Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This summer in 2026, we are sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archives! Poetry Medicine for the Soul first began in 2020, in partnership with the Stockbridge Library in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. With the Stockbridge Library, over a hundred episodes were recorded over four seasons. This episode features poet Brian Culhane and was originally recorded on March 8, 2023 during Season 3.

Brian Culhane was born and raised in New York City. Culhane’s poems have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Republic, the New Criterion, Antaeus, the Paris Review, the Hudson Review, and Western Humanities Review. He earned a BA from the City University of New York, an MFA from Columbia University, and a PhD in epic literature and the history of criticism from the University of Washington. He has lectured on Frost and Thoreau as an Inquiring Mind speaker for the Washington Commission for the Humanities. He received a 2007 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission fellowship in literature and a 2009 MacDowell Colony fellowship. He has taught film and English at Lakeside School in Seattle.

Culhane is the author of Remembering Lethe: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2021) and The King’s Question (Graywolf Press, 2008), winner of the Poetry Foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book Prize. Learn more at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/brian-culhane.

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

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This summer in 2026, we are sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archives! Poetry Medicine for the Soul first began in 2020, in partnership with the Stockbridge Library in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. With the Stockbridge Library, over a hundred episodes were recorded over four seasons. This episode features Peter Kline and Brittany Perham from Season 4, and was originally recorded on recorded on April 11, 2023.

Peter Kline teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and with Stanford University's Master of Liberal Arts Program. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has also received residency fellowships from the Hemingway House, Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, Artsmith Orcas Island, Marble House Project, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation. His poems have won First Prize in the River Styx International Poetry Contest, Southwest Review's Morton Marr Poetry Prize, and the Poetry Prize from The Columbia Review, and have appeared in Ploughshares, Five Points, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure, and Persea Books' anthology of contemporary self-portrait poems, More Truly and More Strange. He is director of the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon, which he founded in 2012. His first collection of poetry, Deviants, was published by Stephen F. Austin State University Press in 2013. His newest collection, Mirrorforms, was published by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions in the fall of 2019. Learn more at www.peterklinepoetry.com.

Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo. New poetry, fiction, and nonfiction may be found or is forthcoming in The Cortland Review, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Tupelo Quarterly. Her new book, Executrix, was selected by Cheryl Strayed for the AWP Sue William Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction and will be published by the University of Georgia Press in 2026. Learn more at www.brittanyperham.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