SWWIM: Allison Blevins, Carolina Hospital’s, Nicole Medina, Holly Iglesias

SWWIM Reading Series at The Betsy Writer's Room presents eight celebrated women poets in residence, September 2025-April 2026. Each visiting poet pairs with Miami's vibrant literary voices for intimate readings, fostering cross-generational dialogue and celebrating contemporary women's poetry.

This series offers audiences rare access to emerging and established poets in an intimate setting, fostering meaningful connections between writers, readers, and Miami's thriving arts community. Presented with support from the Jorge M. Perez Family Foundation CreARTE.

ABOUT THE POETS

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer disabled writer and the author of Where Will We live if the House Burns Down?, Cataloguing Pain, Handbook for the Newly Disabled: A Lyric Memoir, Slowly/Suddenly, and five chapbooks. Her sixth chapbook is forthcoming. Winner of the 2023 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award from Persea Books and the 2022 Laux/Millar Poetry Prize from Raleigh Review, Allison serves as the Publisher of Small Harbor Publishing. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. allisonblevins.com

Carolina Hospital’s poetry collections include Key West Nights and Other Aftershocks (Anhinga Press) and The Child of Exile: A Poetry Memoir (Arte Público Press), as well as Myth America and How to Get into Trouble (Anhinga Press), both collaborative collections with Maureen Seaton, Holly Iglesias, and Nicole Hospital-Medina; plus, the novel A Little Love, under the pen name C. C. Medina (Warner Books). She also collaborated with South Florida writers on the New York Times bestselling novel Naked Came the Manatee. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Norton Anthology of Latino Literature; Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Occupy the Workplace; and Rumors Secrets and Lies: Narrative Poems about Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her new poetry collection All Roads Lead to Here is forthcoming in August 2025 (Redacted Books , ELJ Editions).

Cuban-American writer and educator, Nicole Hospital-Medina earned her MFA at the University of Miami where she now instructs writing. She is a poet-activist and a multi-faceted individual, serving as a voice for the neurodivergent community through her literary and artistic contributions. Her poems can be read in the anthologies, Poems from the Lockdown, Feminine Rising: Voices of Power and Invisibility, Women Write Resistance: Poets Resist Gender Violence, as well as in The Miami Herald, Paper Nautilus, Blunderbuss Magazine, The Acentos Review, and more. She is the inaugural winner of the Miami Herald O’Miami Haiku contest. Her paintings have been featured in Linden Lane Magazine. She released a collaborative chapbook, Myth America, working with poets, Carolina Hospital, Holly Iglesias and Maureen Seaton. The cover features one of her paintings, “In My Apartment. ” She continues to collaborate with this team, showcasing her work in their most recent collection from Anhinga Press, How to Get Into Trouble. Independently, she is celebrating the publication of the preliminary edition of her textbook, Rhetorical Innovation with AI Integration (Cognella Press).

Holly Iglesias’ work includes three books of poetry— Sleeping Things, Angles of Approach, and Souvenirs of a Shrunken World—a critical work, Boxing Inside the Box: Women’s Prose Poetry, and two collaborative chapbooks, Myth America and How to Get Into Trouble. She has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Edward Albee Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She taught at the University of North Carolina-Asheville and at the University of Miami, where her favorite classes were History as an Act of the Imagination and Documentary Poetics. Her current project is Theories of Flight, an intergenerational memoir in prose fragments.

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