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Jason Reynolds speaks about his appointment by the Library of Congress as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, the importance of young readers, and the danger of banning books in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
In this 2019 video, Diane Seuss reads from her books of poetry and speaks about her writing with Washington Post’s Ron Charles at Hill Center in Washington, D.C. for a series hosted by the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. Seuss’s essay “Restless Herd: Some Thoughts on Order—In Poetry, In Life” appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“One of the women greeted me. / I love you, she said. She didn’t / Know me, but I believed her, / And a terrible new ache / Rolled over in my chest,” reads Tracy K. Smith from her poem “Wade in the Water” in this 2018 Library of Congress event with Ron Charles, book critic of the Washington Post. Smith is featured in a profile by Renée H. Shea in the March/April 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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.
María Kodama discusses the work of her late husband, Jorge Luis Borges, at the Library of Congress, which Borges often called his home. Kodama is joined by Saúl Sosnowski, a professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Maryland.
Poet, memoirist, and novelist Jon Pineda discusses the Filipino American experience and his writing at the Library of Congress. Pineda’s second novel, Let’s No One Get Hurt (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Marie Arana, literary advisor at the Library of Congress, presents a video tribute of the late Denis Johnson, who was awarded the 2017 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Johnson’s second story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden (Random House, 2018), is featured in Page One in the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“We harness a wildness in the ‘I’ of our poems.” In this 2013 video at the Library of Congress, Dorothea Lasky delivers the Bagley Wright Lecture on Poetry and explores how poetry makes us human. Lasky interviews the late Max Ritvo about his poetry and process in “The World Beyond: A Last Interview With Max Ritvo” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"A lightning flash split the gloom and a rumble of cascading boulders burst from the sky." At an event at the Library of Congress, A. Igoni Barrett reads from "The Shape of a Full Circle," a short story from his collection Love Is Power, Or Something Like That (Graywolf Press, 2013). His debut novel, Blackass (Graywolf Press, 2016), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The Library of Congress announced today that Charles Wright is the new U.S. poet laureate. In this clip, Wright, the author of nearly two dozen poetry collections, most recently Caribou (FSG, 2014), reads his poem "Together" for PBS NewsHour.
