This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.
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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the poets Gabrielle Bates and Keetje Kuipers, who met when Gabby enrolled in Keetje’s poetry class at Auburn University in Alabama almost thirteen years ago. According to Gabby, she thought all poets were dead, so Keetje’s class was a revelation. They read Richard Siken, Terrance Hayes, A.E. Stallings, and Dorianne Laux, Keetje’s own mentor. They began corresponding about poems, and when Keetje later left her tenure-track job to move to Seattle, where Gabby was living after her MFA (and still is), they formed a writing group with a few other local poetesses, to crib Gabby’s word, and became something more like peers.
We joke in this episode that Keetje is Gabby’s personal archivist: she came prepared with poems from the first packet Gabby ever sent seeking feedback, as well as an email exchange from 2014 and an introduction Keetje wrote for one of Gabby’s readings from the same year. In the second half of the episode, we get to hear excerpts from all three, and Gabby and Keetje read aloud several poems from their most recent books, JUDAS GOAT and LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS.
We track some wonderfully eerie resonances across their work, including encounters with animals, patriarchal violence, the general attraction to discomfort, the contrast between ‘now’ and ‘then,’ dialogue with other women, and poem endings that ask new questions. We discuss why it’s empowering to write while housesitting and what the difference might be between the “scariest thing” in a poem and its “heart.” And reader: we all cry a little bit.
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Gabrielle Bates is the author of Judas Goat (Tin House, 2023; the87press, 2025), an NPR Best Book of 2023 and finalist for the Washington State Book Award. Originally from Birmingham, Alabama, she currently lives in Seattle, where she works for Open Books: A Poem Emporium, co-hosts the podcast The Poet Salon, and serves occasionally as visiting faculty for the University of Washington Rome Center and the Tin House Writers’ Workshops. Her poems have appeared in the New Yorker, the Believer, Sewanee Review, American Poetry Review, and Ploughshares.
Keetje Kuipers’ fourth collection of poems is Lonely Women Make Good Lovers. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She lives in Montana and is Editor of Poetry Northwest.
More Gabby: https://www.gabriellebat.es/
More Keetje: https://keetjekuipers.com/
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.