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In this 2016 New Yorker video, Robert Battle, former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, reminds all artists, whether dancers, musicians, poets, or writers, that “it’s important for us to, at this time, see beyond our circumstances.” Battle continues: “I think we can do that through the arts.”
In this Button Poetry video, Patricia Smith reads her poem “An All-Purpose Product,” which appears in her award-winning collection Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), for the 2016 Get Lit Classic Slam in Los Angeles.
“[Los Angeles is] part of an international community. The city has allowed tremendous growth for me, in terms of its cultural outlets, from libraries, great cinema, dance, orchestra, interesting mixes of people.... I see myself as a global citizen and a global writer.” Will Alexander, winner of the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize, talks about the influence the city of Los Angeles has had on his relationship with language and writing.
In this 2016 video, Michael Chabon presents Toni Morrison with the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts and American culture. Morrison, who received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center, tells a packed audience about how she became a writer and the inspiration for her first novel, The Bluest Eye.
“Have I forgotten it – / wild conch-shell dialect, / black apostrophe curled / tight on my tongue?” In this video, Safiya Sinclair reads a selection of poems from her debut collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), as well as new poems for this installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series with an introduction by poet Noah Warren.
In this 2016 lecture for the Greater Good Science Center’s conference, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass discusses the history of awe and wonder in world literature, the root of the word “catharsis,” and the power poetry has to captivate and transform its readers.
Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, director of the organization Women Who Submit, reads from her collection Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016) and speaks about writing family stories as a first-generation Chicana in this interview with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA series.
“The only time I meet a stranger is when I confront myself. Any time I meet new people, they’re not strangers.” Poet, novelist, and essayist Chris Abani tells a story about meeting strangers in the airport, learning from their kindness, and how these experiences have influenced his writing for this 2016 House of SpeakEasy event at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York.
“Our cries are heard as noise, / our suffering considered / natural. Native citizens, / we are not free / to roam,” reads the late Kamilah Aisha Moon from her poem “The Emperor’s Deer” in this 2016 Define: BLACK video.
In this video, poet Sarah Browning introduces an encore presentation of a 2016 reading and conversation with Sharon Olds at the Folger Shakespeare Library, part of the O. B. Harrison Poetry Series titled “Begin Again.”
