I had the great honor of interviewing one of my all-time favorite poets, Naomi Shihab Nye.  This interview will air Sunday, October 3 at 10:30 am and Monday, October 4 at 1:30 pm on Irving Toast, Poetry Ghost, KRUU-LP 100.1 FM, http://kruufm.com.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born on March 12, 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University. [Click read more below.]

Iowa State Poet Laureate Mary Swander read at the MUM Library North Lounge at 7:30 pm on Wednesday, February 1st, 2012. There was a reception for the author afterwards and refreshments were served. This event was made possible through funding from Humanities Iowa.

In 2009, Governor Chet Culver appointed Mary Swander the Poet Laureate of the State of Iowa. Her most recent work is a book of poetry, The Girls on the Roof (Turning Point/Word Tech, 2009), a Mississippi River flood narrative. Swander has worked with the Eulenspiegel Puppet Theatre to create a performance piece of The Girls for the stage. Currently, Swander is also touring her play Farmscape, a docudrama capturing the changing rural environment. She is the co-founder of Agarts, a national group designed to explore the intersection of the arts and agriculture, and is developing a website, The Iowa Literary Community, where anyone with an Iowa connection can post poetry and other pieces of writing.

Reginald Gibbons' blog posts at
Northwestern's Center for the Writing Arts

b. 1957

Poet and translator Cyrus Cassells was born in 1957 in Delaware and earned a BA from Stanford University. Cassells is the author of a number of collections of poetry, including the National Poetry Series winning The Mud Actor (1982),Soul Make a Path through Shouting (1994), which won the William Carlos Williams Prize and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Beautiful Signor (1997), which won a Lambda Literary Award, More Than Peace and Cypresses (2004), and The Crossed-Out Swastika (2012). A book of his translations of the Catalan poet Francesc Parcerisas, Still Life With Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, is forthcoming.