Jump to navigation Skip to content
Denis Johnson reads a selection of short stories to a captive audience as part of the Spring 2016 Barbara and David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series at Cornell University. Johnson died at the age of sixty-seven on May 25, 2017.
“It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu.” Patricia Lockwood, poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy (Riverhead Books, 2017), performs a dramatic reading of a passage from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001) for the literary nonprofit O, Miami.
“And if you can’t keep secrets from your family, who can you keep secrets from?” In this video, Jonathan Safran Foer reads excerpts from his novel Here I Am (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016) at Salon@615 in Nashville.
“This poem ‘Home’ is not only talking about ‘home,’ a physical place. It’s also talking about language as a home which I feel exiled from.” Safiya Sinclair, author of the debut collection Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads from “Home” and talks about the multiple languages and places that inhabit her poems.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads “damn right it’s betta than yours” from her collection, TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), and talks about the influences of music and language on her writing.
Allen Ginsberg’s anti-war poem “Hum Bom!” is read by Bono and then discussed by U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Harvard professor Elisa New. New is the creator of Poetry in America, a multi-platform digital initiative that offers professional development classes for educational practitioners, as well as free online poetry courses.
Lesley Nneka Arimah reads “War Stories” from her debut story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“The things I say in my poems are things that I absolutely have to say.” Jive Poetic reads an original poem and shares his writing process for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.
Morgan Parker reads a selection of poems including “Heaven Be a Xanax,” “Hottentot Venus,” and “Slouching Toward Beyoncé” from her second poetry collection, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Tin House Books, 2017), with musical accompaniment by David Cieri. Parker’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Dean Rader reads his poem inspired by Leilani Bustamante’s painting “Lady Moore” and “Self-Portrait in Place” for a Quiet Lightning reading series event. Rader’s most recent collection, Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
