Versopolis podcast

What happens to a poem when it crosses an ocean? This spring, Versopolis opened its first transatlantic route, and two poets set off in opposite directions to find out.Volha Hapeyeva, a Belarusian poet, translator and linguist who writes in Belarusian and German, travelled through the United States, reading in Washington, Tucson and St. Louis. Rachel DeWoskin, an American poet and novelist who spent her twenties in Beijing, flew to Riga for the Page Break International Poetry Festival, where poets read in their own languages while translations glowed on the walls.In this episode, the two meet to compare what they found. They talk about why translation can ‘oxygenate’ a poem, why Belarusian sounds like a song and what it means to write in a language you were not born into. Then the conversation takes an unexpected turn east, into Tang poetry translated with a father, a months-long argument over gibbons and monkeys, and a Japanese haiku master who wrote tender little poems for flies.The conversation closes on poetry’s role in public life: not an answer to political crises, but a means of restoring nuance, fostering empathy and resisting isolation. In a world divided by borders and languages, poetry remains an invitation to listen and translate.Volha Hapeyeva, born in Minsk, Belarus, is an award-winning poet who writes in Belarusian and German. She is the author of seven poetry books and two novels in Belarusian; in German she has published the essay The Defense of Poetry in Times of Ongoing Exile (2022) and The Dictionary of a Nomad (2026). Her poems have been translated into more than 15 languages, and her awards include the English PEN Translates Award, the Wortmeldungen Prize and the manuskripte Prize. Since 2020 she has lived as a nomad in exile in Austria and Germany. In spring 2026 she was the first European poet of Versopolis USA, reading at Georgetown University, the University of Arizona Poetry Center and Washington University in St. Louis. She is curating the Poetica festival in Cologne in 2027.Rachel DeWoskin is an American poet, novelist and memoirist who lives in Chicago with her family. In her twenties she lived in Beijing, where she unexpectedly became the star of a Chinese television soap opera, an experience she recounts in her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She is the author of five novels, including Someday We Will Fly, winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Sydney Taylor Book Award, and Big Girl Small, which received an Alex Award. Her poetry collections Two Menus and absolute animal were published by the University of Chicago Press; absolute animal includes her translations of classical Chinese poems by Li Bai, Wang Zhihuan and others. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Ploughshares and other magazines. She has taught at Boston University, NYU and the University of Chicago, and serves on the national steering committee of Writers for Democratic Action.

»FEDORA – VAN CLEEF & ARPELS Dance Prize 2025 Winner«In this special series of the Versopolis podcast, poets from the Versopolis network recollect their impressions of premieres of FEDORA Prize-winning works by writing a poem. The invited poet experiences the performance, the artistic creation process surrounding it, and the atmosphere of the premiere from an audience member’s point of view. Gentlemen’s Jack is a ballet that premiered in May 2026 and won the FEDORA – VAN CLEEF & ARPELS Dance Prize 2025. Its prima ballerina, Gemma Coutts, plays the part of Anne Lister, a 19th-century entrepreneur often referred to as ‘Gentleman Jack’ and today regarded as the world’s first modern lesbian icon. Among the audience at the premiere in London in May 2026 was Ruth Lasters, the incumbent Poet Laureate of Belgium, who wrote a poem in response to the piece. We talked about why the ballet, inspired by the unconventional 19th-century entrepreneur Anne Lister, is relevant today and how themes of identity reverberate throughout the years. Why does loving mean losing all self-deceit? What happens when the hat worn by Anne Lister falls from her head in the middle of rehearsals, and why does the hat turn to glass in the poem? Ruth Lasters is an award-winning Belgian poet and novelist. Her debut novel, Poolijs/Polar Ice, won the Flemish Debut Prize in 2007. Her poetry collections include Vouwplannen/Folding Plans, Lichtmeters/Light Meters, and Tijgerbrood/Tiger Bread, which received several major poetry awards. Her work has been translated into German, Spanish and French, most recently Désirs à l’essai/Trial Desires (2026). Lasters has performed internationally at festivals including Poetry International. In 2022, she resigned as City Poet of Antwerp after the city rejected a poem addressing educational discrimination, an act that earned her the Ark Prize of Free Speech in 2023. In 2026, she became Poet Laureate of Belgium. Gemma Coutts is a ballerina from New Zealand who grew up in Thailand where she trained at the Aree School of Dance Arts in Bangkok. She continued her training in London and graduated at the English National Ballet School. Gemma is now in her fifth season at Northern Ballet. In that time she has experienced a range of corps and soloist roles which have allowed her to develop her artistic range and confidence. She was the principal ballerina in the ballet Gentlemen’s Jack which premiered on May 2026 and won the Winner of the FEDORA – VAN CLEEF & ARPELS Dance Prize 2025. 

The multilingual poet Natalija Milovanović has firmly established her poetics with her second book of poems, Tuja mehkoba (Foreign Softness), which won the Veronika Prize for the best poetry collection in Slovenia of 2025. Talking about language and identity, she explains that a poem usually arrives to her in Slovenian, even though she was born in Niš at the height of the Yugoslav wars. It is mostly the subject that decides the language: the more intimate the topic, the more likely it is to be written in her native tongue. Her poems explore identity with a refined, unhurried sensibility, a reflexive attention to language and a contemplative response to the world. Such writing is emerging as the epitome of a poetics of post-national borders, one that transgresses and travels between languages and countries seamlessly. Without ever losing sight of a sense of belonging, these poems decipher the unwritten rulebook of things held to be self-evident, but that nevertheless change without fail every time a border is crossed. Natalija Milovanović (1995) is a poet and translator with a completed master’s degree in translation studies. She writes in Slovenian and Serbian. Her debut collection Samoumevno (2021) won the award for best literary debut at the Slovenian Book Fair; her second, Tuja mehkoba (2025), received the Veronika Award and was shortlisted for the Jenko Award. Both appeared in 10 Books from Slovenia. She translates poetry and prose between Serbian and Slovenian, and since 2025 has been executive producer of the Pranger festival. Her poems have been translated into eight languages.

‘Human life is not more interesting or worthwhile because it occurs in the centers of capitalism.’ That’s the tagline of Peripheries, the online journal co-run by Katja Perat, who joined us for the 40th edition of the Versopolis Podcast. Katja’s early poetry collections, which earned her a cult following, were written against the backdrop of the 2008 global financial crisis and captured a specific moment: Slovenia drifting into neoliberalism under the cover of liberal democracy. Her relationship with poetry at the time was, she says, fraught, shaped by a tendency to hyper-intellectualize rather than feel.After earning her PhD in 2022 into a brutal humanities job market, she took a position teaching English at a communitycollege in northern Alaska, the northernmost in North America. The move tied together her longstanding fascination with the Far North and her commitment to minor languages: teaching in a community where Iñupiaq is spoken, she draws a quiet parallel to her grandmother’s work with Slovene as a minority language. ‘There’s an untapped wealth of literary inspiration in these spaces where the rural collides with the urban,’ Katja says, ‘the literary markets just isn’t as interested in covering peripheral knowledge. And I think, just from an epistemological perspective, that’s a huge loss.’Katja Perat is a Slovenian poet, novelist, essayist and journalist whose work spans multiple literary forms and languages. She published her first poems in 2007 in the Slovene literary magazine Literatura andthe bilingual Slovenian Bosnian magazine Dignimo pero/Dvignimo pero. Her debut poetry collection, The Best Have Fallen (Najboljši so padli, 2011), received the Best Debut Award and the Kritiško sito Award from the Slovenian Literary Critics’ Association. Her second collection, Value-Added Tax (Davek na dodano vrednost, 2014), was nominated for both the Jenko Award and the Veronika Award. That same year, her work appeared alongside Eileen Myles in Fear of Language, the third issue of Sternberg Press’s Poetic Series. Her novel The Masochist (Mazohistka), translated into English by Michael Biggins and published by Istros Books in 2020, has taken on an international life of its own in translation, earning a nomination for the Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, she published the essay collection Make America Graspable Again. A Slovene immigrant and minor language speaker, Perat holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from Washington University in St. Louis. As a scholar, author and teacher, she explores the relationship between complexity and accessibility, and brings her transcultural, multilingual background to the writing classroom.

What happens when you stop asking AI to sound human and instead ask it to be itself? That’s the question at the heart of Lily in a Codebox: The Search for AI’s Poetic Voice, a book that began as a casual experiment between two Boulder poets and turned into something neither of them expected. Lee Frankel-Goldwater and Eric Raanan Fischman started by asking ChatGPT to imitate the Beat poets. It fell flat. So they triedsomething more radical: they asked the AI to write poetry for an audience of other AIs, in whatever form felt native to its own nature. What came back was something genuinely strange: ASCII structures, protocol-like verse, code typography that sits somewhere between literature and notation. Together they developed the Dickinson-Turing Test: not whether AI can think, but whether it can move us. They coined the term cyborg poetics. And they found themselves in territory that raises real questions about authorship, voice, and what creativity is. In this episode we talk about all of it, including the hardest question of all: whether a project like this is a new frontier for poetry or a betrayal of everything poetry stands for. Lee Frankel-Goldwater is a social innovator, environmental educator and poet whose work weaves together ecosystems, technology and community. Holding a PhD in EnvironmentalStudies from the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches, he brings a systems-thinking lens to everything he creates. His interest in machine creativity traces back to his Computer Science undergraduate thesis on AI music composition using Hidden Markov Models. As a poet and co-organiser of Boulder’s Writer’s Block Collective, he has spent years probing the border between human expression and computational logic. In Lily in a Codebox, co-authored with Eric Raanan Fischman and published by Spinning Leaf Press (2025), he introduces ‘cyborg poetics’ – a practice of inviting AI to write on its own terms, for its own kind. Eric Raanan Fischman is a poet, educator and literary community organiser based in Boulder, Colorado. A graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, he brings the Beat and Outrider traditions into his teaching, writing, and curatorial work – most visibly through Beyond Academia Free Skool, where he offers free public workshops and creative programming throughout Colorado. His poems have appeared in Bombay Gin, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Tiny Spoon, Twenty Bellows and East Window Journal. His poem ‘Night Code’ won a 2023 broadside award from Denver Quarterly, where it was letterpress printed and republished. His debut collection Mordy Gets Enlightened (The Little Door, 2017; Turnsol Editions, 2021) earned wide acclaim, and in 2025 he received a Best of the Net nomination. Lily in a Codebox (Spinning Leaf Press, 2025), co-authored with Lee Frankel-Goldwater, is his second book. 

Turner Wyatt is an award-winning social entrepreneur and one of the editors of Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology, a newly released collection spanning over 100 years of Colorado’s most impactful poets. One of the last state laureates was the late Andrea Gibson, about whom a movie titled Come See Me in the Good Light was nominated for the Best Documentary Award at the 2026 Academy Awards. The editorial project of Begin Where You Are is the first to unite all ten state poets laureate, and it pioneers a collaborative effort to increase access to poetry in Colorado’s rural and underserved communities. In the podcast, we talked about the role of a poet laureate, discerned how the Colorado poetry scene differs from the American scene, discussed how the proceeds from its sales will be used to fund poetry programs in rural areas. In an era of federal funding cuts for the arts, this book introduces a new model for ‘literary social enterprise,’ which sets a precedent for grassroots-funded poetry proliferation. Turner Wyatt is an award-winning social entrepreneur, filmmaker, writer and one of the editors of Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology, a newly released collection spanning over 100 years of Colorado’s most impactful poets, including the late Andrea Gibson. This project is the first to unite all ten state poets laureate, and it pioneers a collaborative effort to increase access to poetry in Colorado’s rural and underserved communities. 

Matic Ačko is a former Slovenian poetry slam champion. He explores the dynamic relationship between poetry, body and audience, contrasting the intimacy of the page with the immediacy of performance, discerning between slam and page poets. Slam poetry is an art form that demands presence: when you forget a line on stage, you cannot freeze but must move forward. This pressure transforms poetry into a practice of resilience, spontaneity and trust in the body. It is in this endeavor that poetry becomes a responsive infrastructure for connection, reclaiming space and building commons. Matic Ačko is a designer, photographer, poet and hobby musician from Maribor where he currently lives. He is a former Slovenian poetry slam champion and has thus represented Slovenia at the European (2021) and the World Poetry Slam Championship (2022). He also organises poetry slam events as the sitting president of the Maribor slam group named ‘Slam beasts’. His first book of poetry titled Requiem for Snow was published in February 2024. Furthermore, his poetry has been published in multiple magazines and anthologies. 

Senka Gavranov’s practice navigates the terrain of the poetic wild, where poems unlearn their traditional shapes to become forms of critical and communal engagement. This unruliness is both a political gesture and a playful reinvention of the medium, demonstrating that breaking form is a direct way to challenge fixed narratives and modes of knowledge production. She is dedicated to demystifying these unruly forms in public workshops by inviting participants into hands on creation, transforming experimental poetry from a distant concept into an accessible, shared experience. This approach tackles core questions of inclusion, proving that chaotic or opaque poems can resonate in everyday life by valuing personal interpretation and collective discovery. She contends that the future of experimental poetry lies precisely in this intersection where radical formal innovation, from algorithmic generation to embodied performance, meets a commitment to participatory access, ensuring the wild poem remains a dynamic and democratic force. Senka Gavranov is a cultural worker who bridges arts based research, advocacy for improving working conditions in the cultural sector and for equitable work opportunities for women and persons with disabilities, feminism, as well as European transnational cooperation. As a PhD candidate, she researches indigeneity and decolonization in contemporary experimental poetry in Canada, focusing on the use and treatment of colonial histories, documents and archives in contemporary literary forms and knowledge-production. As an art mediator, she facilitates participatory workshops that demystify poetry, literature and experimental art for general audiences. Her collaborative get-togethers seek to make complex (academic) concepts and experimental art accessible and relevant to everyday life. Senka is active in the association kultura natura pARTicip (KNP, Romania). She has established productive, durable working relationships with cultural organizations, artists and activists throughout Europe and Canada. In 2026, she organizes Unfold: Experimental Poetries Then and Now (a summer school of experimental poetry) as a coordinator andfacilitator and the travelling festival Synesthetic (experimental art and poetry) as an artistic director. She is proficient in several modern languages and has learned five classical languages. Senka is a committed and proud pedestrian.

Nina Medved is the founder of Dve luni (Two Moons), an institute whose mission is the poetization of the world. Through its work, she mentors young, middle-aged and elderly participants, fostering playfulness through poetry and a wide range of workshops. A firm believer that good things take time, and opposed to the rat race of overproduction, she maintains that the creation of community through ‘third places,’ which her institute enables, is just as – if not more – important than the poetry created in the workshops.In addition to her mentorship work, Nina is an award-winning poet. She won the Urška Young Literature Festival (2019), and her debut poetry collection, Drseči svet (2020), was nominated for Best Debut at the Slovenian Book Fair and presented at the Pranger Festival.She also helped establish the Slovenian slam poetry movement, served as the first leader of the Poetry Society Slam Zverine, and co-organized the European Slam Poetry Championship (2020). We talked about her work across an unusually wide age range, reflected on first encounters with contemporary poetry, and discussed the strategies she uses to create safe spaces for reading and writing. Finally, we explored the vision behind Dve luni and how mentorship, workshops and conscious knowledge transfer aim to poetize the world.Nina Medved is a poet, translator and photographer dedicated to the care of words and light. She graduated in Comparative Literature and French from the Faculty of Arts in Ljubljana and lives and works in Maribor. As the winner of the Urška Young Literature Festival (2019), she published her debut poetry book Drseči svet (2020), nominated for the best debut at the Slovenian Book Fair and presented at the Pranger Festival. Her second collection Rodna doba was published in 2024. Her poetry and translations from French have been published at home and abroad. She co-creates numerous literary projects, runs the Dve luni institute and makes a significant mark on Slovenian slam poetry. In 2021, she received the Pont charter.

Nigerian poet, musician and LGBTQ activist Logan February is one of the most prominent young voices writing today. We explored the urgency and strangeness in Sylvia Plath’s confessional writing, how her work embodies the courage to reveal what is interior without fully explaining it. Logan spoke about mystery in poetry as something that keeps us returning, a force that resists being too lucid, where what feels difficult or painful can be sublimated, turned into art through both emotion and intellect. Logan reflected on growing up surrounded by Greek mythology instead of Yoruba stories, a consequence of colonial erasure that shapes identities and spiritual imagination. They shared how Christianity, queerness and indigenous myths produce a non-dual world, where what is and what is not coexist, and poetry becomes a way to honour intangible realities we are taught to doubt. For them, words offer power, reshaping culture, restoring dignity and imagining futures like ‘Afroqueer Hallucinations,’ where Africans themselves define queerness rather than searching for proof in erased histories.Logan February (1999) is a celebrated Nigerian poet, author and multi-disciplinary artist. Born in Anambra State and raised in Ibadan, they are a prominent non-binary voice in contemporary literature, openly identifying with they/them pronouns. February honed their craft studying psychology at the University of Ibadan and creative writing at Purdue University. Their acclaimed literary works include the poetry collection In the Nude (also published as Mannequin in the Nude in the US) and chapbooks Painted Blue with Saltwater and How to Cook a Ghost. Their writing has earned significant recognition, including being a finalist for the African Poetry Book Fund’s prize and a Pushcart Prize nominee.