Poet Talk on WMUA

Robin Barber

Born 1947 in Northampton, Robin Barber, M.A., is a writer, teacher, and photographer.He loves writing workshops--first joined Pat Schneider's workshop in 1987, then Gene Zeiger's, then Carol Edelstein's from 1994 to the present. Certified by Amherst Writers and Artists leadership program,  he's been leading the Wednesday evening and Monday morning workshops since 1997. In 2010, Robin helped Carol Edelstein ( they're married ) establish non-profit Gallery of Readers Press, using a small annual grant and donations to fund Carol's reading series with 18 writers each season, a website with many resources, and the publication of 21 books. Find out more at www.galleryofreaders.org

J.K. Lawson

JK Lawson is a visual artist and poet. Over the past 30 years his work has been exhibited extensively throughout the USA including the American Visionary Museum in Baltimore, the Californian African American Museum in Los Angelos, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Time and Space Limited, Hudson, NY and currently at the New England Visionary Arts museum, in Northanpton, Ma. He is the author of seven books, including Zombie Love, his third collection of poems in the Some Guy Upstairs Trilogy. His novel, Hurricane Hotel, set at the Audubon Hotel in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, has been successfully adapted for the theater with several staged readings both in the USA and UK. JK helped establish a poets/songwriter residency at the Rame Center for the Arts in Cornwall, U.K. and along with the poet Jane Ormerod, hosts the Galerie of Poetic Autopsies. A monthly gathering of poets, songwriters, and other undisrables, held at the Park Theatre in Hudson, NY. He is the recipient of both the Mass Individual Grant and the Berkshire Taconic grant and currently lives in Sheffield,Ma with his wife and son and 16-year-old puppy ,Sunshine. For more information, please visit www.lawsonworks.com or follow him on social media.

Poet Talk with Suzanne Stroh

Suzanne Stroh’s new book, published last December by Headmistress Press, is the first English translation of the only book length prose poem by Natalie Clifford Barney, one of the Brilliant Exiles living in Paris between the two World Wars. Suzanne’s writing has been anthologized in NPR’s Story Project, edited by Paul Auster, and by Peacock Press in the Defying Gravity Series edited by Richard Peabody. She’s at work on her first poetry collection.

Anthony Walton

Anthony Walton’s poems have appeared widely, in such magazines and journals as The New Yorker, The American Scholar, The Black Scholar, 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Black Renaissance Noire, Poetry Ireland, Oxford American, Obsidian, Notre Dame Review, The Library of America, and The Academy of American Poets, among many others. He is the author of a chapbook of poems, 1968, and his full-length collection, Celestial Mechanics, will be published in September by Godine. A celebrated writer of prose, he is the author of Mississippi: An American Journey and The End of Respectability. With the late Michael S. Harper, he edited two landmark anthologies, Every Shut-Eye Ain’t Asleep: African American Poetry Since World War II, and The Vintage Anthology of African American Poetry. He teaches at Bowdoin College.

Heather Treseler

Heather Treseler is author of Auguries & Divinations, which received the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry, and two chapbooks, Hard Bargain and Parturition. Her work has received a Pushcart Prize, the W. B. Yeats Prize, and the Editors’ Prize from The Missouri Review, and support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her poems appear in Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, The Irish Times, and Kenyon Review, and her essays appear in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, and in eight books about poetry. She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.