Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features poet, prose writer and editor Carolina Hospital.

Carolina Hospital is a poet, prose writer and editor. Her most recent poetry collections are All Roads Lead to Here (Anhinga Press) and Bamboo Ghost Notes (Contagioso Press). Other poetry collections include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks and The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir, as well as Myth America and How to Get into Trouble, collaborations with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina. She published the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina and collaborated on the New York Times' bestselling novel Naked Came the Manatee. Carolina edited the groundbreaking anthology of Cuban American writers Los Atrevidos, as well as A Century of Cuban Writers in Florida. She also wrote the poetry used as lyrics to Greetings from Florida: Postcards from Paradise by composer Scott Lee with jazz vocalist Camila Meza, released as a CD by Sunnyside Records.

Learn more at: www.carolinahospitalauthor.com

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website or Simplecast podcast feed for more episodes.

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more and get in touch: 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 Lawrence Raab, which was originally recorded on May 17, 2022 and can be viewed on the Stockbridge Library YouTube page.

Lawrence Raab is a poet and professor, born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MA from Syracuse University and has taught at various institutions including American University, the University of Michigan, and Williams College, where he is the Morris Professor of Rhetoric.

Raab is the author of many collections of poetry, including April at the Ruins (2022), The Life Beside This One (2017); Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The History of Forgetting (2009); Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (2003); and What We Don’t Know About Each Other (1993), selected for the National Poetry Series by Stephen Dunn and a finalist for the National Book Award. He collaborated with Stephen Dunn on a chapbook of poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea (1999).

Conversational yet precise, Raab’s lyrical meditations trace human fallibility and doubt. As Boston Review critic Don Colburn noted in a review of What We Don’t Know About Each Other, “Lawrence Raab’s gracefully haunting poems explore the fine lines of our temporal lives‚ between distance and intimacy, limits and possibility, present and past … In Raab’s poems, reason and faith are not as far apart as they sometimes seem.”

In addition to his poetry, Raab has written the screenplays The Distances (1967) and Or I’ll Come to You (1968). The Birds, his adaptation of a play by Aristophanes, was first produced at the Power Center in Ann Arbor in 1975. Raab has been an editor for Frontiers and a member of the editorial board of Alkahest.

Raab’s honors include the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. He has also received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Raab’s poetry has been featured in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1983), A Book of Luminous Things (1996), and several volumes of Best American Poetry.

Learn more at www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lawrence-raab.

This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website or Simplecast podcast feed for more episodes.

Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn more and get in touch: poetrymedicineforthesoul.com