Read: "Everyone Said Nature Was Healing" (Poetry Northwest)

Purchase: Portrait of Us Burning(Curbstone Books, 2023)

Sebastián H. Páramo is the author of Portrait of Us Burning (Curbstone Books, 2023) and was named a finalist for the 2023 Best First Book of Poetry by the Texas Institute of Letters. His poems have recently appeared or will appear in AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Arkansas International, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, and elsewhere. His work has received fellowships and support from the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program at UT-Austin, CantoMundo, among others. He is the founding editor of The Boiler and lives in Texas.

Recommended Reading:

Apocalypse and Disaster Communities Reading List on Bookshop

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabriel Zevin

Meltwater by Claire Wahmanholm

Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank

The World Keeps Ending, the World Goes On by Franny Choi

The Murderbot Diariesby Martha Wells

Stanley Kunitz

Larry Levis

Thomas Lux

Nicola Davison-Reed

Read: Emily's poem "The Meat of the Plum" in Moist Poetry Journal

Emily Kramer is a poet and editor living in Boston, MA. She received her BA in English from Barnard College, and her PhD from Boston University’s Editorial Institute. Her critical edition of Arthur Henry Hallam’s collected poems is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.

Recommended Reading:

Saskia Hamilton

Arthur Henry Hallam

Alfred, Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam

Robert Lowell

Words in Air: the complete correspondence of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton

The Dolphin by Robert Lowell, edited Saskia Hamilton

Virginia Woolf's Letters with Vita Sackville-West (Paris Review)

John Keats' Letters

Read: "Invitatory" at Poetry Daily

Purchase: Invitatory (Parlor Press, 2024)

Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, editor, and writing instructor. Her debut collection, If the House (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019) won the 2019 Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge​ (SIU Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Poetry Series, won the 2019 Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Invitatory, her forthcoming third collection, won the 2022 New Measure Poetry Prize and will be published in 2024 by Free Verse Editions / Parlor Press. Molly’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, Copper Nickel, FIELD, The Georgia Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her critical writing and essays have appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review online, Literary Hub, The Writer's Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. Molly's work has won a Lucile Medwick Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Glenna Luschei Award from Prairie Schooner, a Writers@Work Fellowship Award, and a faculty fellowship from the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities. She holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop and an MPA from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, and teaches writing at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. ​

Further Reading:

Carl Phillips

Jorie Graham

"Home Burial" by Robert Frost

Wordsworth's Prelude, Book 1 ("Fair seedtime had my soul...")

Aracelis Girmay's essay From Woe to Wonder

Jake Skeets' essay Poetry as Field

Louise Glück