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“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” In this video that originally aired in 2012, poet Joy Harjo reads her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” which appears in her collection The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Norton, 1994), for PBS NewsHour.
In this PBS NewsHour interview, director Raoul Peck speaks about his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, which examines the writings of George Orwell and interweaves clips, readings from the author’s diary, cinematic references, and modern-day footage to propose how prophetic his novels and work have become.
In this PBS NewsHour video, Malcolm Brabant speaks with archivists and scholars about discovering lost stories written by Virginia Woolf before her first novel was published. The discovery culminated into a newly published collection of three comic stories, The Life of Violet: Three Early Stories (Princeton University Press, 2025), edited by Urmila Seshagiri.
“When the time of your life is a time of earthquakes.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Arthur Sze reads from his latest collection, Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), and talks about his life and work, including his discoveries while translating literature. Sze has been named the twenty-fifth poet laureate of the United States.
In this PBS NewsHour interview, Nicholas Boggs speaks about his new book, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), a biography which looks at the ways James Baldwin’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.
In this PBS NewsHour video, Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Maureen Corrigan, professor and book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, offer recommendations for summer reading, including The Satisfaction Café (Scribner, 2025) by Kathy Wang, King of Ashes (Flatiron Books, 2025) by S. A. Cosby, and A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, 2025) by Sophie Elmhirst.
“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.
In this PBS NewsHour video, Danzy Senna discusses her latest novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the ways in which she uses comedy and satire to shed light on the reality of race in America in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.
In this PBS NewHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with best-selling author Rebecca Yarros and romance bookstore owner Leah Koch about the rise of the romantasy genre, which mixes elements of romance and fantasy stories.
In this PBS NewsHour video, Kaveh Akbar speaks about writing his first novel, Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), and how pop culture as well as Persian and contemporary literature mix into the narrative in an interview with Jeffrey Brown. The novel is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
