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Liu Xia, wife of imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, reads from her first poetry collection, Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), while under house arrest in her home in Beijing. Empty Chairs, translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern, is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"What puts the mean in some of us?" Ada Limón reads her elegy, "Marketing Life for Those of Us Left," in this video for the Academy of American Poets. Limón's fourth poetry collection, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
"If you think the human mind is a wonderful thing, there is an infinite interest in cultivating it." Marilynne Robinson speaks with Bill Moyers about her novel Lila (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), and her thoughts on faith, democracy, and creativity. Robinson discusses her new book of essays, The Givenness of Things (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"The mind is a much more generous resource than we're in the habit of considering it to be." The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist speaks about accessing imagination through writing and her teaching experiences at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. Robinson discusses her new book of essays, The Givenness of Things (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I read everything aloud as I'm writing, because the ear is a great editor. I think listening is the most important thing in the creative arts, but also in life." Yusef Komunyakaa, whose new poetry collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the importance of poetry as a celebration of language and as a way to give voice to the psyche.
Yusef Komunyakaa reads "The Great Migration" at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition, "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North." Komunyakaa's new poetry collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"A written story can inhabit an individual vision far more intensely and deeply than film is able to do." Mary Gaitskill, whose new novel, The Mare (Pantheon Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the powerful worlds that can be built by great literature.
"As readers we can't simply witness or observe a book from afar—we have to live inside it, we have to go through it, and every time we do, we expand a version of our own lives." Carrie Brownstein talks about the relationship between readers, books, and writers in her introduction to the 2013 National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 ceremony. Brownstein's debut memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl (Riverhead Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping,” begins Lauren Groff’s third novel, Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), which was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award. In this video, Groff talks about the making of her novel at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington D.C.
"In one house my grandfather lay dying, the smell of approaching mud keeping him alive." Ray Gonzalez, whose new poetry collection, Beautiful Wall (BOA Editions, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads a selection of poems at Arizona State University in 2012.
