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The inaugural cohort of Letras Boricuas Fellows showcases the vitality and diversity of Puerto Rican literature.
Created in response to social uprisings and the pandemic, Lampblack offers direct aid and community to Black writers and publishes an annual magazine that furthers Black literature.
“Instead begin with the body—itself a kind / of ending.” In this Poetry.LA video, torrin a. greathouse reads from their debut collection, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), and speaks to Mariano Zaro about writing through multiple identities and connecting trauma, disability, and transness.
As with this past weekend’s Super Bowl, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the national anthem of the United States, before the start of sports events is a time-honored tradition. Poet Ada Limón has made that eventful moment the center of her poem “A New National Anthem,” which is included in her collection The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018). “The truth is, I’ve never cared for the National / Anthem. If you think about it, it’s not a good / song,” writes Limón. “And what of the stanzas / we never sing, the third that mentions ‘no refuge / could save the hireling and the slave’? Perhaps, / the truth is, every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza.” Write a poem inspired by a country’s national anthem. What are your feelings about it? Is it a good song?
In honor of the seventh anniversary of poet Philip Levine’s passing, Tom Sleigh speaks about their friendship and reads “That Word,” a poem from his latest book, The King’s Touch (Graywolf Press, 2022), dedicated to Levine in this video directed by Ed Robbins. Sleigh says of Levine: “Phil’s intelligence was as brilliantly acerbic as it was heartbreaking.”
“Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about my mom losing her hair, or my mom losing weight, I was thinking about us in Korea eating patbingsu,” says Michelle Zauner in this CBS Sunday Morning interview about her best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart (Knopf, 2021), and finding comfort in the Korean-owned supermarket chain after losing her mother to cancer.
