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“The slit would talk back sweet nothing in a red gown.” Phillip B. Williams reads at the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize Reading. Williams, author of Thief in the Interior (Alice James Books, 2016), is featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” by Dana Isokawa in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“How we write is we feel around on the ground with our hands to find what has fallen before us isn’t and must be ours to speak of.” Ari Banias, author of the debut poetry collection, Anybody (Norton, 2016), reads a selection of his poems for the Poetry Project. Banias is featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Even your dinner napkins are on fire.” Solmaz Sharif accepts an award from the Women’s Intercultural Network and reads poems from her debut collection, Look (Graywolf Press, 2016). Sharif is featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Sometimes I ask for too much just to feel my mouth overflow.” Ocean Vuong reads “Notebook Fragments” for Button Poetry at the 2016 AWP conference and book fair. Vuong, author of Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), is featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this New Yorker video, Teju Cole, author of Known and Strange Things (Random House, 2016), reflects on his American citizenship and Nigerian upbringing from his home in Brooklyn. Cole is featured in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I want to be remembered as somebody who told good stories.” This documentary follows Neil Gaiman on his last book signing tour and chronicles his youth and successes as an author. Directed by Patrick Meaney, the film features interviews with the late Terry Pratchett, Lev Grossman, Michael Sheen, and others.
“There is no perfect ethical status/identity that you exist in.” Zadie Smith and Jeffrey Eugenides discuss their own approaches to writing and what they've learned from their experiences at the 2016 New Yorker Festival.
“I thought, okay, a hundred pages, I’ll do the four seasons, twenty-five pages each section, that’s all I have to do.” Poet and novelist Jennifer Tseng, whose novel, Mayumi and the Sea of Happiness (Europa Editions, 2015), is longlisted for the 2016 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction, reads a selection and talks about her writing inspiration and experience.
“During the spring and summer all the grasses come up, and that’s always the first thing I smell when I go up there [to South Dakota], and the first thing I miss when I come back...” Layli Long Soldier talks about the inspiration for her “Grass Poems” series and reads a selection of poems from her debut collection, WHEREAS, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2017. Long Soldier is a 2016 Whiting Award winner in poetry.
“Once you can identify dehumanization, just breath can make a brick cage clumsy.” This short film for Motionpoems is an adaptation of Cynthia Manick's poem “Things I Carry Into the World” featuring four poets from Urban Word NYC: Esther Aloba, Nkosi Nkululeko, Makayla Posely, and Trace DePass.
