Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).
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Read: "Ghazal: Morning" (The Offing)

Purchase: In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls(Wandering Aengus Press, 2025)

Majda Gama was born in Beirut to a Saudi father and American mother. Her hometown is Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and her roots Hijazi, but she also has a long, complicated relationship with Northern Virginia where her father was stationed in the 1970's. Majda is the author of In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls (Wandering Aengus Press, 2025) and The Call of Paradise, (Two Sylvia’s, 2023). Her poetry has been honored with the Graybeal-Gowen award for Virginia poets from Shenandoah and the Gregory Djanikian scholar award for poetry from Adroit. Recent poems have appeared in, or are forthcoming from, AGNI, Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Swamp Pink, Tupelo Quarterly, and TriQuarterly.

Recommended reading
2017 PEN America World Voices: Sheyr Jangi (Poetic Battles)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Mahmoud Darwish

Fady Joudah

Gwendolyn Brooks

Jill Kitchen

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).
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Read: Three Poems by Frances Klein at Cultural Daily

Purchase: Another Life (Riot in Your Throat Press, 2025)

Frances Klein is an Alaskan poet and teacher. Klein is the author of the poetry collection Another Life (Riot in Your Throat Press, 2025). She is also the author of several poetry chapbooks, including (Text) Messages from The Angel Gabriel (Gnashing Teeth, 2024). Klein is the founding editor of Flight: A Literary Sampler, and an editor at The Weight Journal. Her writing has appeared in Best Microfictions, Rattle, the Harvard Advocate, the London Magazine, HAD, and others. Klein lives in Southeast Alaska with her husband and son.

Recommended Reading:

Terrance Hayes, "Wind in a Box" (poem, also recommend book)

Jericho Brown

Marianne Baruch, Grace, Fallen from

Joshua Bennett

Robert Hass

Lucille Clifton

Sarah Vap, End of the Sentimental Journey

James Tate

Of Poetry is hosted by Han VanderHart, author of Larks (Ohio UP, 2025).
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Read: "Mother Water Ash" (Poets.org)

Purchase: MOTHER WATER ASH(Louisiana State University Press 2024)

Nicole Cooley grew up in New Orleans and is the author of seven books of poems, most recently MOTHER WATER ASH(Louisiana State University Press 2024), as well as OF MARRIAGE (Alice James Books 2018), GIRL AFTER GIRL AFTER GIRL (LSU Press 2018) and BREACH (LSU Press 2010). She has received the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, an NEA grant, and the Emily Dickinson Award from The Poetry Society of America, and most recently a grant from the New Jersey Council for the Arts. She is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Queens College, The City University of New York and lives in NJ with her family.

Reading Recommendations:

Yannis Ritsos

Incendiary Art by Patricia Smith

The Dream of Reason by Jenny George

The Poet in the Worldby Denise Levertov

The Art of Deathby Edwidge Danticat

Against Forgetting by Carolyn Forche

Orbit by Victoria Chang

Mother Hunger by Kelly McDaniel

"A Small Needful Fact" by Ross Gay

C.D. Wright

Philip Levine