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In this video, Rachel Eliza Griffiths talks about grief, poetry, vulnerability, and writing her first memoir, The Flower Bearers (Random House, 2026), for an episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast with host Miwa Messer. For more on Griffiths, read “Marvelous and Dangerous: A Q&A With Rachel Eliza Griffiths” by Renée H. Shea.
Watch Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González host this two-part event celebrating the ten debut poets featured in “New Ways of Seeing: Our Twenty-First Annual Look at Debut Poets” from our January/February 2026 issue. The virtual event includes readings from the poets, as well as conversations about their debut books, their influences and inspirations, and their individual paths to publication.
In “Object Loss,” which appears in her Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, Stag’s Leap (Knopf, 2012), Sharon Olds touches upon the emotions brought up from objects that were formerly tied to a romantic partner—a clock, a chair, a table. These physical items exemplify the metaphysicality of human connection. “As I add to the stash which will go to him,” writes Olds, “I feel as if I’m falling away / from family—as of each ponderous / object had been keeping me afloat. No, they were / the scenery of the play now closing, / lengthy run it had.” Jot down a list of objects that you’ve held on to from people you’ve loved in the past. Compose a poem that incorporates several of those items, taking care to describe their physical attributes. What sentiments did they evoke while in the act of parting, and after?
In this Books Are Magic event, Andrés Cerpa reads from his third collection, The Palace (Alice James Books, 2025), and talks about the importance of myth in poetry in a conversation with Iain Haley Pollock. Cerpa’s collection is featured in Page One in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
The author of Cord Swell (Norton, 2025) considers the power of leveraging different media in poetry.
Ilya Kaminsky begins his poem “Psalm for the Slightly Tilted,” which was published this week in the New Yorker, with the lines: “This is not / a good year. / But it has / witnesses.” In this first month of the new year, compose a poem that begins with “This is a ____ year,” or perhaps “This is not a ____ year.” In Kaminsky’s poem, he explores protest, revolution, and resistance, deploying imagery of things that are slightly askew: a question mark, bent spoons, off-rhythm chants, and people leaning and lopsided. Think of how you would characterize the year based on these first weeks, considering what’s happening in your own life, and in political and global events. What sort of imagery might characterize the sentiments or mood of this month?
“Look up from your own desperation and walk outside. No matter the weather, be outdoors each day. It will help you.” —Andrés Cerpa, author of The Palace
The author of Cord Swell (Norton, 2025) reflects on offering reverence to ordinary objects in poetry.
In this video, fourteen Black poets from ten different countries read in multiple languages and in translation for this 2024 Furious Flower Poetry Center virtual event hosted by Gbenga Adesina, who is featured in “New Ways of Seeing: Our Twenty-First Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2025 reading hosted by the Grolier Poetry Book Shop, Diana Arterian reads from Agrippina the Younger (Northwestern University Press, 2025), Frannie Lindsay reads from The Snow’s Wife (CavanKerry Press, 2020), and Ariel Yelen reads from I Was Working (Princeton University Press, 2024).
