To celebrate the launch of Steven Sanchez’s first full-length poetry book, PhantomTongue, Mike sits down with Steven, Michelle Brittan Rosado, and Mathieu Cailler to talk about the process of putting a book together, how one manages to keep making love poems interesting, the power of persona poems and so much more! Writers’ Block Live! is recorded at the 1888 Center in Orange, California. 

Mathieu Cailler’s poetry and prose have been widely featured in numerous national and international publications, including the Los Angeles Times and The Saturday Evening Post. A graduate of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, he is the recipient of a Short Story America Prize for Short Fiction and a Shakespeare Award for Poetry. He is the author of Clotheslines (Red Bird Press), Shhh (ELJ Publications), and Loss Angeles (Short Story America Press), which has been honored by the Hollywood, New York, London, Paris, Best Book, and International Book Awards. His newest book, May I Have This Dance? (About Editions), was recently named poetry winner of the New England Book Festival.

Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, which won the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and is forthcoming from University of Wisconsin Press in Fall 2018. Her chapbook, Theory on Falling into a Reef, was the winner of the inaugural Rick Campbell Prize, and Her poems have been published in Alaska Quarterly Review, Indiana Review, Poet Lore, and The New Yorker.

Steven Sanchez is the author of Phantom Tongue, selected by Mark Doty as the winner of the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award (Sundress Publications, 2018). He is also the author of two chapbooks: To My Body (Glass Poetry Press, 2016) and Photographs of Our Shadows (Agape Editions, 2017). His poems have appeared in Poet Lore, Nimrod, Crab Creek Review, Muzzle, and Tinderbox.

Producer and Host: Mike Gravagno
Producers: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Manager: Sarah Becker
Guests: Mathieu Cailler, Michelle Brittan Rosado, and Steven Sanchez
Audio: Brew Sessions Live