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In this video from the keynote of A Writing Room’s 2022 retreat, best-selling author Anne Lamott speaks about the discipline needed to write and reflects on writing as a spiritual and moral practice grounded in truth telling.
For this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2025 Blaney Lecture, Kaveh Akbar reminisces on his childhood spent studying and reciting prayers in Arabic and discusses how sacred poetics and language allow us to sit in complexity and remain in awareness. “Such poetry is a potent antidote against a late capitalist empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction,” Akbar says.
At this Japanese Literature Night event hosted by the Japan Society, Keiichiro Hirano delivers his keynote speech titled “The Question of Selfhood” in which he shares how his upbringing in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka during the eighties and nineties inspired his interest in literature and how he attempts to tackle questions of the individual’s place in modernity through his novels.
“Poetry is our essential language, and it is as essential to me as breathing.” In this Library of Congress event, Arthur Sze accepts the 2024 Rebekah Bobbitt Johnson National Prize for Poetry for Lifetime Achievement, reads several poems from his career, and talks about his formal exploration of poetics in a conversation with Rob Casper.
“When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally found my way back to the womb.” In this event for the Center for the Art of Translation’s annual Day of Translation, cohosted at the Center for Fiction, Don Mee Choi delivers her keynote speech about writing from the “translation womb,” her attempts to comprehend and translate the Korean War, and her definition of what it means to write in the language of translation.
In this video, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha accepts the 2024 National Book Award in poetry for her collection Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024). “I’m proud to stand here today, and to accept this honor as a Palestinian American on behalf of all the deeply beautiful Palestinians that this world has lost and in honor of those miraculous ones who endure.”
“Artificial intelligence is no substitute for the real thing,” says Percival Everett in his acceptance speech for the 2024 National Book Award in fiction, which he won for his novel James (Doubleday, 2024).
In this video, Samantha Harvey accepts the 2024 Booker Prize for her novel Orbital (Jonathan Cape, 2023), which snapshots one day in the lives of six astronauts traveling through space. “What we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves, and what we do to life on Earth, human and otherwise, we do to ourselves,” says Harvey in her speech.
“There are kinds of knowledge, in both science and poetry, that can be made visible only by their enacting.” For this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2024 Blaney Lecture, Jane Hirshfield discusses the visible versus the invisible and examines poetry’s ways of naming through some of her favorite poems.
“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.
