A National Poetry Month Digital Reading

Listen in as we move through decades of poetry at Colorado Review in celebration of National Poetry Month!

This June, social media manager and associate editor Alec Witthohn, delved into Colorado Review‘s archives to bring you eight exceptional poets from across the magazine’s history. Interns and editors here at Colorado Review helped to select and read some our favorite poems while Alec provides historical and aesthetic background on each poet, guiding you on a journey that spans all the way from the Winter of 1956 to the Summer of 2017.

Selections include:

Kitasono Katue – “A Black Chapel” read by Alec Witthohn – (Winter 1956)

Rosario Castellanos – “Useless Day” read by Carolina Bucheli – (Fall 1979)

Yusef Komunyakaa – “The Brain to the Heart” read by Linnea Harris – (Fall 1985)

Holly Prado – “Never Another Light Than This” read by C. E. Janecek – (Fall/Winter 1988)

Toi Derricotte – “The Wedding” read by Lauren Furman – (Spring/Summer 1989)

Brenda Hillman – “After the Feast at Year’s End” read by Mika Todd – (Summer 2012)

Victoria Chang – “[I Used to My Father Used to Used to Sit in a Living Room with My]” read by Tasha Seebeck – (Fall/Winter 2012)

Kaveh Akbar – “On Bridges and the Shadows of Bridges” read by Stephanie G’Schwind – (Summer 2017)

By C Culbertson

In this audio installment of Con(verse), CR‘s recurring interview series, C Culbertson sits down with Colorado Prize for Poetry winner Adrian Lürssen to discuss his book, Human Is to Wander. Lürssen reads a few poems from the collection and talks about his inspiration for the work, the biography and personal history of the poems, and how he revisits these poems now—as a reader rather than a writer.

C Culbertson is a third year MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University, where they are a Gill-Ronda Fellow in Creative Writing and associate editor at Colorado Review. Their work appears or is forthcoming in Nat. Brut and Posit.

In part two of Colorado Review’s May podcast, podcast host Lilia Shrayfer sits down with Colorado State University alum and former Colorado Review podcast editor Kylan Rice. Together, they talk about their experiences at AWP, writing and professionalization, and life after the MFA.

In this episode of the Colorado Review Podcast, host Lilia Shrayfer sits down with Danny Thiemann to discuss his story “One Bad Night in San José, Costa Rica,” forthcoming in the Colorado Review‘s Fall/Winter 2021 issue. This story was awarded the 2021 Nelligan Prize for Short Fiction by final judge T. Geronimo Johnson. Thiemann is also the recipient of the 2020 Tobias Wolff Prize for Fiction from the Bellingham Review, an Award for New Writers from New York City’s Table4 Foundation, and a Madalyn Lamont Award for Fiction from the American University in Cairo. His writing has appeared in the New Delta Review, the Bosque Review, Your Impossible Voice, the Beloit Fiction Journal, and Guernica Magazine. He works at Earthjustice and previously worked for the Programa de Campesinos/Farmworker Program at Oregon Law Center. Danny sits down with podcast host Lilia Shrayfer to talk immigration and legacy, how activism informs writing, surrealism as a way to explode dystopian elements of real life, and great craft advice to emerging writers.

Please join Colorado Review associate editor Nicole Piasecki and writer Sarah Curtis for a discussion about Curtis’s recently published essay “The Ghosts of Lubbock,” published in CR‘s Summer 2021 issue.

This month’s episode kicks off the start of fall with not one, but two authors! Podcast host Lilia Shrayfer sits down with Michelle Ross and Kim Magowan to talk about their latest co-written short story, “Twenty-Three Safety Manuals.” This episode features conversation on the craft of collaborative story-telling, writing women inside and outside of gender roles of their time, and the relationship between what the writer intends and the reader imagines on the page.

This month’s episode brings into conversation author Iris Jamahl Dunkle and CLP associate editor and graduate student intern Annmarie Delfino. The two discuss Dunkle’s recently published book, West : Fire : Archive, from CLP’s Mountain/West Poetry Series, as well as how writing about the environment bridges the historical and the personal to recover landscapes and people thought to have been erased.

Podcast host C Culbertson sits down with Brandon Krieg to talk about ecopoetics, environmental thought, and how the practice of walking calls on us to notice the world around us. Krieg reads the poems “In Case of Loss” and “Havening,” from his book Magnifier, winner of the 2019 Colorado Prize for Poetry.

Krieg’s other books include: In the Gorge (2017, Codhill Press), Invasives (2014, New Rivers Press), and Source to Mouth, a chapbook published by New Michigan Press in 2012.