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In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Abiodun Oyewole talks about the legacy of the spoken word group The Last Poets, the influence of Langston Hughes and Nina Simone, and his thoughts on the poets of today.
In this episode of the New Social Environment series hosted by the Brooklyn Rail, poets Eve L. Ewing and Andrea Faye Hart read a selection of their poems and join journalist trina reynolds-tyler to discuss how they became co-owners of Build Coffee & Books, a community-centered bookstore and coffee shop in Chicago.
Alison McAlpine’s fifteen-minute-long documentary, perfectly a strangeness, follows a posse of three donkeys as they traverse the barren landscape of the Atacama Desert in Chile and happen upon an astronomical observatory on top of a mountain. While there is no dialogue, the movements of the donkeys, their expressive ears, and the mechanized motions of the observatory satellites, combined with the setting sun giving way to a night sky, offer an expansive range of interpretations and discovery. McAlpine, who was a poet before she was a filmmaker, says in an interview for Deadline, “Seeing these donkeys grazing besides these billion-dollar beasts, these metallic domes, I asked a question, how do they see this world?” Write a narrative poem without human presence that attempts to convey the perspective of an animal, or other living thing, discovering the universe for the first time. What diction seems most effective at producing the wonder you wish to evoke?
In this Amanpour and Company segment, Hari Sreenivasan speaks with poet Megan Falley and comedian Tig Notaro about their Oscar-nominated documentary film Come See Me in the Good Light, which follows Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson’s journey with terminal cancer.
In this PBS NewsHour video, Elizabeth Alexander, president of the Mellon Foundation, speaks about the efforts to support literary nonprofits, including independent publishers, residencies, and fellowships for writers.
In this 2025 event hosted by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Carl Phillips reads from his most recent collection, Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and answers questions about the relationship between the natural world and human experience, and his use of notebooks to collect images.
Published in n+1, Jynne Dilling writes a tribute piece to Michael Silverblatt, who died earlier this month and was the host of NPR’s Bookworm radio program for over three decades. Reflecting on his many insights, Dilling writes about an episode of the program in which Silverblatt talks to author David Mitchell about how stammering is a form of learning what to say. “Stammering is the language of the inner self,” says Silverblatt. “Before a writer does a final draft, the first draft is a form of stammering, trying to gum one’s way through the thing one doesn’t yet know how to say.” Compose a poem that begins as a stammer of sorts, in which you are learning how to say something that feels difficult or even impossible to articulate in language. How might holding on to parts of the stammering imbue your poem with valuable insights into your inner self?
This short film produced by Boa Editions and Hunger Media highlights the life and career of Lucille Clifton and how her work continues to influence and inspire the poetry community, including Boa’s Blessing the Boats Selections series. For more on the press’s work, read “Poetry to Save Us: Boa at 50” in the March/April 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
With his second collection, Horses, award-winning poet Jake Skeets shows us how to contemplate the profundity of our interconnected world, holding space for both grief and beauty, the Anthropocene and queer eros.
The author of Last Psalm at Sea Level considers the different shapes of language through a reflection on curating Deaf art and signed literature for programming at the Guggenheim Museum.
