Bowland Beth
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"That her skydance went for nothing / hanging fire on empty air." David Harsent reads "Bowland Beth" from his 2014 T. S. Eliot Prize–winning collection, Fire Songs (Faber & Faber, 2014).
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Theater video tags: 2014
Azar Nafisi
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"At death's door, you want to remember the best that humanity has to offer." The author of The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (Viking, 2014) speaks about the impact of literature and why we turn to reading and writing for connection.
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Teresa Mei Chuc
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The author of Red Thread (Fithian Press, 2012) and Keeper of the Winds (FootHills Publishing, 2014), reads from her work at Rattle's monthly reading series. Rattle is featured in Literary MagNet in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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Cristina Henríquez
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"Just watch the world and observe." Cristina Henríquez, author of The Book of Unknown Americans (Knopf, 2014), offers anecdotes and advice to guide young writers.
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One Child Has Brown Eyes
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"One roams the heavens for a perfect answer / One transfixed like a dead doe, a convex mirror." Marilyn Chin reads "One Child Has Brown Eyes" from her latest poetry collection, Hard Love Province (Norton, 2014).
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Helen Macdonald
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"My fascination with birds goes back so long.... When I was about five or six, I think I used to try and sleep with my hands behind my back like wings." Helen Macdonald discusses her memoir, H Is For Hawk (Jonathan Cape, 2014), which received the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction, and won the 2014 Costa Book Award this week.
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The Bone Clocks
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"It has a skeleton of realism, but inside its rib cage it has a sort of paranormal heart." David Mitchell introduces and reads from his most recent book, The Bone Clocks (Random House, 2014), which was longlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.
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Claudia Rankine as a Citizen
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"I feel like it's my personal mission to keep those stories as present as I am possibly able to keep them present." Claudia Rankine appeared on PBS NewsHour last week to discuss the recent upheaval involving unarmed black men and white police officers, and how these events influenced her book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014).
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All the Light We Cannot See
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"I wanted to try to capture the magic of hearing the voice of a stranger on a little device in your home." Anthony Doerr discusses what inspired him to write his new novel, which took him ten years to complete. All the Light We Cannot See, published in May by Scribner, was a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction.
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Poem for Jon
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Award-winning slam poet and teacher Joaquin Zihuatanejo performs a moving poem in sign language to thank his student Jon. This performance is from the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam in Phoenix, Arizona, and shared by Button Poetry.
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