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In this installment of the New Social Environment series for the Brooklyn Rail recorded in April, Charles Bernstein speaks with Erica Hunt about unpacking language and how writers have reimagined ways to communicate amongst each other during the pandemic. Hunt talks about her new poetry collection, Jump the Clock (Nightboat Books, 2020), in Ten Questions.
In this Library of America video, Kevin Young discusses Claude McKay’s 1919 poem “If We Must Die,” the rhymes and the collective voice in lines such as, “Though far outnumbered let us show us brave.” This poem is included in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song, an anthology edited by Young and published by the Library of America, which is featured in The Anthologist in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“In Kenya, we have many peoples who make up the Kenyan nation. Please note: I am not using the word tribe. I do not use the word tribe to describe anybody.” In this African Literature Festival video, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o speaks with hosts Samuel Ndogo and Mingqing Yuan about writing his first novel in verse, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi (New Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Director Barry Jenkins has released a teaser trailer for the upcoming television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical fiction novel, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016). The limited Amazon series stars Thuso Mbedu as Cora, a woman who escapes a plantation in Georgia and finds the Underground Railroad, an actual train system transporting runaways to the north.
Rumaan Alam reads from his third novel, Leave the World Behind (Ecco, 2020), and speaks with Laura Marsh about developing his characters in this virtual event for the New Republic salon book series. A Q&A with Alam by Joshunda Sanders is featured in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I have written somewhere that there is only one story, but there are many stories in the one, and I like that idea.” In this video from PBS’s American Masters series, N. Scott Momaday speaks with Robert Redford about the oral tradition, hearing stories from his father, and the importance of language and story. Momaday’s second memoir, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (Harper, 2020), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this video for Poets House, Carl Phillips, whose most recent poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, was published in March by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, reflects on his process for putting a book together, as well as his journey as a poet, teacher, and mentor.
“Great stones of whitewater / hammer down.” In this 2017 reading at the Bookworm, an independent bookstore in Beijing, Tracy K. Smith reads a translation of Yi Lei’s poem “Huangguoshu Waterfall,” included in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree (Graywolf Press, 2020), translated from the Chinese by Changtai Bi and Smith, which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“If I had been comfortable with the world in which I was living, I would never have written a word.” In this video, 2020 MacArthur fellow Cristina Rivera Garza speaks about how she came to be a writer and the ways in which she explores the tension between English and Spanish from a transnational perspective. Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches From a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020) is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Cardinal is conjuring the question: Where can Black people go to be safe?” Tyree Daye introduces his second poetry collection, Cardinal (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and reads “Miss Mary Mack Introduces Her Wings” and other poems. Cardinal is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
