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"I'm pursuing a kind of language which is just as complicated, and also as transparent, as human experience." The MacArthur Genius Grant–recipient reads from his new poetry collection, How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), and speaks about his musical influences and how he continues to develop his voice.
"We do what everyone says we can't. We write." Trumbo tells the story of legendary screenwriter and novelist Dalton Trumbo, played by Bryan Cranston, who was blacklisted by Hollywood in the 1940s after he was accused of being a Communist. The film is directed by Jay Roach with a screenplay by John McNamara.
Megan Kruse reads from her debut novel, Call Me Home (Hawthorne Books, 2015), for the Burnt Tongue reading series in Portland, Oregon. Kruse is one of the honorees for the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 for 2015.
"Within that economy of words, you choose words that have certain angles, that have certain edges, that effect people in a certain way." Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, speaks with Khalil Gibran Muhammad about what he learned as a poet and how those skills continue to influence his writing.
"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.
"She could taste with all of her skin, including her eyelids." Author and naturalist Sy Montgomery describes her first meeting with Athena, a giant Pacific octopus, at the New England Aquarium in Boston. This encounter spurred her to write The Soul of an Octopus (Atria Books, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
This book trailer for Lincoln Michel's debut short story collection, Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015), presents humorously offbeat testimonials of the author's prowess as a "short story social media guru and a flash fiction consultant czar."
"Whether I was born this way or my personality was formed by circumstance, I don't think anyone would call me an easy person to deal with..." Photographer Sally Mann reads from her memoir, Hold Still (Little, Brown, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
"I was hoping for scandal and deceit, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, racial complications... and I found all of it." Photographer Sally Mann reflects on her family history and how old letters, photographs, and journals in her attic inspired her memoir, Hold Still, published by Little, Brown this month.
Patrick Phillips reads "Matinee" from his poetry collection Boy (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and speaks about what drew him to poetry. His latest book, Elegy for a Broken Machine (Knopf, 2015), is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award.
