Julia B. Levine and Natalie Shapero

On the 11/6/24 edition of Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour:

Julia B. Levine joins Dr. Andy in conversation after her 2024 Pushcart Prize win, stating the gratitude and shock she felt upon winning. She then shares high praise for her peer Murray Silverstein, who will be reading with her at the Poetry Night Reading Series on November 7th, 2024. Levine then shares a poem centered around joy titled “The Dove.” She also recommends John Murillo’s collection Kontemperary Amerikan Poetry. The next guest on the show, Natalie Shapero, phones in to discuss her upcoming reading at Shields Library, and her excitement to see the trees of Davis, California. Shapero describes her poetic life and career from Washington D.C, to Boston, and now to California. She thereafter shares the thematic throughlines of her most recent collection, Popular Longing, a collection that outlines the power dynamics at play within the financial structures of art institutions. Shapero then shares two poems, “My Hair is My Thing” and “Magpie.”  Shapero also discusses the natural time it takes her to assemble a collection of poetry,

Julia B. Levine is the poet laureate emerita of Davis, California. Levine’s poetry has won many awards, including a 2021 Nautilus Award for her fifth poetry collection, Ordinary Psalms (LSU press, 2021), as well as the 2015 Northern California Book Award in Poetry for her fourth collection, Small Disasters Seen in Sunlight (LSU, 2014). Recently she has won the 2024 Pushcart Prize, the 2023 Oran Perry Burke Award from The Southern Review, the 2022 Steve Kowit Poetry Prize, the 2020 Bellevue Literary Review Poetry Award, as well as a 2022 American Academy of Poetry Poet Laureate Fellowship for her work in building resilience in teenagers related to climate change through poetry, science and technology. Her work has appeared in many literary journals, including Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Nation and Prairie Schooner. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from University of California, Berkeley and an MFA in poetry from Pacific University.

Natalie Shapero was born in Chester, Pennsylvania and earned a BA in Writing Seminars from the Johns Hopkins University, an MFA in Poetry from the Ohio State University, and a JD from the University of Chicago. For the 2011-2012 year, Shapero served as the Steven Gey Fellow with Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She is the author of the poetry collections No Object (Saturnalia, 2013), Hard Child (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), and Popular Longing (Copper Canyon Press, 2021). Her writing has appeared in The Believer, The New Republic, Poetry, The Progressive, and elsewhere, and she is an editor at the Kenyon Review. In 2012-2014, she was a Kenyon Review fellow. Shapero teaches at Tufts University. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches writing at UC Irvine.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, visit his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.

Find out more about Dr. Andy's Poetry Night Reading Series in Davis, California by visiting http://www.poetryindavis.com. Invite your friends to sign up for the mailing list. To learn more about Dr. Andy’s tiny media fiefdom, subscribe to his weekly newsletter at https://andyjones.substack.com.