Poetry with Sebastian Matthews, Nathan McClain, Richard Michelson, and Michelle Whittaker

Award-winning poetry by established and emerging poets throughout the summer.

Sebastian Matthews is a writer, writing coach, and workshop leader living in Asheville, NC. His latest book, The Patient Body: A Personal Narrative in Pieces, is out from Ren Hen Press this year. He is also the author of three books of poems and two books of personal narrative. Recent work has appeared in Orion, Lithub, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is working on a book on writing, Cut for the Dog: The Art & Craft of Personal Narrative. 

Nathan McClain is a poet, editor, and educator living in Amherst, Massachusetts. He is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017) and Previously Owned (Four Way Books, 2022), and his poems and prose have recently appeared, or are forthcoming, in Poetry Northwest, Green Mountains Review, Poem-a-Day, The Common, The Critical Flame, and upstreet, among others.  He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and African American Literary Arts at Hampshire College, and serves as Poetry Editor of The Massachusetts Review.

Richard Michelson’s poetry collections include Sleeping as Fast as I Can (Slant Books), More Money than God (U of Pittsburgh), Battles and Lullabies (U of Illinois), and Tap Dancing for the Relatives (U of Florida), plus two fine-press collaborations with the artist Leonard Baskin. Michelson has received a National Jewish Book Award and two Gold Medals from the Association of Jewish Libraries. Michelson wrote the libretto for the off-Broadway music/theater piece Dear Edvard, and his children’s books have been among the top ten of the year by The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, The New Yorker, and among the Best Dozen of the Decade by Amazon. In 2019 he became the sixth recipient of the Samuel Minot Jones Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Originally from Brooklyn, Michelson served two terms as Poet Laureate of Northampton MA, where he hosts Northampton Poetry Radio and is the owner of R. Michelson Galleries.

Michelle Whittaker is the author of Spoke the Dark Matter (Sundress Press, 2024). She is an American poet of West Indian heritage and also the author of Surge which was awarded a finalist medal for the Next Generation Indie Book Awards (Great Weather for Media). She has been published in places such as New York Times Magazine, New Yorker, Shenandoah, Upstreet, Pank Magazine and received a Pushcart special mention, Cave Canem fellowship and New York Foundation of Arts fellowship in poetry. Currently, she is an assistant professor in the program in writing and rhetoric at Stony Brook University. She was awarded a Finalist Medal for the 2018 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Poetry, a 2017 NYFA Fellowship in Poetry, a Jody Donohue Poetry Prize, Cave Canem Fellowship for African American poetry, and a Pushcart Special Mention.