Jessica Piazza: National Poetry Month 2026

Poetry Medicine for the Soul is a podcast inviting poets to share, explore, and celebrate poetry, hosted by John Gillespie. This National Poetry Month 2026 bonus episode features Jessica Piazza reading "Easter" by Jill Alexander Essbaum. You can read "Easter" on the Poetry Foundation website. Jessica Piazza is the author of three poetry collections: Interrobang, This is not a sky, and Obliterations (with Heather Aimee O'Neill), as well as the children's book Olivia Otter Builds Her Raft. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Jessica now lives in Los Angeles, where she is a professor at the University of Southern California. She co-founded Bat City Review (Austin, TX) and Gold Line Press (Los Angeles, CA), and curates Poetry Has Value, which focuses on the intersections of poetry, money and worth. She is the recipient of the Amy Clampitt residency, and is working on a new poetry collection and a novel. Her poems have most recently appeared in Best American Poetry, The Baltimore Review, The Cincinnati Review, Smartish Pace and 32 Poems. When she's not writing or teaching, Jessica works with Literary Affairs, facilitating book clubs for avid readers all around Los Angeles. Learn more at www.jessicapiazza.com. Born in Bay City, Texas, poet and editor Jill Alexander Essbaum was educated at the University of Houston, the University of Texas, and the Episcopal Seminary of the Southwest. Essbaum’s debut collection of poems, Heaven (2000), won the 1999 Bakeless Prize. Other collections include Harlot (2007), Necropolis (2008), and the long-poem chapbook The Devastation (2009). Her work has been included in the anthology Best American Erotic Poems (2008). Essbaum’s novel Hausfrau (2015) was a New York Times Bestseller, named one of the best books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, the Huffington Post, and Shelf Awareness, and nominated for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. The recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Essbaum has served as an editor for the online journal ANTI- , the print journal The National Poetry Review, and has also edited for the Nanopress Project, whose aim is to “pioneer a new poetry publishing model that brings together, on a one-time basis, an independent editor’s judgment and gravitas and a poet’s manuscript.” Essbaum teaches in the University of California-Riverside Palm Desert’s low-residency MFA program and lives in Austin, Texas. This podcast is hosted and produced by John Gillespie. Check out our website or Simplecast podcast feed for more episodes. Listen and subscribe to Poetry Medicine for the Soul in Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more and get in touch: poetrymedicineforthesoul.com