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In this video for the Poets House Hard Hat Reading series, Asiya Wadud, author of No Knowledge Is Complete Until It Passes Through My Body (Nightboat Books, 2021), reads from Inger Christensen’s alphabet (New Directions, 2001), translated from the Danish by Susanna Nied, followed by her own poem “L.”
“I don’t want to sound unreasonable / but I need to be in love immediately.” In this video, Alex Dimitrov reads a selection of poems from his collection Love and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021) for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems reading series. “Twelve Films That Put Me in the Mood to Write” by Dimitrov appears in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“A free society does not ban books.” Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks about her personal journey to develop The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World, 2021) as well as the attempts in certain states to ban the book from schools in this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
“This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus. The hermanos have been preparing in the dirt yard behind the morada,” reads Kirstin Valdez Quade from her award-winning debut novel, The Five Wounds (Norton, 2021), in this 2021 virtual reading for the James Merrill House’s Writer-in-Residence reading series.
“For most of American history, African American authors have not had the purchase on the American conscience that they have right now,” says Ta-Nehisi Coates about the rise of banning books with themes about race including his own memoir, Between the World and Me (One World, 2015), as well as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Antiracist (One World, 2019) and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World, 2021) by Nikole Hannah-Jones in this 2021 CBS Mornings interview. “This is really about white children now being exposed to ideas that I think were previously segregated.”
In this Strand virtual event, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux president Jonathan Galassi and editor-at-large for poetry Robyn Creswell speak about editing The FSG Poetry Anthology, which celebrates the publisher’s seventy-fifth anniversary, and introduce poets Maureen N. McLane, Ishion Hutchinson, and Carl Phillips who read their poems.
In this video, Raymond Antrobus discusses and reads his poem “Plantation Paint,” which appears in his collection All the Names Given (Tin House/Picador, 2021), for which he was shortlisted for the 2021 T. S. Eliot Prize.
“To feel signs depends on how & why / the singer’s song puckers the mouth.” Yusef Komunyakaa reads his poem “A World of Daughters,” which appears in his collection Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), among other selections in this 2020 virtual reading for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series.
“As I often tell students: What other people call revision, I call writing,” says poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach about writing his books The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Forever (Norton, 2021) as a writer-in-residence in this 2021 installment of James Merrill House’s video series Studio 107. Longenbach died at the age of sixty-two on July 29, 2022.
“[The Congo] is the heartbeat of the world, and it’s never recognized as a central heartbeat,” says Will Alexander about the focus of his most recent collection, Refractive Africa (New Directions, 2021), a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, in this Poetry.LA interview with Douglas Manuel about the intuition he follows for his writing. “I’m not colonized by cognitive expertise,” says Alexander.
