"The power of the word is a doorway." MFA students from Anitoch University in Los Angeles have a unique requirement to do community service as part of their program to enhance the "writing life" of others. PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown takes a look.

Man Booker Prize-winning author John Banville, whose pen name as a crime novelist is Benjamin Black, recently appeared on PBS NewsHour to discuss his new Philip Marlowe crime novel, The Black-Eyed Blond, and the difference between writing literary fiction and crime fiction.

PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown recently talked with Carolyn Forché, whose new anthology, Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English 1500-2001, published last month by W.W. Norton, contains the work of poets who have witnessed war, imprisonment, torture, and slavery. Forché calls the collection an "outcry of the soul." 

“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 “Perhaps the World Ends Here” for PBS NewsHour.

Natasha Trethewey, poet laureate of the U.S., and Jeffrey Brown explore the impact poetry has on people who suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease in this video clip from the series Where Poetry Lives on PBS Newshour.

The National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin recently spoke with the PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about his latest novel, TransAtlantic, which features a fictional braiding of the narratives of Frederick Douglass traveling through Ireland in 1845, the first nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1919, and Senator George Mitchell in 1998 trying to forge a peace treaty in Northern Ireland. (Check out Brown's retake at the beginning of the clip.)

The author who yesterday won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for his novel The Orphan Master's Son (Random House, 2012) appeared on the PBS NewsHour shortly after the publication of the book to discuss his fictional interpretation of North Korea and its late dictator, Kim Jong-il.

The eighty-seven-year-old poet talks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about a life of writing poetry and his Early Collected Poems: 1965-1992, for which he recently won the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress.

The author reads an excerpt from his latest novel, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, published last month by Riverhead Books, on PBS NewsHour.

PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown profiles eighty-eight-year-old David Ferry, who was recently honored with the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize as well as the National Book Award for poetry. Ferry is currently tackling a translation of Virgil's Aeneid.