The Poetry of Kinship: Joan Barasovska, Jayne Benjulian, & Hilde Weisert – Free

Pictured: Joan Barasovska, Jayne Benjulian, Hilde Weisert

A reading and conversation with three  award-winning poets on the many forms of kinship: with family, community, heritage, and the natural world. 

Jayne Benjulian is the author of Five Sextillion Atoms (Saddle Road Press, 2016).  Her collection, said David Wojahn, is a “highly distinctive and gripping book notable for the ways in which it combines the stories of family history with larger matters of public history.”

Her poems, widely published, have been shortlisted for the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Fish Poetry Prize and the Bridport Prize. She served as chief speechwriter for Apple and investigator for the Public Defender in King County, WA. She lives in the Berkshire Hills where she edits the work of prose writers and poets.

Jayne was an Ossabaw Island Project Fellow; teaching fellow at Emory University; lecturer in the Graduate Program in Theater at San Francisco State University; and Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Lyon, France.   www.jaynebenjulian.com 

Joan Barasovska is a poet living in Chapel Hill, NC. In lyrical, accessible poetry, Joan contemplates the lifetime of a woman: as a girl, a daughter, a young woman in despair, and a wife and mother. At the brink of old age, living in welcome solitude, she revisits memory with broadened perspective.

Joan hosts a poetry series sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society at independent bookstore McIntyre’s Books. Joan was selected by the Poetry Society as their 2026 Pinesong Dedicatee. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and four times for a Pushcart Prize. Her books have been reviewed in numerous literary journals. She is the author of Birthing Age (Finishing Line Press, 2018); Carrying Clare (Main Street Rag, 2022); Orange Tulips (Redhawk Publications, 2022); and Unblessed, Unsung (Main Street Rag, 2025)  www.joanbarasovska.com

“In Unblessed, Unsung, Joan Barasovska carries us from the Eastern European shtetl to a Philadelphia tailor shop, from a bright baseball star to his businessman brother, from father to son, from mother to daughter. Drawn from photographs and family history, these poems form a steady line of family through dark times. Reading them is like standing in a darkroom watching images emerge, silver on paper, under a red safelight: fragile magic.” —Mimi Herman, author of The Kudzu Queen

Hilde Weisert’s 2015 poetry collection The Scheme of Things was published by David Robert Books. Her work has appeared in LIBER: A Feminist Journal, Cold Mountain Review, Plume, Paterson Literary Review, the Journal of the American Medical Association, The Hudson Review, The Cincinnati Review, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and elsewhere. Awards: 2017 Gretchen Warren Award (NE Poetry Club), 2016 Tiferet Poetry Award, 2008 Lois Cranston Prize, and three Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowships. She is co-president of the Sandisfield Arts Center She is co-president of the Sandisfield Arts Center.. www.hildeweisert.com

“Hilde Weisert’s quiet, versatile poetic voice, fully at ease in narrative and lyric, is distinguished by vivid accuracy of thought and speech, modest but absolute courage in choice of subject, a dry, sweet humor, and a generosity of spirit that brings me back to her book again and again.”
– Ursula Le Guin