Wheaton News

Former writing professor creates space for poetry

In 2020, the pandemic lockdown ended Sandra Yannone’s book tour, and started her on a new journey that still continues.

“I could never have anticipated meeting so many poets from around the world. I could never have anticipated being asked to blurb other people’s books or being invited to read my own work internationally,” said Yannone, a member of the Class of 1986.

The vehicle through which she has reached all those experiences, and many more, is “Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry,” a virtual open mic poetry series and Facebook group that Yannone started with the help of her sister in March 2020.

“It started out so humbly in my friend’s mother’s living room in Missoula, Montana,” Yannone said. “And we were happy when 300 people had signed up; it was like a big celebration. Then it grew to 500, and then it was a thousand.”

And it’s still going. More than 5,000 people currently follow the gathering on Facebook, and viewers watch it on Facebook Live or join in via Zoom with recordings following the same day on YouTube.

“It was extremely messy and exhilarating at first,” Yannone said, noting that there were very few models for online readings to follow at the time. “Suddenly we had a whole new community, a whole new group of people.”

The gathering, which regularly features invited poets alongside an open mic portion of the program, draws participants from around the globe. The program celebrated its fifth birthday on March 23, 2025, with a full 90-minute open mic session. The invitation to the session read: “What better way to celebrate than to hear as many of our members as possible, read their fine poems?”

Until about two years ago, the online event occurred weekly, aside from a few holidays. Nowadays, it skips one week each month. The global reach of Cultivating Voices happened naturally, a consequence of Yannone’s affiliation with the Ireland-based Salmon Poetry, the publisher of her two collections, Boats for Women (2019) and The Glass Studio (2024) and of a forthcoming volume Unsinkable: Poems Inspired by the Titanic for which she serves as co-editor.

“I really wanted to bring the Irish poets to the American poets, and vice versa,” she said, noting that she chose to schedule the readings on Sunday at 3 p.m. ET to facilitate participation from the United Kingdom, Europe and beyond. “It expanded beyond that pretty quickly. We were having poets from India and New Zealand and Australia and Bangladesh.”

In addition to her Irish connections, Yannone was uniquely qualified to create the online poetry program in other ways as well (aside from technology skills, she jokes). Her 20-plus years as faculty director of the Writing Center at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., gave her a wealth of experience in encouraging writers and fostering community. She also credits Professor of English Emerita Sue Standing for demonstrating how to create space for sharing poetry.

“I truly feel the mentorship that I received at Wheaton helped me envision how poetry can create community,” she said. “We had the most beautiful workshops with Professor Standing. She brought poets from all over New England to read at Wheaton while I was there. I remember those events vividly now that I do them regularly, and I’m so grateful that, without knowing it, she set this path for my journey.”

Yannone is putting her experiences to work in the real world as well as online. Having recently retired from Evergreen’s faculty and moved back to her Connecticut hometown, she has taken on a new role: the official poet laureate of Old Saybrook. The first person to hold the post was appointed just before the pandemic and resigned shortly afterward. One of her responsibilities involves coordinating a state-wide poetry contest, which runs through the month of April (National Poetry Month).

“What I hope to do is make it a sustainable position in this town—that’s my goal,” she said. Toward that end, she hosts a monthly Wednesday Write-In for local residents at the local library, a gathering that she hopes may eventually lead to in-person open mic events at which people share their writing and listen to each other.

Poetry has the power to connect people and inspire them, Yannone said. In fact, the motto for Cultivating Voices quotes from Muriel Rukeyser’s 1949 book, The Life of Poetry: “In times of crisis, we summon our strength.” The choice was inspired by the pandemic, but “crises ebb and flow,” she said.

“People, I think, are engaged with poetry much more than they believe. They turn to it more or it’s available to them more than they recognize,” said Yannone, whose own work has also been published in Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner and many other journals. “When a person is asked to speak, and speak profoundly to others, they will often turn to a poem to anchor what they want to say. I find that fascinating. I love promoting whatever we can do to support people in using their voice, to examine the world and amplify how they can not only survive, but thrive in crisis.”