Mike Lala (b. 1987, Lubbock, TX) is a poet who works with text, recorded sound, and, occasionally, images. His first book, Exit Theater, was selected by Tyrone Williams for the 2016 Colorado Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming later this year. Current work can be found in Boston Review, Fence, The Brooklyn Rail, Denver Quarterly, Jubilat, The Awl, and VOLT, as well as a number of chapbooks, most recently In the Gun Cabinet (TAR 2016) and Twenty-Four Exits (Present Tense Pamphlets 2016). He lives in New York. www.mikelala.com

Episode 5 Mike Lala

Erika L. Sánchez is a poet, essayist, and novelist She is the author of Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf 2017) and a Young Adult novel forthcoming from Knopf in the fall of 2017. Her nonfiction has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and many other publications. She has received a CantoMundo Fellowship, a "Discovery"/Boston Review Poetry Prize, and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.

Episode 8: An Interview With Erika L. Sánchez

Hannah Gamble is the author of Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast (Fence Books, 2012), selected by Bernadette Mayer for the 2011 National Poetry Series. She has performed her work at the Pitchfork music festival, the Chicago Art Institute, The Chicago MCA, and as part of the Clark Street Bridge arts series in association with FCB Global.
Gamble's poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, POETRY, The Believer, jubilat, and Pleiades, and she has written for the Poetry Foundation, the Poetry Society of America, and the culture magazine Fanzine. In 2014, Gamble was awarded a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. 
She lives in Chicago.

Episode 9: An Interview With Hannah Gamble

Mark Turcotte (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) is author of four poetry collections, including The Feathered Heart and Exploding Chippewas. His poems and stories have appeared in POETRY, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, North American Review, The Missouri Review, LUNA, Prairie Schooner and the recent anthology, Stray Dogs. His work was included in the Poetry Society’s Poetry In Motion project, as well as the Poetry Foundation/NEA recitation program, Poetry Out Loud. He has been the recipient of a Lannan Foundation Grant, two Literary Fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Josephine Gates Kelly Memorial Fellowship from Wordcraft Circle.  He was the 2008/09 Visiting Native Writer at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, and served as Visiting Writer-In-Residence for Spring 2014 at the Center For The Writing Arts at Northwestern University. Since 2009 he has been a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at DePaul University.

Episode 10: An Interview with Mark Turcotte

Parneshia Jones is the author of Vessel: Poems (Milkweed Editions). After studying creative writing at Chicago State University, earning an MFA from Spalding University, and studying publishing at Yale University, Jones has been honored with the Gwendolyn Brooks Poetry Award, the Margaret Walker Short Story Award, and the Aquarius Press Legacy Award. Her work has also been anthologized in She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems, edited by Caroline Kennedy and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, edited by Nikky Finney. A member of the Affrilachian Poets, she serves on the board of Cave Canem and Global Writes. She currently holds positions as Sales and Subsidiary Rights Manager and Poetry Editor at Northwestern University Press. Parneshia Jones lives in Chicago.

Episode 11 An Interview With Parneshia Jones

Episode 11 Bonus: Parneshia Jones on Community and Publishing

Detroit native Tyehimba Jess’ first book of poetry, leadbelly, was a winner of the 2004 National Poetry Series. The Library Journal and Black Issues Book Review both named it one of the “Best Poetry Books of 2005.” Jess, a Cave Canem and NYU alumnus, received a 2004 Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and was a 2004-2005 Winter Fellow at the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. Jess is also a veteran of the 2000 and 2001 Green Mill Poetry Slam Team, and won a 2000 – 2001 Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, the 2001 Chicago Sun-Times Poetry Award, and a 2006 Whiting Fellowship. He exhibited his poetry at the 2011 TEDxNashville Conference. Olio, his second collection, was published by Wave Books in April 2016. Jess is an Associate Professor of English at College of Staten Island.

Jess' fiction and poetry have appeared in anthologies such as Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Beyond The Frontier: African American Poetry for the Twenty-First Century, Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art, Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Power Lines: Ten Years of Poetry from Chicago's Guild Complex, Slam: The Art of Performance Poetry. His poetry has appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Ploughshares, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas, Mosaic, American Poetry Review, Indiana Review, Nashville Review and 580 Split.

Tyehimba Jess Final

A bonus from our latest episode -- Toby and Tyehimba read "Freed Song: Dream Gone" and "Dream Song 13" together.

Freed Song   Dream Song

Called by Sandra Cisneros “the Pablo Neruda of North American poets, “ Martín Espada was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1957. He has published almost twenty books as a poet, editor, essayist and translator. His new collection of poems from Norton is called Vivas to Those Who Have Failed (2016). Other books of poems include The Trouble Ball (2011), The Republic of Poetry (2006), Alabanza (2003), A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen (2000), Imagine the Angels of Bread (1996), City of Coughing and Dead Radiators (1993) and Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover’s Hands (1990).

His many honors include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Robert Creeley Award, the National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, an American Book Award, the PEN/Revson Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. The Republic of Poetry was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The title poem of his collection Alabanza, about 9/11, has been widely anthologized and performed. His book of essays, Zapata’s Disciple (1998), was banned in Tucson as part of the Mexican-American Studies Program outlawed by the state of Arizona, and will be reissued in a new edition this fall. A former tenant lawyer in Greater Boston’s Latino community, Espada is a professor of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Martín Espada Final

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist. He is the author of Radios (Make Now Press, 2016), EXE TXT (Gauss PDF, 2015), Epic Lyric Poem (Troll Thread, 2015), and Inventory Arousal with James Hoff (Bedford Press/Architectural Association, 2011). His editorial work can be found online at UbuWeb, PennSound, Eclipse, and Jacket2. With Mashinka Firunts and Avi Alpert, he is one-third of the academic performance group Research Service. He is currently at work on a memoir entitled Apocalypse Diary. See also: http://dss-edit.com

Episode 16: An Interview with Danny Snelson

Make (No) Bones is a podcast about poems and poetry. Each episode we invite a poet to read one of their poems and talk about it in relation to the work. Hosted by Emily Barton Altman and Toby Altman.

Make (No) Bones Podcast