“We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, who died on February 14, 2015 at the age of eighty-seven, speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown in a 2010 interview about the need for working-class life to be represented in poetry.

"I feel like it's my personal mission to keep those stories as present as I am possibly able to keep them present." Claudia Rankine appeared on PBS NewsHour last week to discuss the recent upheaval involving unarmed black men and white police officers, and how these events influenced her book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014). 

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 3 Sections speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about how his experience as an immigrant influences the way he writes his poems. "If you're an immigrant, you're sort of on the fringe of society, you see society as a whole, you see panoramas...you can embrace all of it."

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.

"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.)