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“I’ve turned old. I ache most / To be confronted by the real, / By the cold, the pitiless, the bleak.” In this 2018 video from the 92nd Street Y, Tracy K. Smith reads her poem “Annunciation,” which appears in her new collection, Such Color: New and Selected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021). Smith’s fifth poetry collection is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“We claimed it first, this little mountain. Me and MaViolet and a scattering of neighbors,” reads Jocelyn Nicole Johnson from the title novella of her debut story collection, My Monticello (Henry Holt, 2021), which is featured in Page One in the November/December 2021 of Poets & Writers Magazine, in this reading and conversation with Walter Mosley for Left Bank Books in St. Louis, Missouri.
“For some reason, the poems are much closer to the reality in my life,” says Ananda Lima about her writing process for poetry versus fiction in this episode of The Story Talks Back podcast with Dave Stanton. Lima’s first poetry collection, Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I felt like someone was talking to me and I had to write it down.” Natashia Deón talks about vivid dreams and how events from her life inspired the opening lines of her debut novel, Grace (Counterpoint, 2016), in episode 1 of Are You There, Ghost? It’s Me, Chiwan with host Chiwan Choi. Deón’s second novel, The Perishing (Counterpoint, 2021), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Dark and huge, it is frightening to be alive with a song in you,” reads Shangyang Fang from his poem “Serenade Behind a Floating Stage” in this Copper Canyon Press video promoting his debut collection, Burying the Mountain, which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“What does it mean to dream of better places in this book?” Anthony Doerr talks about exploring utopian questions while writing his latest novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land (Scribner, 2021), in this interview for Late Night With Seth Meyers. A Q&A with Doerr by Joshua Mohr appears in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Green spring grass on / the hills had cured / by June and by July,” reads Forrest Gander from his poem “Wasteland: on the California Wildfires” for Dear Poet, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.
“It wasn’t until I was assigned the family tree project at the age of nine, the same age as my mother when she became a refugee, that I began to understand that she had survived a war.” In this Greenlight Bookstore virtual event, Grace M. Cho reads from her memoir, Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), which is shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction, and speaks with Sun Yung Shin about breaking the conventions of writing genres.
“When you can articulate the shape of the monster before you, it all of a sudden becomes a lot less intimidating.” In this video from PBS’s Articulate, author Tochi Onyebuchi talks about how writing helps him process rage and hopelessness, and “organize the universe.”
“It’s about memory, and love, and friendship,” says Sandra Cisneros in this short video introducing her first work of fiction in nearly a decade, Martita, I Remember You (Vintage, 2021), a novel about three women who travel to Paris to fulfill their dreams. The book comes in a dual-language edition with a Spanish translation by Liliana Valenzuela.
