In Volume Six, Chapter Ten we welcomed Hoboken, New Jersey–based educator, poet, writer, and author Isabella DeSendi.

A 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, 2024 Ruth Lilly Fellowship finalist, 2024 Best New Poets selection, and 2025 New Jersey Fellowship finalist, Isabella earned her MFA from Columbia University. Her 2020 chapbook Through the New Body won the Poetry Society of America’s Chapbook Fellowship, and her debut full-length collection Someone Else’s Hunger was released September 15th via Four Way Books.

In our conversation, Isabella talks about what it’s been like to live inside the excitement and vulnerability of releasing her first book while touring, and how she navigates the tension between Isabella the writer and Bella the person. We discuss how her understanding of voice, fear, and visibility evolved between Through the New Body and Someone Else’s Hunger, and how she has learned to “call a monster by his name” through the act of writing.

Isabella shares how her family’s stories — her mother’s, her abuela’s — shaped her voice and sense of resilience, and how iconic figures like Eve, Mary, and Medusa stand beside those familial presences in her poems. We talk about the slow, deliberate process that shapes her work, how hunger became both the literal and spiritual thread uniting her collection, and what it means to transform pain into power — to turn the very wound that could have destroyed you into a source of strength.

We also discuss anger’s rightful place in poetry and the complicated beauty of reclamation.

Contact Isabella:
Website: isabelladesendi.com Instagram: @isabellamdesendi

Recorded Spoken Word Performances Featured Include:

Ifrah Hussein – Tell Us
Instagram: @ifrahhussein

Lyrical Faith – Black Boy Joy
Instagram: @lyricalfaithpoetry

Masterpiece Poet – Slingshot
Instagram: @masterpiecepoetry Website: masterpiecepoetry.com

Rick Dove – A Poetic Conceit
Instagram: @rickdove Website: rickdove.co.uk

Lionheart– Pretty Hurts
Instagram: @lionheartfelt Website: lionheartonline.com

Support the show