Jump to navigation Skip to content
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.
Luljeta Lleshanaku reads from her collection Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) in English translation and in the original Albanian, and talks about how history, politics, and religion have informed her writing. Lleshanaku’s new collection, Negative Space (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Glenn Close reads “Old Wives’ Tales on Which I Was Fed” from Jenny Xie’s debut collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), which won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Walt Whitman Award. Eye Level is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“The next morning Less is awakened at six, as planned, introduced to a cup of coffee, and led into a black van with smoked windows....” In this video for Mercury News, Andrew Sean Greer reads from his fifth novel, Less (Lee Boudreaux Books, 2017), for which he was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
“Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done…” Actress Helen Mirren and Stephen Colbert share an emotional moment as she reads the last lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
