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“The tepid / American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic / could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh…” Safiya Sinclair reads from her debut collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), and speaks about poetry as the “language of an impolite body” in this episode of LIT hosted by Yahdon Israel.
“We’d cut school like knives through butter, the three / Of us — Peter, Stephen and I — to play / Just about all the music we knew…” In this video, award–winning poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads “Boys” from his second collection of poems, Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016.
In this Open Studio With Jared Bowen interview, playwright Kirsten Greenidge; Kerri Greenidge, historian and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019); and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016) talk about growing up together as sisters and how their work often overlaps.
“Even a baby is / a paper cut theater, / a necklace of incisions strung together / into a country.” In this Poetry.LA video, Kenji C. Liu reads poems from his collections Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016) and Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019) at the Writers for Migrant Justice reading in Los Angeles.
“Our swarm, it move like a flock of birds. All these beautiful black people in motion. Moving and shifting with a kind of intelligence.” Rion Amilcar Scott reads from his debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), and speaks with Cinder Barnes and Karl Smith at Montgomery College in Maryland. Scott’s second story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Liveright, 2019), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“When the water in my heart falls, I hold on to a memory…” Monica Sok reads her poem “I Am Rachana” from her chapbook, Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2016), at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in 2016. Sok is one of the finalists for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.
The Good Liar (HarperCollins, 2016), the debut novel by Nicholas Searle about a wealthy widow who crosses paths with a seasoned con artist, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Bill Condon, the film stars Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, and Russell Tovey.
“I believe literature should always start from zero. So, I write stories in both languages on purpose.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Yoko Tawada speaks in German, English, and Japanese about thinking and writing in two different languages and about her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.
“Living in this world where everything is social media, we’ve lost the art of being completely vulnerable and honest with our thoughts and our feelings. It’s exactly what poetry is, it’s about vulnerability.” In this Poetry.LA interview, Eric Morago, author of the collection Feasting on Sky (Paper Plane Pilot Publishing, 2016), reads from his work and talks about what brought him to poetry.
“Look at the old house in the dawn rain / all the flowers are forms of water…” In this excerpt from the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the late W. S. Merwin reads his poem “Rain Light.” Merwin’s final collection, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
