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

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 Jeffrey Harrison and was originally recorded December 14, 2020.

Jeffrey Harrison is the author of seven books of poetry, beginning with The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the National Poetry Series in 1987, and including Incomplete Knowledge (Four Way Books, 2006), runner-up for the Poets’ Prize, Into Daylight (Tupelo Press, 2014), winner of the Dorset Prize, and Between Lakes, (Four Way Books, 2020), selected as a 2021 Must-Read Book by the Massachusetts Center for the Book. His next book, Sightings, is forthcoming from Four Way Books in 2027. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Bogliasco Foundation, among other honors. His poems have appeared widely in magazines and journals, as well as in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, and other anthologies; been translated into Bulgarian, Italian, Norwegian, and Portuguese; been set to music by several composers and performed at the National Opera Center, the Boston Athenaeum, and other venues; and been featured on The Writer’s Almanac, American Life in Poetry, and in The New York Times Magazine. He lives in Massachusetts.

Learn more at www.jeffreyharrisonpoet.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 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 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