New Hampshire-raised poet and video artist Kevin McLellan’s complex and moving collection SKY. POND. MOUTH. is the winner of our Granite State Poetry Prize and our first published collection on Yas Press. I usually share a video of a poet reading one poem, but the videos I found of McLellan reading were pretty low fidelity, so I thought I’d just talk about the book.  SKY. POND. MOUTH. is formally diverse and psychologically rich while also having a striking starkness and sense of solitude—qualities that are not at all contradictory if you’re familiar with New Hampshire, where the more...

    Our first Nossrat Yassini Poetry Prize winner, chosen by Camille Dungy, is the fabulous Kweku Abimbola, for his debut collection Saltwater Demands a Psalm. His work, concerned as it is with the fundamentals of being human—place and identity—is perfect for the task of inaugurating the tradition of the Prize. Beyond simply being great in themselves, Abimbola’s poems tell us something about why we make poetry in the first place: poetry is one of the most powerful ways to bear witness to life. The lives he’s concerned with are Black lives, both in Africa (he’s of mixed West African...

  This spotlight is going to be a bit different, because our subject, Diane Foley, is not a poet. Her son, journalist James Foley, was the first American citizen killed by ISIS. After many years in the late 2000s and early 2010s covering wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, Foley was kidnapped by ISIS in 2012. He spent nearly two excruciating years as a hostage before the group murdered him. Less than a month later, his family founded the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation.  Diane, the President of the Foundation, is a UNH graduate and longtime resident of Wolfeboro, New...

Many of our headliners are based in New England, but nobody's more local for us than Diannely Antigua, who not only lives nearby Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where she serves as poet laureate, but also teaches poetry here at UNH's English Department as our inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. Her first book, Ugly Music, came out via YesYes Books in 2019; its follow-up, Good Monster, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press, and will be available at the Festival. Antigua's work has an intimate feel, often reflecting on personal experiences and inner emotional...

A professor at Hampshire College and current poetry editor for the Massachusetts Review, Nathan McClain is well-established figure in the New England poetry scene and nationally. He’s published two collections with Four Way Books, Scale (2017) and Previously Owned (2022). Jump to 2:27 in the video above to hear McClain read “Fire Destroys Beloved Chicago Bakery”, a beautifully compressed reflection on the mind's associative capacities and the enduring effects of trauma. Inspired by a newspaper headline (from which it borrows its title), the poem is structured around the speaker’s unconscious...

Mckendy Fils-Aime is a Haitian-American poet based in New England. He's described himself as a "perennial semi-finalist of the National Poetry Slam," in which he's participated nine times. He employs a bold and dynamic live reading style, a preference for direct, colloquial language, and striking metaphors. In "To Ask a Place to Say Its Name", recorded in 2018, Fils-Aime discusses the psychological effects of gentrification, and "what it means to feel like a tourist in your home." He breaks from a narrative of a neighborhood whose cultural identity is slowing being eroded and replaced...

We're very lucky to have Camille Dungy, whose stunning work has a natural music and a longstanding interest in the relationship between ecology and society, as one of our headliners for the first Nossrat Yassini Poetry Festival. Her latest book, Soil: the Story of a Black Mother's Garden, is not a poetry collection but a unique memoir about her experience building a garden in Fort Collins, Colorado, where her mostly white community maintained bizarrely restrictive rules for gardening--reflective, to her mind, of a dangerous mania for homogeneity, corrosive to both the enviroment...