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“My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. / He says that he believes a person can love someone / and still be able to murder that person.” Marie Howe reads her poem “After the Movie,” which appears in her collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Norton, 2008), in this 2014 video for the Page Meets Stage series in New York City.
“I’ll dig in, / into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.” The late Denise Levertov reads poems from her collections Evening Train (New Directions, 1992) and Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996) in this video from a 1993 event at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.
“Scientists say the average human/ life gets three months longer every year. / By this math, death will be optional,” reads Nicole Sealey from her poem “The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born,” which appears in her collection Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), in this reading with Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro (Tin House, 2019), at Scripps College.
This virtual round-robin reading of new Asian American fiction features Nawaaz Ahmed, author of Radiant Fugitives (Counterpoint, 2021), Jackson Bliss, author Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Melissa Chadburn, author of A Tiny Upward Shove (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), Tracey Lien, author of All That’s Left Unsaid (HarperCollins, 2022), and Soon Wiley, author of When We Fell Apart (Dutton Books, 2022). The event was hosted by the Center for Fiction and presented in partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
In this 92nd Street Y recording, Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021), is introduced by poet Angel Nafis, and John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020), is introduced by poet Terrance Hayes before reading from a selection of their poems.
In this livestreamed event, poet and drag performer Wo Chan, author of Togetherness, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September, and poet CAConrad, author most recently of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), read from their works at the Poetry Project in New York City.
This video celebrates the tenth season of the Silo City Reading Series, a poetry reading series that takes place in a complex of historic grain silos in Buffalo, New York and has “held true to the belief of what imagination can do when it acts collectively.” Upcoming events begin this weekend and feature poets Richie Hofmann, Victoria Chang, and Jericho Brown.
In celebration of Walt Whitman’s bicentennial birthday on May 31 of 2019, 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.
“In the last year of her life, my mother Asako spoke more openly of the trauma of the war years and her incarceration at Topaz,” reads Karen Tei Yamashita for this event celebrating her work, hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Yamashita was awarded the 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.
“[The poem] allows for a place for the reader to breathe,” says Ada Limón in this 2019 reading and conversation about her books of poetry with Washington Post book critic Ron Charles, hosted by the Library of Congress. “In that empty space we actually bring ourselves to the page, so that the writer is not the only person experiencing the poem, but the reader is part of that journey.”
