Poetry Medicine for the Soul

About Poetry Medicine for the Soul

Poetry readings and conversation

Publisher

John Gillespie

Category

arts

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

17 Oct 2024

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

74 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Oct 2026

   The other side of today: a reading with Carolina Hospital

   Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode features poet, prose writer and editor Carolina Hospital. Carolina's most recent and fourth solo poetry collection is All Roads Lead to Here from Anhinga Press. Other recent works include the limited signed and numbered edition of haibun Bamboo Ghost Notes, and How to Get into Trouble, collaborations with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina, as well as the lyrics to the CD Greetings from Florida: Postcards from Paradise by composer Scott Lee released by Sunnyside Records.

2. 

   9 Sept 2026

   Melody or Witchcraft: Poets on Emily Dickinson and Today's Issues

   Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This episode shares another wonderful poetry podcast called Melody or Witchcraft: Poets on Emily Dickinson & Today’s Issues. Melody or Witchcraft is hosted and produced by Kathryn Petrucelli. Her podcast features poets reading a work of their own and an Emily Dickinson poem of their choosing. Kathryn is a poet and workshop leader, as well as a good friend and contributor to Poetry Medicine for the Soul. In this episode, Kathryn talks with poet Kemi Alabi, author of Against Heaven and co-editor of The Echoing Ida Collection. Kemi was a guest on Melody or Witchcraft’s most recent season, which also included poets like Pádraig Ó Tuama and Diane Seuss. Full show notes and bonus content for Melody or Witchcraft are available on Kathryn's Substack: Ask The Poet. You can find Melody or Witchcraft wherever you listen to podcasts and on YouTube. Poetry Medicine for the Soul Season 7 is in the works and will air this fall. Subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. Kathryn Petrucelli holds an M.A. in teaching English language learners and a love of the stage. She’s passionate about getting contemporary poetry, particularly that of Poets of Color, in front of youth. Among the journals her work has appeared in are The Southern Review, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, RHINO, Rattle, Poet Lore, SWWIM,  and Literary Mama. Nominated for a Pushcart 2024 & 2025, Best Small Fictions in 2024, & Best of the Net 2020, Kathryn is a past winner of San Francisco’s LitQuake essay contest and a finalist for the Omnidawn Broadside Poetry Prize. She writes the Ask the Poet Substack and hosts the Melody or Witchcraft podcast. Kathryn lives with her family in the west of Ireland. Learn more at poetsroar.com. Kemi Alabi (they/them) was born in Wisconsin on a Sunday in July and is now a Chicago-based poet, essayist, cultural strategist, and teaching artist informed by the Black surrealist tradition. They’re author of Against Heaven (Graywolf Press, 2022), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Academy of American Poets First Book Award. The collection was a Kate Tufts Discovery and Leslie Feinberg Award finalist, Chicago Review of Books Award winner, and one of New York Public Library’s Best Books of 2022. Kemi’s poems have appeared in The Atlantic, The Nation, Poetry, Boston Review, the Grammy-nominated album Difficult Grace, and elsewhere. Kemi is co-editor of The Echoing Ida Collection (Feminist Press, 2021), an anthology of Black reproductive justice writing. They've spent over a decade building narrative power for trans and queer bodily autonomy, most recently as the 2024-2025 Feminist in Residence at Northwestern University, where they developed the MELONCHOLIA audio collage and ritual. They’ve received fellowships and grants from MacDowell, Sewanee, Berlin’s Junge Akademie, Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events, and Beloit Poetry Journal, where they were the inaugural Iron Mouth Curatorial Fellow. Kemi is working on their second poetry collection and can be contacted here for readings, workshops, classroom visits, and manuscript consultations. Learn more at kemialabi.com.

3. 

   19 Aug 2026

   From the Archive: Lawrence Raab

   Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This summer in 2026, we are sharing some of our favorite episodes from the archives! Poetry Medicine for the Soul first began in 2020, in partnership with the Stockbridge Library in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. With the Stockbridge Library, over a hundred episodes were recorded over four seasons. This episode features Lawrence Raab, which was originally recorded on May 17, 2022 and can be viewed on the Stockbridge Library YouTube page. Lawrence Raab is a poet and professor, born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. He earned a BA from Middlebury College and an MA from Syracuse University and has taught at various institutions including American University, the University of Michigan, and Williams College, where he is the Morris Professor of Rhetoric. Raab is the author of many collections of poetry, including April at the Ruins (2022), The Life Beside This One (2017); Mistaking Each Other for Ghosts (2015), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; The History of Forgetting (2009); Visible Signs: New and Selected Poems (2003); and What We Don’t Know About Each Other (1993), selected for the National Poetry Series by Stephen Dunn and a finalist for the National Book Award. He collaborated with Stephen Dunn on a chapbook of poems, Winter at the Caspian Sea (1999). Conversational yet precise, Raab’s lyrical meditations trace human fallibility and doubt. As Boston Review critic Don Colburn noted in a review of What We Don’t Know About Each Other, “Lawrence Raab’s gracefully haunting poems explore the fine lines of our temporal lives‚ between distance and intimacy, limits and possibility, present and past … In Raab’s poems, reason and faith are not as far apart as they sometimes seem.” In addition to his poetry, Raab has written the screenplays The Distances (1967) and Or I’ll Come to You (1968). The Birds, his adaptation of a play by Aristophanes, was first produced at the Power Center in Ann Arbor in 1975. Raab has been an editor for Frontiers and a member of the editorial board of Alkahest. Raab’s honors include the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry magazine, the Academy of American Poets Prize, and the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum. He has also received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, the Peter S. Reed Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Raab’s poetry has been featured in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1983), A Book of Luminous Things (1996), and several volumes of Best American Poetry. Learn more at www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lawrence-raab.

Who has been a guest on Poetry Medicine for the Soul

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Claire Millikin
• Maya Williams
• Dr Therí Pickens
• John Reinhart
• Kristen Lindquist

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

1 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 40 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

66

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

32

Contact Poetry Medicine for the Soul

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

Shows with a similar audience

• 

  The Poetry Space_

• 

  Up First

• 

  Good Hang with Amy Poehler

• 

  Lovett or Leave It

• 

  The New Abnormal

Questions about Poetry Medicine for the Soul