Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).

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Read: "Faith Test" at The Florida Review Online

Purchase: The Science of Things We Can Believe (Ghost Peach Press, 2024)

Christen Noel Kauffmanis author of The Science of Things We Can Believe which won the Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry chosen by Tiana Clark (2024) and the chapbook Notes to a Mother God (2021), which was a winner of the Paper Nautilus Debut Chapbook Series. She is a 2022 National Poetry Series Finalist and her work can be found in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. She's currently a poetry editor for Driftwood Press and lives in Richmond, Indiana.

Reading/Listening Recommendations:
Frank X Walker's Affrilachia

Sara Moore Wagner's Of Poetry Episode

upfromsumdirt's Of Poetry Episode

Joe Wilkin's Of Poetry Episode

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).

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Purchase: Lady Wing Shot by Sara Moore Wagner (Lynx House Press, 2024)

Read: “Annie Oakley’s Bullet Inventory” Jet Fuel Review

Sara Moore Wagner is the author of three prize winning full length books of poetry, Lady Wing Shot, winner of the 2023 Blue Lynx Prize (2024), Swan Wife (Cider Press Review Editors Prize, 2022), and Hillbilly Madonna (Driftwood Press Manuscript Prize, 2022), and of two chapbooks. She is also a 2022 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award recipient, a 2021 National Poetry Series Finalist, and the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals and anthologies including Gulf Coast, Smartish Pace, Waxwing, Beloit Poetry Journal, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. In 2023, she became the Managing Poetry Editor of Driftwood Press. She lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three children.

Recommended Reading

Christen Noel Kauffman (with us in spirit on Episode 74!)

[Buffalo Bill 's] by E.E. Cummings

Lit Youngstown
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).

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Read: "Practice Elegy" at Copper Nickel

Purchase: The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021)

Rachel Mennies is the author of the poetry collections The Wolf (BOA Editions, forthcoming fall 2027); The Naomi Letters (BOA Editions, 2021); The Glad Hand of God Points Backwards, the 2014 winner of the Walt McDonald First-Book Prize in Poetry at Texas Tech University Press and finalist for a National Jewish Book Award; and No Silence in the Fields, a chapbook from Blue Hour Press. Her poetry has recently appeared at Poetry Magazine, The Believer, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Rachel's essays, criticism, and other articles have appeared, or will soon, at The Millions, The Poetry Foundation, LitHub, and numerous other outlets.

Reading Recommendations:

"Having it out with Melancholy" by Jane Kenyon

Portrait of a Woman on Fire, Dir. Céline Sciamma (film)

Aracelis Girmay's The Black Maria

This is How You Lose the Time Warby Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Circe by Madeline Miller

Galatea by Madeline Miller

[Eugenio] Montale in English

Adrienne Rich

Anne Sexton

Virginia Woolf

Anaïs Nin

Sylvia Plath