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“They are not just a challenge in an individual school system or library, but legislation being introduced in statehouses that would affect the availability of books all over the state in every school and library.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel about the intensifying efforts across the United States to ban specific books related to LGBTQIA+ issues, race, and freedom of speech.
“I still believe that we listen more closely to a whisper than to a shout.” In this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove speaks about history, rage, the power of poetry, and her latest collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021).
“A book is much more than a transactional object. The words are flooding in, and ideas are filling you in emotion. It’s haunting in a good way.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Louise Erdrich speaks from her bookstore Birchbark Books & Native Arts in Minneapolis about her love of books and her new novel, The Sentence (Harper, 2021), a ghost story which explores the racial divides of her hometown.
“I’m carrying this for America, but for Indigenous peoples in particular,” says Joy Harjo about what it means to be the first Native American to serve as the poet laureate of the United States in this 2019 PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown. A Q&A with Harjo about her new memoir, Poet Warrior (Norton, 2021), appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I look back, just with a little wonder. Wonder that I stuck with this thing.” In this 2004 interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS NewsHour, Philip Roth reflects on his writing career and the role of a writer. Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018.
“I gave my body to the mountain whole. / For my body, the clinic gave out petals inked with curses. / Refill, refill, refill, until they stopped.” William Brewer reads poems from his debut poetry collection, I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), and takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia to speak about the opioid crisis.
“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.
Paul Muldoon speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about “Muldoon’s Picnic,” a monthly show held at the Irish Arts Center in New York featuring music, storytelling, and poetry.
In this video, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown tours an exhibit on Emily Dickinson at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, where visitors can listen to readings of her poems, examine remnants of her life, and view handwritten manuscripts.
“There are no rules to writing...and if there are rules, really they’re there to be broken.” Colum McCann, author of Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice (Random House, 2017), speaks to Jeffrey Brown about the challenges and excitement of writing today at the 2017 AWP conference and book fair.
