This episode isn’t about poetry but about another kind of art: the art of conflict resolution. In a deeply practical conversation, Pádraig Ó Tuama sits down with Columbia University’s Peter Coleman, author of The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization and an expert in constructive conflict. Coleman shares advice for “the exhausted middle majority” — the large number of Americans fed up with our divided politics — on how to engage with others in ways that lead to openness and learning. He also talks about the surprising power of taking a walk with your challenger, the limitations of bringing together people from both sides, and the three factors that matter most when handling conflict.

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Peter Coleman is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University. He is an expert in constructive conflict resolution and sustainable peace, and he's particularly interested in how people can face and work with the conflicts of their lives and think about the systems of conflict we're in. He serves as the director of the Morton Deutsch International Center for Cooperation and Conflict Resolution and is the author of many books, including The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization.

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“Politics by themselves are necessary but not sufficient … [and] poetry by itself is necessary but not sufficient. We must find a way to bring them together,” says Martín Espada, a poet and professor. With crystalline language, an all-seeing gaze, and innate musicality, he writes poems that show us the world and people as they are — sometimes violent, vicious, unjust, but also tender, tenacious, courageous. In this potent conversation recorded for the 2026 Greenbelt Festival in Kettering, England, he reads from his work, and he and Pádraig Ó Tuama discuss the resistance he’s met when mixing politics and poetry, his parents as influences and teachers, and how his writing (and editing) have changed over time.

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Martín Espada was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He has written more than 20 books of poetry and nonfiction and translation. His collection Floaters won the National Book Award for Poetry, and he is a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His most recent collection is Jailbreak of Sparrows.

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After actor, dialect coach, and teacher Amanda Quaid was diagnosed with a serious illness in 2021, she responded by trying something new — she wrote poetry. She says, “I was looking for an art form that allowed me to be with uncertainty in a beautiful way.” The result is a captivating memoir-in-poetry, No Obvious Distress, that uses words and phrases from her medical charts to create verse that rings with laughter, tears, and truth. In this conversation recorded at New York City’s Morgan Library & Museum, Amanda reads from her book, and she and Pádraig Ó Tuama talk about the three principles that guided her through illness, her parenting a young child through this time, and her work with medical students, actors, and CEOs.

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Amanda Quaid was raised in New York City, where she works as a dialect coach. She also teaches at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale. After working in theatre for most of her life, Amanda began writing poetry as a way to work creatively with illness. Her debut collection, No Obvious Distress, is out now with John Murray Press and was named Memoir of the Month and one of the best books of 2025 by the British newspaper The Independent.

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Poet, translator, and musician Haleh Liza Gafori describes the revered 13th-century Persian poet Rumi as “a good pal to humanity”. As she puts it, “He's rooting for our liberation.” In this exuberant conversation recorded for the 2025 Greenbelt Festival, she reads some of her translations, and she and Pádraig Ó Tuama illuminate the life of the man known as Rumi — his intense love of all things earthly and divine, the Islamic faith and universalist vision that flow through his work, and his life-changing connection with Shams, a Sufi mystic who catalyzed Rumi’s transformation from preacher to poet.

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Haleh Liza Ghafori is a New York City-born translator, poet, and musician of Iranian descent. Her most recent book of translations of poetry by the 13th-century mystic Rumi is entitled Water and was released in April of 2025 by New York Review Books. Her first translation of Rumi was the acclaimed Gold, released in 2022, also by New York Review Books.

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“For me, if a poem doesn't swing, it's really not much of a poem,” says Adrian Matejka, author of the collection Be Easy: New and Selected Poems. His work hums with music, from its references to David Bowie, Miles Davis, and others to its infectious rhythms, repetitions, and rhymes. In this lively conversation recorded in 2024 at the Wick Poetry Center in Ohio, he reads several poems, and he and Pádraig Ó Tuama talk about “the imaginary discotheque” that takes place in Adrian’s head when he writes, how metaphor and simile offer a third space for his ideas to reach people, and his intense interest in exploring “masculinities” in all their expressions and emotions.

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Adrian Matejka is the author of many books of poetry, including most recently Be Easy: New and Selected Poems, which was published by W.W. Norton in 2026. He also serves as the editor of Poetry magazine, and he was poet laureate of the state of Indiana from 2018 to 2019.

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After listening to this exuberant interview, you’ll retire the phrase “lost in translation” from your vocabulary. Instead, writer and scholar Karen Leeder believes poetry can expand when translated, reaching new audiences and gaining new layers of meaning. Karen joins Pádraig Ó Tuama in an interview recorded in 2025 after she and Durs Grünbein were co-awarded the Griffin Poetry Prize for her translation of Psyche Running, which Durs wrote. In addition to reading from her work, she explains what it’s like to translate a poet who is very much alive and why she thinks translation can help “explode” insularity and xenophobia.

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Karen Leeder is a writer, scholar, and translator of contemporary German literature. She has received many accolades for her translations, including being co-awarded (with Durs Grünbein) the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize for her translation of Psyche Running by Durs Grünbein. She is the Schwarz-Taylor Chair of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

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“Poetry means paying attention in a different way to the world and seeing what wisdom you're given back in return for that attention,” says Richard Scott in this conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama, recorded during the 2025 Collective Trauma Summit. Richard’s second collection, That Broke Into Shining Crystals, features sequences that focus on two hypnotically compelling subjects: still-life paintings and crystals. From them, he’s created poems that thrum with music, memory, harm, and healing. Richard reads from his book, and he and Pádraig discuss the “surprising life” to be found in still lifes, the difference between the speaker vs. the poet, and how crystals — the beautiful result of “unimaginable” pressure and breakage — can offer us a way to think about trauma.

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Richard Scott was born in London in 1981, and his debut collection, Soho, which came out in 2018, was a Gay's The Word Book of the Year, and it was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and The Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and the Costa Poetry Award as well. His second poetry collection, That Broke into Shining Crystals, was published this year by Faber & Faber also. He's a lecturer in creative writing at Goldsmiths at the University of London, and he runs a poetry writing group there, and he also teaches poetry at the Faber Academy.

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“It had to involve more than just a slim volume of verse,” says Kimberly Campanello about MOTHERBABYHOME, her ongoing visual poetry project which centers the 796 infants and children who died at the St. Mary's Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, in the west of Ireland, between 1926 and 1961. So it consists of 796 sheets of vellum with text from archival and contemporary sources that she’s shaped into a work that blends documentation and lamentation, reportage and rite. In this Zoom conversation between Kimberly and Pádraig Ó Tuama — part two of two — recorded in 2025, Kimberly reads an excerpt from MOTHERBABYHOME, and then she and Pádraig discuss whether all poets want to be priests and how poetry is the ultimate DIY activity. Or, as Kimberly puts it, “You don't have to learn an instrument to be a poet.”

We invite you to subscribe to Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound books and his newest work, Kitchen Hymns, or listen to all our Poetry Unbound episodes.

Kimberly Campanello is a poet, translator, and performance artist. Her most recent projects are the poetry collection An Interesting Detail, the novel Use the Words You Have, and MOTHERBABYHOME. She is Professor of Poetry at the University of Leeds.

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