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“I don’t know a thing about paradise || In my house nobody ever brought / it up...” Anna Moschovakis reads from her poem “Paradise (Film Two)” from her collection They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House Press, 2016) as part of the twenty-fourth annual Poets House Showcase in 2016. Moschovakis’s forthcoming debut novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love will be released by Coffee House Press in August.
“If I understood Marx, I thought, I could understand my mother.” At Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Jordy Rosenberg reads from his essay “The Daddy Dialectic,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rosenberg speaks about his debut novel, Confessions of the Fox (One World, 2018), in “The Business of Relationships” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Words carry weight, lots of weight. Words can drown us, and words can save us.” Jaki Shelton Green, who was recently named North Carolina’s tenth poet laureate, reads from her poem “From Whence I Enter” at Christ School in Asheville, North Carolina. Green is the state’s first African American poet laureate.
“I hear words spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives.” At a 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017), which details her experience as an interpreter for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.
In this vintage video from 1973, Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman read their long collaborative poem “Memorial Day” as part of a reading series at 98 Greene Street Loft curated by the poet Ted Greenwald. The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution worked with the Berrigan estate, Waldman, and Sandy Hirsh, who filmed the reading, to digitally preserve this video.
Anne Waldman reads from the “Endtime” section of her longer poetic text at the 2017 Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word Performance Extravaganza at Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. Waldman’s poetry collection Trickster Feminism (Penguin Books, 2018) is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2009 interview with poet Elizabeth Spires, former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall reads poems and speaks about the writing life. For more Hall, read “Turning Time Around: A Profile of Donald Hall” by contributor John Freeman from the November/December 2014 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Hall passed away on June 23, 2018 at the age of eighty-nine.
“Justin used to think the trees were God. But today, right here, he thinks the ocean might be God. All that power and weakness, spread out for us to see.” Silas House reads from his fifth novel, Southernmost (Algonquin Books, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Porochista Khakpour reads from her essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay” and talks to Northwestern University professor Brian Edwards about her writing interests and the publishing industry. Khakpour’s debut memoir, Sick (Harper Perennial, 2018), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became / a character in the news...” Khaled Hosseini, Rita Dove, Philip Gourevitch, and Siri Hustvedt read Liu Xia’s poem “June 2nd, 1989” from Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. PEN America and Amnesty International collaborated on the video series as a call to free Liu Xia from house arrest in Beijing, where she has been held since her late husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009.
