1991, he worked in Turkish universities and was awarded a Beinecke Fellowship to Yale in 1990. He is widely traveled, having visited North Yemen, Egypt, South Africa, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, Bulgaria (where he taught during spring 2007 on a Fulbright Scholarship), the United Arab Emirates, Austria, Croatia and Romania, (where from 2013-14 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Oradea). He is glad every day that he is living in the USA. He watches the birds throughout the year, with joy.

Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

L.J. Sysko is the author of “The Daughter of Man” (April ’23, University of Arkansas Press), the 2023 Miller Williams Poetry Series first finalist selected by Patricia Smith, and BATTLEDORE (Finishing Line Press), a chapbook about early motherhood. Sysko’s poems have been anthologized in “Best New Poets” and “Let me Say This: A Dolly Parton Poetry Anthology” (Madville Publishing) and have appeared in publications such as Ploughshares, The Missouri Review’s “Poem of the Week,” and Mississippi Review, among others. An MFA in poetry from New England College, a Virginia Center for Creative Arts Fellow, and a 2022 Palm Beach Poetry Festival Thomas Lux Scholar, Sysko is Director of Executive Communications at Delaware State University. Below are excerpts from the interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Born in the Gambia, Kweku Abimbola earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He is of Gambian, Ghanaian, and Sierra Leonean descent. Abimbola’s first full-length poetry collection, Saltwater Demands a Psalm, was published by Graywolf Press in 2023. In 2022, the début collection was selected by Tyehimba Jess to receive the Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award. Abimbola’s writing primarily investigates colonization, Black mourning, Black boyhood, gender politics, and the spiritual consequences of climate change in West Africa. He is a Visiting Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tampa. Below are excerpts from his interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

On this episode we welcome poet Aimee Baker and filmmakers Jason Greer and Vanessa Cicarelli to discuss the award-winning documentary “She” based on Baker’s collection “Doe” which tells the stories of missing and unidentified women through poetry. “She” is available to stream for free on Tubi, Plex, and Roku.

This is the second interview in a two-part series with Daniel Ash and David J, lyricists and songwriters behind Love and Rockets, Bauhaus, and multiple other band and solo projects. I interviewed Daniel and David separately, with a similar set of questions. The success of their projects can be attributed, in part, to their distinctly different approaches to writing lyrics and crafting songs. Today’s episode features Daniel Ash with David J’s interview coming later this week. I spoke with Daniel and David while they were preparing for Love and Rocket’s first US tour in fifteen years. Below are excerpts from his interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast (Daniel’s interview is available here).

This is the first interview in a two-part series with Daniel Ash and David J, lyricists and songwriters behind Love and Rockets, Bauhaus, and multiple other band and solo projects. I interviewed Daniel and David separately, with a similar set of questions. The success of their projects can be attributed, in part, to their distinctly different approaches to writing lyrics and crafting songs. This episode features Daniel Ash (David J’s interview is available here). I spoke with Daniel and David while they were preparing for Love and Rocket’s first US tour in fifteen years. The second part goes live later this week. Below are excerpts from his interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Katy Didden is the author of Ore Choir: The Lava on Iceland (Tupelo Press, 2022), and The Glacier’s Wake (Pleiades Press, 2013). Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in journals such as Public Books, Poetry Northwest, Ecotone, Diagram, The Kenyon Review, Image, 32 Poems, The Spoon River Poetry Review, The Sewanee Review, and Poetry, and her work has been featured on Verse Daily and Poetry Daily.  She has received fellowships and residencies from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation, the Hambidge Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Listhús Residency in Ólafsfjörður, Iceland. She was also a 2013-2014 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. Collaborating with members of the Banff Research in Culture’s Beyond Anthropocene Residency, she co-created Almanac for the Beyond (Tropic Editions, 2019). Katy is an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ball State University. Below are excerpts from her interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Stephen Massimilla is a poet, professor, painter, and author, most recently of the poetry collection Frank Dark (Barrow Street Press, 2022) and the 2022 co-edited social justice poetry anthology, Stronger Than Fear. His multi-genre, co-authored Cooking with the Muse (Tupelo Press, 2016) won the Eric Hoffer Award and many others. Previous books and honors include The Plague Doctor in His Hull-Shaped Hat (SFASU Press Prize); Forty Floors from Yesterday (Bordighera Prize, CUNY); The Grolier Poetry Prize; the Van Rensselaer Prize, selected by Kenneth Koch; a study of myth in poetry; award-winning translations; etc. His work has been featured recently in hundreds of publications ranging from AGNI to Denver Quarterly to Huffpost to Poetry Daily. Massimilla holds an MFA and a PhD from Columbia University and has taught there and at many other schools, currently The New School. He is also a prolific artist. Below are excerpts from his interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Katie Farris’s work has been commissioned by MoMA and appears in American Poetry Review, Granta, McSweeneys, The Nation, and Poetry. She is the author of the chapbook A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving, which won the 2020 Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal, and boysgirls, a hybrid-form book, as well as co-translator of many books of poetry. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley and Brown University. She is currently Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Georgia Institute of Technology. Standing in the Forest of Being Alive (Alice James Books, 2023) is her first book of poems. Below are excerpts from her interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.

Natalia Andrus (Eerie Ink) is a freelance artist who works in multiple media, both digital and traditional. I had a chance meeting with Natalia at her SiliCon booth in San Jose last summer and immediately knew her style of art would be perfect for my new book “The Plague Doctor“. Fast forward to today and Natalia has completed three incredible black ink drawings inspired by poems in my book. I interviewed Natalia for the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to learn more about how she transformed my poetry into exquisite ink art.

Morgan Liphart’s work has appeared in anthologies and journals across the US, Canada, and England, such as Oxford University Press’ Literary Imagination, Popshot Quarterly, and Chicken Soup for the Soul. Her first chapbook, Barefoot and Running, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. She recently launched a groundbreaking poetry masterclass where students can learn step-by-step how to get their poetry placed in journals and magazines worldwide. When she’s not writing, she enjoys her career as an attorney and loves to adventure in the wild spaces surrounding her home near the Rocky Mountains. For more of her poetry, find her on Instagram at @mliphart or visit morganliphart.com. For her masterclass, visit poetry-masterclass.thinkific.com.

James Morehead interviewed Morgan for the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to discuss her new Poetry Masterclass: Writing and Publishing Powerful Poetry in Journals and Magazines.

Dana Gioia is the former Poet Laureate of California. An internationally recognized poet and critic, he is the author of seven collections of verse, including Interrogations at Noon (2001), which won the American Book Award, and 99 Poems: New & Selected (2016), which won the Poets’ Prize for the best new poetry volume of the year. His critical collections include Can Poetry Matter? (1992), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award, and Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer’s Life (2022). His poems have been set to music by numerous composers, including Morten Lauridsen, Ned Rorem, Lori Laitman, and Dave Brubeck. Gioia has also written four opera libretti and edited twenty literary anthologies.

James Morehead interviewed Dana for the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast to discuss his latest collection “Meet Me at the Lighthouse” (Graywolf Press, 2023). Below is an edited excerpt from the full interview (which also includes Dana reciting selected poems.)

Sandy Longhorn has received the Porter Fund Literary Prize for Arkansas authors and the Collins Prize from the Birmingham Poetry Review. She is the author of three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form (Trio House Press, 2015), The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, and Blood Almanac. Her poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, and elsewhere. Longhorn studied poetry at the College of St. Benedict (St. Joseph, MN) and the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. She now teaches in the Arkansas Writers MFA program at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, AR. Below are excerpts from her interview with James Morehead on the Viewless Wings Poetry Podcast.