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In this Library of Congress video, Arthur Sze speaks about his journey to poetry and his plans to have a special focus on poetry in translation as the twenty-fifth U.S. poet laureate. An interview with Sze by Rigoberto González appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“When the time of your life is a time of earthquakes.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Arthur Sze reads from his latest collection, Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), and talks about his life and work, including his discoveries while translating literature. Sze has been named the twenty-fifth poet laureate of the United States.
“As poets, our job is to make all the music complete on the page.” In this video, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón presents a keynote speech on the power and beauty of poetry, and speaks with Dr. Lori Glaze, director of NASA’s Planetary Science Division, about the intersections between art and science at the 2024 South by Southwest festival.
In this Poetry of Resilience interview, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reads from her collection The Hurting Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2022) and speaks about the emotions she writes from and the importance of poetry for healing with hosts and poets Danusha Laméris and James Crews.
In this 2020 Academy for Teachers craft talk, former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins discusses his theories on how poems find their way to an ending and discusses the works of David Berman, Wisława Szymborska, Tom Wayman, and others.
“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.
In this 2016 lecture for the Greater Good Science Center’s conference, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass discusses the history of awe and wonder in world literature, the root of the word “catharsis,” and the power poetry has to captivate and transform its readers.
In this interview for MSNBC’s American Voices, Ada Limón speaks to host Alicia Menendez about becoming the first Latina U.S. poet laureate, her journey to a writing career, life in Kentucky, and how poetry can bring people together in “those moments when we can put everything down for one minute and just see ourselves, each other.”
“That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life, its abiding metaphors, so that my story would not be determined for me.” In this 2022 video, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write” for the prize ceremony at Yale University.
“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” In this 2018 PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age. Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States today.
