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"It was the end of day. / Shadows came engulfing." As part of the Poets On documentary series, hosted by Carol Frost and directed by Gerard Meola, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning author Donald Justice reads his poetry and attempts to answer such timeless questions as, "What makes a line?" and "How important is originality?"
"In the spleen, an oasis / an oasis as mirage / all my people burned / on either side of me." Listen to poet Charif Shanahan, along with Matt Petronzio, Hafizah Geter, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, and Danniel Schoonebeek read for a National Poetry Month event called Writing and Resistance, presented by MashReads and the Strand Book Store.
"If you're not about the truth, you're not qualified to play any kind of music." National Book Award–winner James McBride reads from Kill 'Em and Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul (Spiegel & Grau, 2016), a book covering the life of James Brown and McBride's personal history with music.
"Nothing can ever happen twice." Listen to a selection of poems by Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, read by her translator Clare Cavanagh, as well as poets Charles Simic and Krystyna Dabrowska, at a celebration of her life and work hosted by the 92nd Street Y. The event also celebrated the publication of Szymborska's posthumous collection, Map: Collected and Last Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).
"A dark woman, head bent, listening for something..." Adrienne Rich reads from her collection An Atlas of the Difficult World (Norton, 1991) at a ceremony in 1995 honoring her as the Santa Cruz County Artist of the Year.
Yuri Herrera reads from his debut novel, Kingdom Cons (Faber & Faber, 2012), translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman, at a 2012 Litquake event at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. Herrera's second novel, Signs Preceding the End of the World (And Other Stories, 2015), also translated by Dillman, is the winner of the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in fiction.
"Emerald, as in the leaf of the ash, / though nothing's burned, not yet..." At a celebration of the Kenyon Review hosted by the Strand Book Store, David Baker, the literary magazine's poetry editor, reads a poem by Alison Hutchkraft from a recent issue, as well as poems from his collection Scavenger Loop (Norton, 2015).
"I’m so damned literary / and at the same time the waters rushing past remind me of / nothing..." Hilary Kaplan reads Frank O'Hara's "Poem en Forme de Saw" from Lunch Poems, first published in 1964 by City Lights Publishers. Angélica Freitas's debut collection, Rilke Shake (Phoneme Media, 2015), translated from the Portuguese by Kaplan, won the 2016 Best Translated Book Award in poetry.
"I want to be able to have some impact on the Nigerian youth, and I want to be able to go back home and do something inspiring..." Chigozie Obioma talks about the response to his debut novel, The Fishermen (Little, Brown, 2015), which was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize and won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize/Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
"What it means / is, what it's showing is, there's this unseen / eye, on the inside. And she's marking it." Listen to Amit Majmudar, a radiologist and Ohio's first poet laureate, read the title poem from his new collection, Dothead (Knopf, 2016). This reading took place at the 2015 Neustadt Festival of International Literature and Culture hosted by the University of Oklahoma.
