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“Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing.” In this Library of Congress event, Arthur Sze accepts the 2024 Rebekah Bobbitt Johnson National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, reads several poems from his career, and talks about his formal exploration of poetics in a conversation with Rob Casper.
In this Library of Congress National Book Festival event, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and Tiya Miles, author of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024), discuss their books in a conversation moderated by Martha S. Jones.
In this PBS Books virtual event celebrating the release of the fortieth anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, published by Everyman’s Library, author Sandra Cisneros discusses the novel and how it has touched many lives and affected the literary landscape in a conversation with Heather-Marie Montilla.
“I like being an outsider. It allows for that distance to enjoy the carnival for what it is.” In this event hosted by the Library of Congress, bestselling author Kevin Kwan speaks about his experiences as an author and the process of writing his latest novel, Lies and Weddings (Doubleday, 2024), with Library of Congress literary director Clay Smith.
In this inaugural Mary Oliver Memorial Event, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón introduces her signature project which includes site-specific poetry installations in seven national parks and the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress. Limón is joined by poets Molly McCully Brown, Jake Skeets, Analicia Sotelo, and Paul Tran for a reading and conversation.
In this event celebrating Sandra Cisneros, winner of the 2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the author reads from her latest poetry collection, Woman Without Shame (Knopf, 2022), and speaks about her writing career with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.
In this 2023 National Book Festival event, Joy Harjo, author of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (Norton, 2022), and Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023), read from their work and discuss writing about nature in a conversation moderated by NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe. Dungy’s essay “Manifest Some Magic: Get Out of Your Own Way and Do the Darn Thing” is included in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this National Book Festival event, George Saunders accepts the 2023 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and speaks about his writing process, how problems in a work-in-progress contain opportunities, and the place of empathy in storytelling in a conversation moderated by Library of Congress literary director Clay Smith.
“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.
In this video, Kim Fu, author of Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century (Tin House, 2022), and Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust (Riverhead Books, 2022), speak about writing within off-kilter realities for this 2022 National Book Festival event moderated by Poets & Writers editor-in-chief Kevin Larimer.
