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“Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing.” In this Library of Congress event, Arthur Sze accepts the 2024 Rebekah Bobbitt Johnson National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, reads several poems from his career, and talks about his formal exploration of poetics in a conversation with Rob Casper.
In this Green Apple Books event, Kinsale Drake reads from her debut poetry collection, The Sky Was Once a Dark Blanket (University of Georgia Press, 2024), and discusses how Indigenous heritage, nature, pop culture, and other influences shaped many of her poems.
“Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.” In this Poetry Hour series reading from the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, actor Jeremy Irons reads “The Folly Of Being Comforted” by W. B. Yeats.
Patrick Rosal reads Paul Genega’s poem “Aliens” in this short film directed by Williams Rossa Cole and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, for their Read By poetry film series.
“It is the Glad Season / Thunder ebbs to silence and lightning sleeps quietly in the corner.” At the annual White House Christmas celebration in 2005, the late Maya Angelou reads a poem written for the holiday and in the spirit of peace.
In this OR Books Live on Avenue C event, Mosab Abu Toha reads “If I Must Die” by the late Refaat Alareer, which appears in his posthumously published collection of poetry and prose, If I Must Die (OR Books, 2024).
In this video, Nikki Giovanni reads a selection of her poems and speaks about her life and career for the Wright Conversations series hosted by the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and PBS Books. Giovanni died at the age of eighty-one on December 9, 2024.
In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers features editor India Lena González introduces the 2024 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors: Suzette Mullen, author of The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024); Dorsía Smith Silva, author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press, 2024); Uchenna Awoke, author of The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult, 2024); Parul Kapur, author of Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024); and Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024).
In this Tucson Humanities Festival event held at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, scholar Jacqueline Barrios introduces Brandon Som, who reads from his Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, Tripas (Georgia Review Books, 2023).
In this 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets virtual event, fellows Kenzie Allen, Kalehua Kim, Halee Kirkwood, Mary Leauna Christensen, Erin Marie Lynch, m.s. RedCherries, and Annie Wenstrup read for their work.
