The Poet and the Poem
2026-27 Series

Featured Julia Lisella and Maria Giura

Click here for Julia Lisella and Maria Giura podcast.mp3

Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems, Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), was named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her other collections include Always, Terrain, and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, The Common, Nimrod, Pangyrus and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and curates the Italian-American Writers Association Literary Reading Series in Boston. For more, see www.julialisellapoetry.com

Maria Giura’s newest book If We Still Lived Where I Was Born (Bordighera Press) is co-winner of the 2026 Paterson Book Prize. She’s also the author of What My Father Taught Me (Bordighera Press) and Celibate: A Memoir (Apprentice House Press), which won a 1st Place Independent Press Award. Giura has been published in several journals including New York Quarterly, Prime Number, Liguorian, I-70 Review, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, Vita Poetica, Lips, the Paterson Review, (Voices in) Italian Americana and in the anthology Celebrating Calabria: Writing Heritage and Memory edited by Margherita Ganeri and Maria Mazziotti Gillan. An Academy of American Poets winner, Giura has taught writing at Binghamton where she received her PhD and currently teaches memoir workshops for Casa Belvedere Cultural Foundation. You can find her on social media and at mariagiura.com

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