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“When I was thinking about Red at the Bone, one thing I knew I wanted to talk about was class—economic class—especially in the Black community, and history.” Jacqueline Woodson talks about her new novel, Red at the Bone (Riverhead Books, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and reads the poem from her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2014) that she calls “the seed” of the novel.
“It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet. During that time, an image of his son, Paris, flashed before his eyes....” At the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Edwidge Danticat reads “Without Inspection” from her third story collection, Everything Inside (Knopf, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Every conversation between us then had a way of spiraling into the same abyss. Real men were impossible to understand. Real men suffered. Real men were broken.” Jaed Coffin reads from his second memoir, Roughhouse Friday (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and talks about his experiences barroom boxing in Alaska with Kathryn Miles for Portland Public Library’s Literary Lunch series.
“I have withheld more than I have written. I have restrained more than I have given. I have left unsaid more than I have said.” In this Granta video, Dionne Brand reads from her collection The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
“My favorite form is the long short story or the novella because I think it allows you a little bit more breadth and scope in terms of what you can do.” Brian Evenson, whose eighth story collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from his work and talks about teaching, writing habits, and spirituality in this video from the 2014 Mission Creek Festival.
“Rule No. 10: Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.” Colson Whitehead, whose seventh novel, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads his 2012 New York Times piece “How to Write” at the Muldoon’s Picnic variety show in New York City in 2015.
“It’s hard to imagine the pain of another without being swallowed by it.” Dave Harris reads “Preparing a Meal” from his debut poetry collection, Patricide, which was published by Button Poetry in May.
In celebration of Walt Whitman’s bicentennial birthday on May 31 of this year, Brooklyn residents—including Mahogany L. Browne, Jason Koo, Gregory Pardlo, Ben Purkert, and Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang—recite his 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” from Leaves of Grass in various neighborhoods and libraries throughout the borough. This video was produced by the Brooklyn Public Library.
“There is nothing one man will not do to another.” Carolyn Forché reads “The Visitor” and “The Colonel” from her second poetry collection, The Country Between Us (Copper Canyon Press, 1981), which bore witness to her travels in El Salvador in the late 1970s. Forché’s debut memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), documents that same period of time and is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Let us bridge the generations and remind all who will listen that it only takes one woman sitting on a bus to inspire hundreds…” Amy Uyematsu, the author most recently of Basic Vocabulary (Red Hen Press, 2016), reads her poem “As American As” at the third annual Writers Resist Los Angeles reading at Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center in Venice, California.
