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In this excerpt from an interview with NBC Chicago, the late Andrea Gibson reads their poem “Love Letter From the Afterlife” to their wife Megan Falley. Gibson died at the age of forty-nine on July 14, 2025.
“You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.” In this video, Fanny Howe reads from her poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014) at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony. Howe died at the age of eighty-four on July 9, 2025.
“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this 2016 video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) for a two-day event at the Lab in San Francisco cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Notley died at the age of seventy-nine on May 20, 2025.
In this 2009 Granta interview, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his early life and his memoir Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Pantheon, 2010) with Ellah Allfrey. Ngũgĩ died at the age of eighty-seven on May 28, 2025.
“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.
In this 2015 Page Meets Stage event, Aziza Barnes reads “a good deed is done for no good reason,” which appears in their debut poetry collection, i be, but i ain’t (YesYes Books, 2016). “You allow yourself to become whatever these hands will make you,” writes Barnes. The award-winning poet and playwright died at the age of thirty-two on December 15, 2024.
In this video, Nikki Giovanni reads a selection of her poems and speaks about her life and career for the Wright Conversations series hosted by the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and PBS Books. Giovanni died at the age of eighty-one on December 9, 2024.
In this 2023 event cohosted by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) and the Center for Fiction, Elizabeth Nunez speaks with Lauren Francis-Sharma about 5 Minutes With Elizabeth Nunez, an original BCLF short film series celebrating the author and her most revered novels. Nunez died at the age of eighty on November 11, 2024.
“I know all the dark places / Where the sun hasn’t reached yet...” Charles Simic reads his poem “Summer Morning,” which he says needs no introduction, in this video for an installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.
In this 2013 video, Nobel laureate Alice Munro talks about her fascination with reading and writing at an early age in Canada’s countryside, how she can become “desperately consumed” with writing, and the ways in which her writing life changed throughout her long-standing career. Munro died at the age of ninety-two on May 13, 2024.
