We got to chat with NH State Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello about her work as Poet Laureate and to listen to and chat about 3 poems. We also talked about her forthcoming work and the value of poetry in turbulent times. You can listen to the conversation and the poems here:



Jennifer Militello is the current Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. She is the author of the hybrid collection Identifying the Pathogen, named a finalist for the 2024 FC2 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize (forthcoming, 2025), The Pact (Tupelo Press/, 2021) and the memoir , winner of the Dzanc Nonfiction Prize (Dzanc Books, 2019), as well as four previous books of poetry. Her work has appeared in numerous national journals in the U.S. and abroad. She has taught at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts Lowell, the Rhode Island School of Design, and is currently program director of the MFA program at New England College.

You can find out more about her and her work here at: https://jennifermilitello.com/

An Excerpt from the conversation:

"I think of poetry as the most public, safe space there is because I think in our language, we can never be wrong. Like this is the place we speak from. The genuine inside hearts of ourselves and reach out to the genuine inside hearts of others and find the common ground. In the current climate when everyone is doing everything they can to divide us, there is enough space and love for everyone in poems. And so, I'm starting to think of them more and more as a kind of tender battleground, right? The sort of the place where we protect one another and protect ourselves because, you know, the tender and the real and empathy and connection are what poems are for. No matter what we're saying, it's about connecting, you know, creating, literally building a road from one heart to another in a genuine and true way."