LISTEN to my August 24th 2026 WIOX show (also a podcast) featuring award-winning poet and writer, teacher and editor, Jo Pitkin, on her new poetry collection Village: Recession, published by Finishing Line Press. Jo explores the Great Recession of the early 2000s from the intimate vantage point of an American village, documenting the effects of this worldwide economic meltdown on friends, family, and neighbors—like the hardworking snow plower or the carpenter who never finishes his own house renovation in order to avoid paying higher property taxes—and on the poet herself. When the “recession’s serrated edge” profoundly alters her daily life, Pitkin finds temporary relief in small acts of kindness and solace in everyday encounters. This show was recorded in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Pamela Manché Pearce, Planet Poet’s erudite Poet-at-Large, also joins us later in the program.
Jo Pitkin earned a BA in Creative Writing and Literature from Kirkland College—one of the first undergraduate creative writing degrees in the United States—and an MFA in Poetry from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She is the author of a chapbook, The Measure, and four full-length collections: Cradle of the American Circus: Poems from Somers, New York; Commonplace Invasions; Rendering; and Village: Recession.
Her award-winning poems have appeared in numerous journals, including The New York Review of Books, Little Star, Salamander, Southern Humanities Review, Stone Canoe, Nimrod International Journal, and Crab Orchard Review, as well as the anthologies A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Writers of the Hudson Valley, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace, In the Black: In the Red: Poems of Profit $ Loss, and The Poetry of Capital: Voices from Twenty-First Century AmericaAfter working as an English Language Arts editor at Houghton Mifflin Company in Boston, Jo enjoyed a long and fulfilling career as a freelance textbook writer for educational publishers, narrowly weathering the Great Recession’s impact on the book publishing industry in the early 2000s. Currently a teaching artist with the Academy of Intentional Magic (formerly The Poetry Barn), she lives and works in New York’s Hudson River Valley.
Visit: jopitkin.com, pamelampearce.com
Praise for Village: Recession
“This deeply moving and highly accomplished book was surely written in a frenzy of making. Certainly, Jo Pitkin has inherited all the formality of line and elegance of thought that’s formed at an Iowa Workshop, but it’s her story, her personal myth of social history, that makes this collection so compelling and heart-shattering. Here is a fully formed poetic voice given over completely to great shocks of material, to deprivation and rat snakes, to the plundered pantry of a Great Depression, to fragmentary American survivors of ancient depression and rust-belt recession who float towards us upon rust-coloured waters. Here is work like no other American work since Carolyn Forché’s The Country Between Us, a brave survivor poetry that transforms us as we read.” –Thomas McCarthy, author of Pandemonium and Prophecy: Poems