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Albert Goldbarth is introduced by Amy Stolls, literature director of the National Endowment for the Arts, before reading selections of his poetry at the 2013 National Book Festival. Goldbarth’s new essay collection, The Adventures of Form and Content (Graywolf Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“We harness a wildness in the ‘I’ of our poems.” In this 2013 video at the Library of Congress, Dorothea Lasky delivers the Bagley Wright Lecture on Poetry and explores how poetry makes us human. Lasky interviews the late Max Ritvo about his poetry and process in “The World Beyond: A Last Interview With Max Ritvo” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I think that with writing, it’s really a space that you own...this sort of free space where you’re really sure of what you’re doing and it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or what sorts of boxes even exist out there.” Amanda Lee Koe, author of Ministry of Moral Panic (Epigram Books, 2013) and winner of a 2016 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for Ten Years of Marriage by Su Qing, talks about the relationship between her creative process and inspirations, which include the city of Singapore.
"Literature played a profound role in turning my life around, but it was also journaling as well, like being able to really write and ask myself those tough questions..." Shaka Senghor, author of the memoir, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (Drop a Gem Publishing, 2013), speaks with Jeffrey Brown about how reading and writing helped him to examine his life, and the need for American citizens to understand the prison system.
"It is a plea for the idea that fiction is a way to access or try to access the truth, not a way to escape from it." Alejandro Zambra, recipient of the 2013 Prince Claus Award, speaks about his novel Ways of Going Home (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013) and on what writing means to him. Zambra is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and in our original podcast reading from his latest novel, Multiple Choice (Penguin Books, 2016), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell.
Rumaan Alam reads from his short story "A Certainty" at an event for the Center for Fiction's literary magazine, The Literarian, alongside Terese Svoboda and Sigrid Nunez. Alam is featured in "First Fiction 2016" in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and reads from his debut novel, Rich and Pretty (Ecco, 2016), on Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast.
"The promise and the danger of a short story is that it can be perfect." At the 2013 New Yorker Festival, Junot Díaz and Karen Russell speak about the unique challenges of writing short stories.
"For me, there's something about habit that is elemental." Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers (Scribner, 2013), a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award, speaks with Louisiana Channel about the importance of persistence in her writing life.
At the New Craftsmen in London, Olivia Laing reads from Ernest Hemingway's short story "Now I Lay Me," and then from her second book, The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking (Picador, 2013), which chronicles the alcoholism of six writers. Laing's new book, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (Picador, 2016), examines loneliness and contemporary interpersonal relations.
"He always had very intense intellectual pursuits in his personality...today people don't really realize that truly sophisticated artists thought a lot." Novelist and poet Stanley Crouch, a recipient of the 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for Nonfiction, talks about Charlie Parker, the subject of his most recent book, Kansas City Lightning: The Rise and Times of Charlie Parker (Harper, 2013), the first in a planned two-volume series.
