All posts tagged: Lauren Delapenha

Podcast: Lauren Delapenha on “Supermarketing”

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Transcript: Lauren Delapenha Podcast 

Headshot and Issue 31 cover

LAUREN DELAPENHA speaks to EMILY EVERETT about her poems “Supermarketing” and “If You Are Learning English,” which appear in The Common’s spring issue. Lauren also discusses her process and revision methods, her time at the Disquiet Literary Program in Lisbon, and how balancing both teaching and writing challenges her.

Lauren is a Jamaican poet and English teacher. She earned her master’s in creative writing from the University of Oxford, and her work has received an Oxbelly Fellowship, a Helen Zell and Jamaica Poet Laureate’s Young Writers Prize for Poetry, a Grindstone International Poetry Prize, and two Pushcart nominations. She currently lives and teaches in Connecticut.

­­Read Lauren’s poems in The Common at thecommononline.org/tag/Lauren-Delapenha.

Learn more about her work at laurendelapenha.com.


The Common is a print and online literary magazine publishing stories, essays, and poems that deepen our collective sense of place. On our podcast and in our pages, The Common features established and emerging writers from around the world. Read more and subscribe to the magazine at thecommononline.org, and follow us on Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

Emily Everett is managing editor of the magazine and host of the podcast. In 2025 her debut novel All That Life Can Afford was a Reese’s Book Club pick, and her work appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column. Previous publications include the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. She was a 2022 Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.

Podcast: Lauren Delapenha on “Supermarketing”
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December 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Lauren Delapenha, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robert Cording, and Rachel Hadas

New Work from LAUREN DELAPENHA, AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL, ROBERT CORDING, and RACHEL HADAS

Table of Contents:
—Lauren Delapenha, “Exodus”
—Aimee Nezhukumatathil, “What They Didn’t Tell Me about Motherhood”
—Robert Cording, “A Sun”
—Rachel Hadas, “Matsinger Forest”

 

Headshot of Lauren Delapenha

 

Exodus
By Lauren Delapenha

The Times article is about the president’s mind
and Xerox-based enterprises like Kodak, Blockbuster, dead-end jobs, and marriages,

and I am so glad the article mentions marriages
given my recent apophatic commitment to romantic

ruination, because who among us hasn’t pressed a finger into the scab
for that foreign roughness, that delicious, needling shaft of sunk cost and thought

that anything is probable in the desert,
even Moses neatly halving an ocean for a nation

December 2025 Poetry Feature #2: Lauren Delapenha, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Robert Cording, and Rachel Hadas
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