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“It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like these. You step into an inverted version of the world,” says poet Alice Oswald about the connection between water and grief in this 2020 virtual lecture for the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. “The water fits around you like a velvet suit, and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections.”
“One of the things that I think I can say now with a great deal of confidence about writing is that usually, the things that you are most ashamed of are actually what you should be trying to describe,” says Alexander Chee in this 2018 lecture titled “The Writer and Life,” part of Brown University’s public lecture series devoted to various forms of nonfiction writing. For more Chee, read “Which Story Will You Tell? A Q&A with Alexander Chee” by Amy Gall.
In this 2014 video for the Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey delivers the final lecture of her second term as U.S. poet laureate speaking on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the major victories of the civil rights movement, as well as reflecting on how these events cross with her own personal history and laureateship.
"Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality." James Wood, literary critic for the New Yorker and a professor of practice at Harvard University, reads from The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of essays from the Mandel Lectures in Humanities, a book series published by Brandeis University Press.
"In 1929, three decades into what were the great years for the blue-collar town of Portsmouth, on the Ohio River, a private swimming pool opened and they called it Dreamland." Journalist Sam Quinones discusses his book Dreamland: The True Story of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which was awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.
"Senatus Populusque Romanus." Cambridge historian Mary Beard gives a lecture at the 92nd Street Y based on her latest book, SPQR: A History of Rome (Liveright, 2015). Beard is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in the nonfiction category.
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams delivered the Poetry Society's annual lecture at Newcastle University in the UK last summer. The seventy-five-year-old chose as his topic On Being Old, reading poems that explore his changing relationship with the great poets of history.
