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For the 2025 lecture in the Bedri Distinguished Writers Series at the University of California in Berkeley, Joy Williams reads from her story collection Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael (Tin House, 2024) and speaks about the importance of fiction’s art.
“I was doing nine years in prison, and poems became my way to see the world.” In this Common Read event hosted by the Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University, Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon (Norton, 2020), answers questions from the audience and presents a lecture and reading introduced by Louisiana poet laureate Alison Pelegrin.
In this Villanova University Literary Festival event, Victoria Chang reads from her poetry collections Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and speaks about her ekphrastic poems and the power of writing in conversation with other artists and people in her life.
“These are notes on encountering the daily, the literary, the visual, violent, the arbitrary, the ordinary, and the beautiful…. They are always concerned with what I think of as the ordinary, extraordinary matter of Black life.” In this Virginia Museum of Fine Arts event, Christina Sharpe discusses her latest book, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which weaves the past, present, and future together through various mediums ranging from lyric to photography.
“I write toward what hurts. I write toward the truth, and I tell it again. I scribe the whole.” In this National Book Festival event, Jesmyn Ward, recipient of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, speaks about how her grandmother influenced her work as a writer and joins Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a conversation about her award-winning novels, grief writing, and cultural authenticity.
“It seems to me that prose, it may be lyrical, but it isn’t meant to be sung.” In this 2014 Academy of American Poets event, Edward Hirsch discusses the history and practice of poets writing prose with Toi Derricotte and Claudia Rankine.
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.
“That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life, its abiding metaphors, so that my story would not be determined for me.” In this 2022 video, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write” for the prize ceremony at Yale University.
“The conundrum of a writer’s life, particularly that of a poet’s, is learning to embody a paradox,” says Rita Dove, winner of the 2018 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, in this recording of the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. “One has to be fierce and tender at the same time. Loud and quiet. Brash and introspective.”
“With regard to war, I can’t help being suspicious of the very reasons we turn to poetry at all,” reads Paisley Rekdal from “Beyond Empathy, Beyond the Archive: Notes on Poetic Representation” for the 2022 Blaney Lecture, an annual lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics created by the Academy of American Poets. “Is our desire one of representation, political change, or emotional catharsis? And is that political change meant to happen on the page, or off it?”
