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Last month poet Martín Espada spoke with Bill Moyers about how poets "reach out and put our hands on the intangible". A one-time lawyer and advocate, Espada has published more than fifteen books of poems, translations, and essays, including his latest poetry collection, The Trouble Ball (Norton, 2011).
Appearing at Cornell University in 2009, the author reads from "The Starlight on Idaho," a short story originally published in Playboy in 2007. Johnson's latest novel, Train Dreams (FSG), was a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
Novelist and screenwriter Tom Perrotta, author most recently of The Leftovers (St. Martin's Press, 2011), offers advice to writers and debunks the maxim of always writing what you know.
In this clip the actor, filmmaker, and author of No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007) and It Chooses You (McSweeney's, 2011), among other books, offers a helpful strategy for avoiding procrastination.
There's nothing understated about this one. Check out Rebecca Migdal's trailer for Andrew Laties's Rebel Bookseller: Why Indie Bookstores Represent Everything You Want to Fight for, From Free Speech to Buying Local to Building Communities (Seven Stories Press, 2011), which pits an online retail giant against a chain bookstore monster (who kidnaps Emily Dickinson)! Can the Rebel Bookseller save the day and bring back a community of books?
It may be Ocho de Mayo, but it's not too late to watch Naomi Shihab Nye read her poem "Cinco de Mayo" (from Transfer, published by BOA Editions last year) for PBS NewHour's Weekly Poem.
This month's selection from Motionpoems is Adam Tow's visual interpretation of David Wagoner's poem "Thoreau and the Lightning," from the collection After the Point of No Return (Copper Canyon Press, 2011).
Commissioned by America: Now and Here, an organization founded by Eric Fischl to promote conversation about contemporary America through the arts, the forty-five-minute film "Crossing State Lines: An American Renga" is based on the book of the same name, curated by Bob Holman and Carol Muske-Dukes and published by FSG last April, that features fifty-four poets from across the country in conversation.
Amy King, the author of six poetry books, including I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press, 2011), reads her poem "Lidija Dimkovska Has Made a Bomb of My Eyes" in this clip. Ugly Duckling Presse published a translation of Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers by Dimkovska, a poet from Skopje, Macedonia, in 2006.
The author of The Uncommon Reader (FSG, 2007) reads from "The Shielding of Mrs. Forbes," one of the two stories in his new collection, Smut, published earlier this year by Faber and Faber and Profile Books in England and forthcoming in the U.S. next month from Picador.
