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"Literature played a profound role in turning my life around, but it was also journaling as well, like being able to really write and ask myself those tough questions..." Shaka Senghor, author of the memoir, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (Drop a Gem Publishing, 2013), speaks with Jeffrey Brown about how reading and writing helped him to examine his life, and the need for American citizens to understand the prison system.
"Let us gather and be / silent together like stones / glittering in sunlight..." Marjory Wentworth, the poet laureate of the state of South Carolina, reads "Holy City," a poem dedicated to the lives lost at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina one year ago.
Curtis Sittenfeld speaks with PBS NewHour's Jeffrey Brown about her latest novel, Eligible (Random House, 2016), a retelling of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice set in twenty-first-century Cincinnati. Sittenfeld is a participant of the Austen Project, in which six contemporary authors have been asked to reimagine Austen's six complete works.
"Outside, a soldier spits out / his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones / fallen from the sky. May / all your Christmases be white / as the traffic guard unstraps his holster." Ocean Vuong shares poems from his debut collection, Night Sky With Exit Wounds (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), and speaks about the oral tradition of his family and his personal ties to the Vietnam War for a series on PBS NewsHour.
"I want women and girls of African descent and of color to be able to not have to keep searching for stories about themselves." For PBS NewsHour's "Brief but Spectacular" series, playwright and actress Danai Gurira encourages writers to tell their stories, their heritage, directly from the source.
Mahogany L. Browne reads her poem “Black Girl Magic” for PBS NewHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series. Browne is a poet and author coordinating the Women of the World Poetry Slam at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Man Booker Prize–winner Marlon James speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about the voices in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books, 2015) and what writing with all the senses means.
"What happens if you take the fantastic and the historical and bind them into the same book?" The award-winning author speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about the mix of magic and reality in his latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Random House, 2015).
The bestselling author speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about bird-watching, debates, and his latest novel, Purity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which is featured in Page One in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
"I was born in minutes in a roadside kitchen a skillet / whispering my name." Gregory Pardlo speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about his life and his poetry collection Digest (Four Way Books, 2014), which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
