"After the Bombs Fall" by Shannon Huffman Polson (Issue 22 Poetry Feature) Artwork

Voices from the Sky: A Companion Podcast to Sky Island Journal

Voices from the Sky is a companion podcast to Sky Island Journal, an independent international literary journal where we discover and publish the finest poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from around the world. Always free-access for our readers, we publish accomplished authors—side by side—with emerging voices for over 115,000 thousand readers in 145 different countries. In this Podcast, we delve deep into some of our favorite pieces since our journal’s inception in 2017, and take listeners inside the heads and hearts of their creators as they help us more fully explore their literary works. Each season, we will feature a variety of writers and a variety of forms--poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction--one at a time, to enhance your experience as readers and thinkers. Following a discussion about the published piece, each episode concludes with a reading by the original writer, and I encourage you to follow along with the piece, which will always be linked in our show notes and on the Sky Island Journal website.

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Voices from the Sky: A Companion Podcast to Sky Island Journal

"After the Bombs Fall" by Shannon Huffman Polson (Issue 22 Poetry Feature)

October 26, 2022 • Jeff Sommerfeld from Sky Island Podcasts • Season 2 • Episode 11

This past Saturday we published Issue 22 of Sky island Journal, and the next three episodes are special features of brand new works from that issue! You will get a sampling of the world-class poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction included in Issue 22, and hear from a few of the writers and poets themselves!

First up, I am honored to introduce you to Shannon Huffman Polson. Shannon took time to speak with me recently about her poem, “After the Bombs Fall.”

Here is a brief bio:

Shannon Huffman Polson writes in all genres, wrestling to find beauty in a broken world. Her poetry is published in Emerge Journal, War, Literature and the Arts, and The Wrath Bearing Tree; her essays appear in Riverteeth, The Utne Reader, Ruminate and more; her books include North of Hope: A Daughter’s Arctic Journey, and The Grit Factor: Courage, Resilience, and Leadership in the Most Male Dominated Organization in the World, published by Harvard Business Review Press in September 2020, and winner of the Axiom Business Book Award in 2021 - her writings about business and leadership have been featured in Business Insider, Psychology Today, Newsweek, and Forbes Magazine, among others, . Shannon has also published a book of essays, The Way the Wild Gets Inside. She and her family currently live in France.

You can view more of her work at her website: https://shannonpolson.com

Read this episode’s featured piece, “After the Bombs Fall,” and all the incredible works of Issue 22 (Fall 2022) for free at skyislandjournal.com

You can enjoy more incredible works of poetry, flash fiction, and creative nonfiction from writers all over the globe at: https://www.skyislandjournal.com