Bread & Poetry
A podcast about poetry- and bread- for everyone.
Scope
Vocal Repair and Enhancement, Editing, Mixing
“I was inspired by the poem “Like You” by Roque Dalton for both the title and mission of this podcast. My favorite line of the poem reads: “I believe the world is beautiful and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”
In this podcast, I bring poetry to the people: poets and non-poets alike. From artists to baristas, I interview folks from all different walks of life about poetry, and what it means to them.
My goal is to demystify poetry, to make it truly accessible to all in a way that nourishes the soul. I’ll also be talking about bread. Favorite types of bread, memories around bread—just lots of bread. Because who doesn’t love bread? And who doesn’t love poetry?”
- Diannely Antigua, host of Bread & Poetry
Diannely Antigua is a Dominican American poet and educator, born and raised in Massachusetts.
Her debut collection Ugly Music (YesYes Books, 2019) was the winner of the Pamet River Prize and a 2020 Whiting Award. Her second poetry collection Good Monster was published with Copper Canyon Press in May 2024.
She received her BA in English from the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where she won the Jack Kerouac Creative Writing Scholarship, and received her MFA at NYU, where she was awarded a Global Research Initiative Fellowship to Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of additional fellowships from CantoMundo, Community of Writers, Fine Arts Work Center Summer Program, and was a finalist for the 2021 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship.
Diannely’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and chosen for The Best of the Net Anthology. Her poems can be found in Poem-a-Day, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere.
She currently teaches in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire as the inaugural Nossrat Yassini Poet in Residence. She hosts the podcast Bread & Poetry and was the 13th Poet Laureate of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the youngest and first person of color to receive the title. In 2023, she was awarded an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship to launch The Bread & Poetry Project.
Diannely was connected to Erin through their mutual friend and fellow Kula podcaster, Grace Anna Brahimy. The two met in Florence while both were graduate student fellows through NYU’s Global Research Initiative Fellowship.
Several years later, Diannely launched the Bread & Poetry podcast as part of the larger Bread & Poetry Project, a three-part initiative honoring the past, present, and future of poetry’s role in our communities. The project includes the podcast, the Portsmouth Poet Laureate Program, and collaborations with local organizations such as HAVEN, which supports survivors of domestic violence and sexual abuse, and NH PANTHER, which works to end racism and systemic biases. It also offers free poetry programming to the community through online workshops.
Diannely had recorded and published several episodes of Bread & Poetry but found it challenging to keep up with production while balancing her work as an educator and poet. Kula took over the time-consuming technical aspects of the project, allowing her to focus on community engagement, education, and her mission to bring poetry to the people.
