“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.

Denis Johnson reads a selection of short stories to a captive audience as part of the Spring 2016 Barbara and David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series at Cornell University. Johnson died at the age of sixty-seven on May 25, 2017.

“We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, who died on February 14, 2015 at the age of eighty-seven, speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown in a 2010 interview about the need for working-class life to be represented in poetry.

The late Pulitzer Prize–winning poet is seen here in 1997 reading selections of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego for the series “Artists on the Cutting Edge,” accompanied by interview segments discussing his influences. The former Vermont poet laureate died at his home in Sheffield, Vermont, this past Tuesday.

Donald Hall reads a poem, from his book The Back Chamber (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), about his home in New Hampshire. Hall discusses his new book, Essays After Eighty (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014), in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“This is not a rehearsal. This is your life.” Maya Angelou is the author of more than thirty books, including her influential memoir of the Jim Crow South, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She received numerous awards throughout her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was presented to her by President Obama in 2011. Angelou died at the age of eighty-six in 2014. A rare figure whose work was both scholarly and accessible, Angelou was undeniably inspiring.

Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose One Hundred Years of Solitude established him as a colossus of twentieth-century literature, died on April 17, 2014 in Mexico City at the age of eighty-seven.

“Do you know what it feels like to wait for your son to come home alive every night?" Award-winning poet Wanda Coleman, often called the “unofficial Poet Laureate of L.A.,” died Friday at the age of sixty-seven. Coleman’s book of poetry Mercurochrome was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. In this clip from May 2013, she reads at California State University.

Watch this recent movie trailer for Big Sur, based on Jack Kerouac’s novel of the same name, which chronicles the beatnik author’s transition from a rebellious and reluctantly famous young man into an emotionally troubled adult. The book debuted in 1962; Jack Kerouac, born in 1922, died in 1969, only seven years after its publication.

Renowned author Doris Lessing—who wrote notable novels such as The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and The Good Terrorist and won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature—died on November 17, 2013 at age ninety-four. Watch this BBC News video that reflects on her colorful personality, prolific writing career, and occasionally controversial life.