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“Guam is air-conditioned, Guam is updating its Facebook status, Guam is a punch line in Hollywood movie jokes...” Craig Santos Perez, a 2016 Lannan Literary Awards and Fellowships honoree and recipient of the 2010 Poets & Writers California Writers Exchange Award for poetry, reads from his award-winning collection, from unincorporated territory [guma'] (Omnidawn, 2014).
“Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand, / Mine to yours, yours to mine.” Alberto Ríos reads his poem “When Giving Is All We Have” as part of Dear Poet, an educational project for the Academy of American Poets.
“The past is so present,” says Roland Rugero about his second novel, Baho! (Phoneme Media, 2016), which is set in rural war-torn Burundi. Baho! is translated from the French by Christopher Schaefer and is the first Burundian novel to be translated into English.
“Joy is an act of resistance.” At the sixty-seventh National Book Awards ceremony, Cave Canem founders Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady accept the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community for the organization known as a home for African American poets. This is the first time the award has been given to an organization.
The Seasons in Quincy: Four Portraits of John Berger is a documentary about art critic, novelist, essayist, painter, and poet John Berger, whose latest essay collection is Landscapes: John Berger on Art (Verso Books, 2016). Cowritten by Ben Lerner and Tilda Swinton, the film was released in August 2016.
“Anything wet and eager enough to consume the skin can be called a baptism.” In this video from Button Poetry, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib reads “Ode to Prince” from his debut poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016).
As part of the Singapore Literature Festival in New York City, Alfian Sa’at, Ovidia Yu, Naomi Jackson, and Jason Koo read from their work and discuss the invisibilities and visibilities of race and gender at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
“There’s a theory that says you don’t exist unless someone calls and you respond.” In this video from SlamFind, sam sax, author of the chapbook All the Rage (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2016), reads his poem “Hydrophobia.”
“When I think about what I’m going to write next, I’m like, where do we not exist?” Jason Reynolds, who won the Kirkus Prize for young readers’ literature for his novel As Brave As You (Caitlyn Dlouhy, 2016), speaks about growing up in Brooklyn and not seeing characters like himself in literature as a child.
At Yale University, Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his award-winning novel, The Sympathizer (Grove Press, 2015), and his latest book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Harvard University Press, 2016), which is a finalist for the 2016 National Book Award in nonfiction.
