Carl Phillips and Aditi Machado Feel Like Radically Different Poets
In Conversation with Lena Crown on Awakeners
This is Awakeners, a Lit Hub Radio podcast about mentorship in the literary arts. Robert Frost allegedly said he was not a teacher but an “awakener.” On every episode of this podcast, host Lena Crown speaks with writers, artists, critics, and scholars across generations who have awakened something for one another. We chat about how their relationship has evolved, examine the connections and divergences in their writing and thinking, and dig into the archives for traces of their mutual influence.
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On this episode of Awakeners, Lena speaks with the poets Carl Phillips and Aditi Machado, who met through the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis when Aditi began as a student almost fifteen years ago. Growing up in India, Aditi wasn’t exposed to much American poetry. Carl could tell, reading her work, that this was a singular voice—he even remembers thinking to himself that Aditi’s style made him want to reconsider his own approach. Today, Aditi offers her own students at the University of Cincinnati the same encouragement to follow their impulses, to lean into what others may find strange.
In the first half of the episode, we discuss what surprised Carl about Aditi’s work, how Carl’s experience as a high school Latin teacher informed his pedagogy, and what Aditi remembers from her time as Carl’s student (and has borrowed, now that she’s a professor herself).
In the second half of the episode, we hear poems from their newest books, Aditi’s Material Witness and Carl’s Scattered Snows, to the North. We discuss their radically different approaches to form, what it means to get “personal” in their poetry, and their shared interest in the agency of the natural world, a subtle materialism that thrums through both collections—and Lena makes the argument that their work isn’t as different as it seems.
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Aditi Machado is a poet, translator, and essayist. Her publications include three poetry collections from Nightboat, Material Witness (2024), Emporium (2020), and Some Beheadings (2017); two book-length translations from the French, Baptiste Gaillard’s In the Realm of Motes (Roof, 2025) and Farid Tali’s Prosopopoeia (Action, 2016); and several chapbooks. Her work appears or is forthcoming in journals like BOMB, Chicago Review, Fence, jubilat, Lana Turner, Volt, and Western Humanities Review, among others. A recipient of the James Laughlin and The Believer Poetry Awards, she serves as an advisory poetry editor for The Paris Review and teaches at the University of Cincinnati.
Carl Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, including Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
More Aditi: aditimachado.com
More Carl: https://www.carlphillipspoet.com/
Subscribe and connect with us on our website: awakenerspodcast.com.
