In the podcast, Ana discusses how she got into editing anthologies, how she goes about putting her anthologies together and making tough decisions about which poems to keep in and leave out, and why she thinks her most recent anthologies featuring only women poets - She Is Fierce and She Will Soar, both published by Pan Macmillan - are particularly important. You can find out more about Ana's work on her website (anasampson.co.uk) and follow her on Twitter (@AnaBooks). Ana and Niall discuss three poems from She Will Soar: 'The Sea-Shore' by Letitia Elizabeth Landon, an excerpt from Elizabeth Barrett Browning's verse novel Aurora Leigh, and 'Sonnet XXXI' by Edna St. Vincent Millay. To read these poems, we are absolutely delighted to welcome the acclaimed actress-writer-director Romola Garai. Romola has worked extensively in film, television and theatre, and you will very likely have seen her in films such as Atonement or Suffragette, or on television, in shows like The Crimson Petal and the White for which she was nominated for a BAFTA. Her debut directorial feature, a horror film called Amulet, was released earlier this year, and Romola will shortly be appearing in a film with a poetry connection when she plays Dylan Thomas's wife, Caitlin, in a movie about the poet called Last Call. As you'll find out by listening to the podcast, she is also an exceptional reader of poetry.

In this episode, the poet, editor and translator Chris Beckett talks to Niall Munro about his latest book, "Tenderfoot". Chris discusses growing up in Ethiopia and questions of privilege, perceptions of Ethiopia and a responsibility he feels to write about the place and its people. Chris also talks about how he portrays his nascent sexuality and how he reflects on Ethopia then and now after numerous trips back to the country in recent years. Chris has published two collections with Carcanet, “Ethiopia Boy” in 2013, a sequence of praise poems about his childhood crush Abebe, and “Tenderfoot” in July this year. He co-translated and edited the first ever anthology of Ethiopian Amharic poetry, “Songs We Learn from Trees”, also out from Carcanet earlier this year. Chris’s partner is Japanese painter and sculptor, Isao Miura. Together they published a book of drawings and poems in 2014, “Sketches from the Poem Road", after Matsuo Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North” which was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and led to a wonderful exhibition of sculpture, paintings and paper installation at the Glass Tank at Oxford Brookes University in 2016. You can find the poems that Chris discusses on the Poetry Centre's Podcast page, where there is also more information about Chris and his work.

Maya C. Popa is an American poet, researcher, editor, and teacher who has published two pamphlets: The Bees Have Been Canceled in 2017, and You Always Wished the Animals Would Leave in 2018. Most recently, her first full-length collection, American Faith, was published by Sarabande Books in 2019. The book was the runner-up in the Kathryn A. Morton Prize judged by Ocean Vuong and the winner of the 2020 North American Book Award from the Poetry Society of Virginia. She is the recipient of awards from the Poetry Foundation, the Oxford Poetry Society, and Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, among others. Maya is the Poetry Reviews Editor at Publishers Weekly, an English teacher and director of the Creative Writing Program at the Nightingale-Bamford school in NYC, and is currently pursuing her PhD on the role of wonder in poetry at Goldsmiths, University of London. As you’ll be able to tell from the recording, Niall Munro spoke with Maya in late May whilst the Covid-19 lockdown was still in place in New York City where she lives. They talked about three of the poems from American Faith: 'The Government Has Been Canceled', 'Meditation Having Felt and Forgotten', and 'Knockout Mouse Model'. You can read the poems that Maya discusses on the Poetry Centre’s Podcasts page, and you can order a copy of American Faith from Sarabande Books and the Poetry Book Society, as well as the usual retailers. You can also visit Maya’s own website and follow her on Twitter. Do tell us what you think of the podcast by e-mailing us or getting in touch via social media - we’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you for listening!

Jennifer Wong was born and brought up in Hong Kong. She now lives in the UK and works as a writer, translator and teacher. She has published three collections: *Goldfish* (2013), Diary of a Miu Miu Salesgirl - a pamphlet with Bitter Melon Poetry (2019), and most recently Letters Home 回 家, published by Nine Arches Press in 2020, which was selected as a Wild Card Choice by the Poetry Book Society. In this podcast, Jennifer reads and discusses four poems: ‘of butterflies’, ‘Girls from my class’, ‘My father, who taught me how to fold serviette penguins’, and ‘Truths 2.0’. You can read the poems that Jennifer discusses and find out more about her work on the Podcasts page on the Poetry Centre website – just search for ‘Oxford Brookes Poetry’. In our discussion, Jennifer explores topics such as the relationship between her past and present life, how far the Chinese family might be perceived as ‘a perfect state of happiness’, her use of Cantonese and English in the poems, her formal choices, and the challenges of writing about the recent Hong Kong protests. Do tell us what you think of the podcast by e-mailing us or getting in touch via social media - we’re on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Thank you for listening!

This interview was recorded in late November 2019 when Doyali visited the UK, and in it Doyali discusses the tensions in her poetry, how her work deals with chronic illness, the innovative formal choices that she makes for her poems in her Griffin Prize-shortlisted collection heft, the link between poetry, art and healing, and how she represents her family in her writing. She discusses three poems, all of which you can read on the Podcasts page of the Poetry Centre website: ‘sagittarius {the archer}’, ‘bhater mondo’, and ‘flare’.

Mariah is a poet, teacher and interdisciplinary researcher from Oxford. Her debut collection, a novel-in-sonnets called the love i do to you, was published in November 2019 by Eyewear. Poems from the novel were shortlisted for The Bridport Prize, The Melita Hume Prize and the manuscript won the AM Heath Prize. A second collection of poems the rafters are still burning which explores writing, constructions of whiteness and museum archives is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press in 2020.

Peter Bearder may be better known to many as Pete the Temp. A spoken word poet, comic, and musician, Peter has appeared on television and radio, at festivals around the UK, and internationally with the British Council. He has been the National Poetry Slam Champion and in 2018 was awarded the Golden Hammer Award for services to spoken word. His poetry has appeared in a collection called Numbered Boxes (Burning Eye Books, 2017). As well as recordings of Peter’s performances and his terrific selection of interviews with spoken word artists, his website also features his 2015 TEDx talk about why every school should have a spoken word artist. Peter’s new book, Stage Invasion: Poetry and the Spoken Word Renaissance (Out-Spoken Press, 2019), is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the recent history and development of spoken word and will be required reading for anyone studying or fascinated by the art. The book covers a tremendous amount of ground, and in this podcast Peter and Niall discuss a number of the issues raised in Stage Invasion, such as Peter’s own first experience of a poetry slam, how he thinks about the world of spoken word now, and recent well-publicised criticisms of spoken word. They also talk about Peter’s own poetry and how he performs it, and the value of spoken word for society.

In the latest episode of the Poetry Centre Podcast, Niall Munro talks to James Arthur. James was born in Connecticut and grew up in Toronto. His poems have appeared in many magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Poetry, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and The Walrus. He has been awarded numerous scholarships and fellowships, such as the Amy Lowell Travelling Poetry Scholarship, a Hodder Fellowship, a Stegner Fellowship, a Discovery/The Nation Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Northern Ireland, and a visiting fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford. He lives in Baltimore and teaches in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. James’s first book of poetry Charms Against Lightning, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2012, and his chapbook, Hundred Acre Wood, came out in 2018 with Anstruther Press. His second full collection, The Suicide’s Son, was published in spring of 2019 by Véhicule Press in Montreal. There is more about James and his work on his website. In this podcast, Niall and James discuss knowledge and childhood, living in Canada and the United States, drone warfare, and the experience of being a new parent. In particular, we talk about three of James’s poems: ‘Ode to an Encyclopedia’, ‘Drone’, and ‘Goodnight Moon’, all of which you can read by following the link associated with this episode.

We were delighted to catch up with Canadian poet Richard Harrison recently, who was passing through Oxford en route to Italy where he was to launch a new Italian translation of his poetry. Whilst he was in town, Richard gave an inspiring reading at the Society Cafe, and beforehand sat down with the Director of the Poetry Centre, Niall Munro, to discuss his work. In this interview Niall and Richard talk about the structure of Richard’s award-winning book On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood and the editing process; his relationship with his father who died from dementia; writing about grief; and the capabilities of poetry. You can also read a slightly different version of the interview on the Poetry Centre blog. Richard Harrison is a multiple-award-winning poet, essayist, and editor. His most recent book, On Not Losing My Father's Ashes in the Flood, was awarded the 2017 Governor General's Literary Award for Poetry. The book was also shortlisted for the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Book Prize and won the Stephan G. Stephansson Alberta Poetry Prize. His six books of poetry include Big Breath of a Wish, poems about his daughter’s acquisition of language, and Hero of the Play, poems in the language of hockey, launched at the Hockey Hall of Fame.

In this first episode in a new podcast series, Shara Lessley discusses her poem ‘The Clinic Bomber’s Mother’. The poem comes from Shara’s new book, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, published by the University of Wisconsin Press. In this discussion, Shara first reads her poem and then talks about a number of issues related to it and the book as a whole, such as motherhood, perceptions of the Middle East by Americans and violence in the Middle East and in America, especially domestic terrorism. Shara Lessley is a writer and teacher. The author of Two-Headed Nightingale and The Explosive Expert’s Wife, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place and Poetic Practice (with Bruce Snider), she is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Shara’s poems and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Threepenny Review, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Missouri Review, and New England Review, among others. A recipient of scholarships from ArtsBridge and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Shara holds Bachelor’s degrees in Dance and English from University of California, Irvine, and an MFA in Poetry from University of Maryland. She was recently awarded Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Oxford. Find out more about Shara’s work on her website, and follow her on Twitter.