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“I think poetry should be part of popular culture, in the sense that poetry should be something we reach to.” Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, speaks about how his childhood in Topeka, Kansas influenced his new poetry collection, Brown (Knopf, 2018), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown.
“I wanted their lives, especially our working-class women, to be out there. People need to be seen. I wanted to show that.” Nicole Dennis-Benn talks about the working-class town she grew up in Jamaica and how her experiences inspired her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), in this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.
“Us brown girls: Brick-built: / Masters of every metaphor and every metamorphosis…” Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X (HarperTeen, 2018), reads her poem “This Is For Us” for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.
“If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle...” For PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series, Marcus Wicker talks about the influence of hip-hop in his poetry and reads his poem “Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church.”
For PBS NewsHour, U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith recommends recent poetry titles, including Look (Graywolf Press, 2016) by Solmaz Sharif, who was featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in Poets & Writers Magazine, and Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf Press, 2017) by Erika L. Sanchez, who was profiled in “First” by Rigoberto González in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“When you see yourself reflected in literature, it enlarges your ideas of what is possible for you.” MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Jesmyn Ward takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of her hometown in Mississippi and shares the parts of her life and community that inspire her writing. Ward is the winner of the 2017 National Book Award in fiction for Sing, Unbured, Sing (Scribner, 2017).
“I gave my body to the mountain whole. / For my body, the clinic gave out petals inked with curses. / Refill, refill, refill, until they stopped.” William Brewer reads poems from his debut poetry collection, I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), and takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia to speak about the opioid crisis.
“I think that’s one of the great things that fiction has the power to do: it allows you to create a character, a character you might find despicable or with whom you might not agree, but then give them the power to basically make their case as though they were making it before God.” Elliot Ackerman talks to PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about his second novel, Dark at the Crossing (Knopf, 2017), which is a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award in fiction.
“They make us more empathetic. They connect us to one another. They make people who are not like us more human.” Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, shares her love of books and why reading them is so important for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.
“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.
