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Angela Flournoy reads from her debut novel, The Turner House (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), and speaks about family, food, and her writing process for Well-Read Black Girl. Flournoy is one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 for 2015.
"Within that economy of words, you choose words that have certain angles, that have certain edges, that effect people in a certain way." Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, speaks with Khalil Gibran Muhammad about what he learned as a poet and how those skills continue to influence his writing.
Ben Fountain reads from his novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, 2012), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, at the 2012 National Book Award finalists reading in New York City. Fountain will join the Why We Write panel on January 9 at Poets & Writers Live in Austin, Texas.
"She could taste with all of her skin, including her eyelids." Author and naturalist Sy Montgomery describes her first meeting with Athena, a giant Pacific octopus, at the New England Aquarium in Boston. This encounter spurred her to write The Soul of an Octopus (Atria Books, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
"Whether I was born this way or my personality was formed by circumstance, I don't think anyone would call me an easy person to deal with..." Photographer Sally Mann reads from her memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Patrick Phillips reads "Matinee" from his poetry collection Boy (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and speaks about what drew him to poetry. His latest book, Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
"What puts the mean in some of us?" Ada Limón reads her elegy, "Marketing Life for Those of Us Left," in this video for the Academy of American Poets. Limón's fourth poetry collection, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
“A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping,” begins Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. In this video, Groff talks about the making of her novel at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.
"Listen, to everything." Ross Gay speaks with Furious Flower's Elizabeth Hoover about line breaks, gardening, and his advice to young writers. Gay's latest poetry collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015), is longlisted for the National Book Award.
"I strongly believe that writing is an act of courage—it's almost an act of physical courage." Ta-Nehisi Coates talks about the personal strength necessary for writing, and reflects on his experience with breakthroughs. Coates's memoir Between the World and Me, published by Spiegel & Grau this week, is an exploration of racial history in the United States.
