Author: Ann Bracken

Ann Bracken has authored three poetry collections, Once You’re Inside: Poems Exploring Incarceration, No Barking in the Hallways: Poems from the Classroom and The Altar of Innocence. Her memoir, Crash: A Memoir of Overmedication and Receovery, will be published in late 2022. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review, and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series. Her poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, and Ann’s poetry has garnered two Pushcart Prize nominations. She’s been featured in Best American Poetry and interviewed by Grace Cavalieri on The Poet and the Poem. Ann’s advocacy work promotes using the arts to foster paradigm change in the areas of emotional wellness, education, and prison abolition.

by Ann Bracken

Interview with Naomi Thiers

I met Naomi Thiers at The Nora School last February when we both participated in a reading. Naomi’s poetry spoke powerfully as she read her stories about women and girls who are marginalized and forgotten, as well as her poems about her grandparents. Her gift lies in getting beneath the surface to reveal and then […]

Interview with Grace Cavalieri

Grace Cavalieri is just as comfortable in the kitchen making gnocchi with spinach and mushrooms as she is in the radio studio interviewing, Juan Felipe Herrera, the new Poet Laureate of the United States. When I talked with Grace about the role of myth in her life and work, she moved easily between making me […]

Once You’re Inside

Note: All the men’s names have been changed to preserve their anonymity. I didn’t know what to expect when Linda Moghadam and I visited the men’s writing group at the Patuxent Institute. I had a clue as to the motivation and tenor of the men from reading a brochure Linda had given me about the […]