Station to Station, Poet to Poet! For the Plume 9 anthology, Danny Lawless, editor of Plume, enlisted forty-nine guest editors, who offered a poem of their own, then selected, introduced and presented a poem from another poet. With this series, we bring you these pairings for a multi-session celebration of poetry. Join our editors at Plume for our November session in this popular series. This session is moderated by Plume editor Leeya Mehta. Plume 9 is available here.
Featuring:
Ron Smith & Stuart Gunter
Sydney Lea & Katie Moritz
Amit Majmudar & Jane Zwart
Stuart Gunter’s work been nominated for Best of the Net. He has poems in or forthcoming in numerous periodicals and two anthologies. He has collaborated with artist Michelle Gagliano on two projects, Language of Place, based on Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks, and a fine-art coffee table book, Once Again to See the Stars: A Contemporary Look at Dante’s Inferno.
Sydney Lea is 2021 recipient of his home state Vermont’s most prestigious artist’s distinction: the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. A former Pulitzer finalist and winner of the Poets’ Prize, he served as founding editor of New England Review and was Vermont’s Poet Laureate from 2011 to 2015. He recently published his thirteenth collection of poems, Here (Four Way Books, NYC, 2019). In fall 2021, Vermont’s Green Writers Press published Seen from All Sides: Lyric and Everyday Life, his collected newspaper columns from his years (2011–15) as Vermont Poet Laureate.
Amit Majmudar is a diagnostic nuclear radiologist who lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. The former first Poet Laureate of Ohio, he is the author of the poetry collections What He Did in Solitary and Dothead as well as two other poetry collections, four internationally acclaimed novels, an anthology of political poetry, and a translation of the Bhagavad-Gita. Awarded the Donald Justice Prize and the Pushcart Prize, Majmudar’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Best of the Best American Poetry, and the eleventh edition of The Norton Introduction to Literature. Two novels are forthcoming in India in 2022: an historical novel about the 1947 Partition entitled The Map and the Scissors, and a novel for young readers, Heroes the Color of Dust. He is currently co-creating a graphic novel/web comic, The Kali Yuga Chronicles. Visit www.amitmajmudar.com for more details.
Katie Moritz lives in Vermont’s rural Northeast Kingdom, where she works in communications at a not-for-profit critical access hospital. She is currently working on her first book of poetry.
Ron Smith, Poet Laureate of Virginia 2014–2016, is the author of five books, four from LSU Press, including Moon Road, The Humility of the Brutes, and the forthcoming That Beauty in the Trees. His first book, Running Again in Hollywood Cemetery, was judged by Margaret Atwood “a close runner-up” for the National Poetry Series Open Competition; in 2020 it appeared in a revised and enhanced second edition from MadHat. Ron is Writer-in-Residence at St. Christopher’s School in Richmond, VA.
Jane Zwart teaches English at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and The Poetry Review (UK), as well as other journals and magazines. You can read more of her work at her website, janezwart.com.
Moderators for this series
Leeya Mehta is Associate Editor at Large, Plume Poetry. She is a prize-winning poet & fiction writer. She is the author of A Story of the World Before the Fence and The Towers of Silence. She writes column on the reading and writing life: The Company We Keep. Discover her latest work here: leeyamehta.com
Amanda Newell’s first full-length poetry collection, Postmortem Say, is forthcoming from Červená Barva Press in 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook, Fractured Light (Broadkill Press, 2010), and her recent work appears or is forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Gargoyle, Rattle, Scoundrel Time, SWWIM, and elsewhere. The former English chair at The Gunston School (Centreville, MD), she has also taught at the University of Paris (Créteil) and Frostburg State University. She is Associate Editor for Special Features and Social Media at Plume.
Nancy Mitchell, Associate Editor of Plume Poetry, is the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop and, with Danny Lawless, co-edited Plume Interviews I. A Pushcart Prize recipient, she is the Poet Laureate of Salisbury, Maryland and hosts the Poets on the Plaza Reading Series, currently on Zoom.