Estha Weiner was born in Maine and from an early age, yearned to live in New York City and be an actress. Her early experiences as an actor and working for the BBC clearly show up in her poetry. Amongst her many other books of poetry – At the Last Minute – was published in Ireland in 2019. Her poems have appeared in The New Republic and Barrow Street and many others. Estha is an alum of Sarah Lawrence where she is the founding director of the College’s  NY Alumni/ae Writers Nights.  She is a Speaker on Shakespeare for The New York Council for the Humanities and is a Professor in the English Dept. at City College of NY, CUNY, and the Sarah Lawrence Writing Institute. Alan Walowitz has been writing poetry, sometimes successfully and sometimes un-, for more than 50 years. He has a small portion of an MFA in Writing from Goddard College, and an entire degree from Eastern Connecticut State University and several from Queens College of the City University of NY. And he studied with Estha Weiner. Though writing poems can be quite lucrative, Alan has earned the bulk of my fortune as a teacher and supervisor of secondary English for 34 years.  He is retired after teaching at Manhattanville College in Purchase, New York. His poems can be found lots of places on the web and off. This podcast was recorded in January 2022 at Gebhard's Beer Culture Bar. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.