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In this 2017 interview at Claremont Graduate University, Marianne Boruch talks about her 2011 collection, The Book of Hours, for which she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and how poetry remains a “mysterious form” and creates a space where “it’s a pleasure to be elsewhere.” Boruch is the recipient of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize.
In this Beyond Baroque event, poets David Quiroz and Joseph Rios join Alan Chazaro for a reading to celebrate the launch of his second collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built for Us (Tia Chucha Press, 2026). For more from Chazaro, read the latest installment of Literary MagNet in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
What sort of emotional labor does one experience when caring for a parent or a child, a friend or lover, or someone who’s ill? This week compose a poem that details the gestures and actions, the commitments and complications involved in taking care of someone else. In Angela Jackson’s poem “Caregiving,” published in the April 2023 issue of Poetry magazine, the speaker recalls a time before the responsibility of caretaking when she would “rumble-race” and “haul-dash” to the gym to exercise twice weekly, and contrasts that dynamism with the slowed-down, zoomed-in attention spent on the person she is looking after who is “sitting on the gray stoop / like a lost little girl.” In your own poem, think about the resulting sacrifices and rewards of caretaking, and consider how to express that through sound and rhythm.
In this Green Apple Books event, Emilie Lygren, author of Once I Was a Stone (Wayfarer Books, 2025), and Deema K. Shehabi, author of Water to Water: Gaza Renga (Interlink Books, 2025), read a selection of their poems and discuss their experiences with writing communities and creating time and space for their writing.
In this video, Diane Ackerman reads a selection of poems from the fiftieth-anniversary edition of her debut collection, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, published by Marginalian Editions, and discusses her lifelong obsession with poetics in a conversation with Maria Popova for this McNally Jackson Books event at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn.
“I love the hour before takeoff, / that stretch of no time, no home / but the gray vinyl seats linked like / unfolding paper dolls,” begins Rita Dove’s poem “Vacation,” which appears in her 2021 collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse. The poem follows the speaker’s thoughts and observations of others in the airport waiting at the flight gate, from the “ragtag nuclear families” to “the heeled bachelorette” to “the lone executive.” Taking inspiration from Dove’s poem, write a poem that takes place in an airport, infusing the piece with the dynamic energy of different people on the move, traveling and waiting, perhaps impatiently with nervous energy or exhaustion. How might the sounds and textures of the airport play a role in how the poem conveys the atmosphere?
In this Books Are Magic event celebrating National Poetry Month, Monica Ferrell reads from her collection The Future (Four Way Books, 2026), Bianca Stone reads from her collection The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026), and Craig Morgan Teicher reads from his collection August, September, October (BOA Editions, 2026).
“Am I living? Do I / accept revision / as my godhead / and savior?” Wendy Xu reads her poem “Looking at My Father,” which appears in her collection The Past (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), in this video for the Dear Poet series, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.
In this Square Books event, Aimee Nezhukumatathil reads from her fifth poetry collection, Night Owl (Ecco, 2026), and talks about the themes of darkness and nighttime in her poems. Nezhukumatathil’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Zipping your skirt, you rustle past, / sand hissing through a glass, / with the bedouin snap and flash / of static-electric / sparks disturbing fabric.” In “Static,” which appears in Bright Thorn: Poems 2000–2026 by Devin Johnston, forthcoming in May from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, sound is a significant component of how meaning is expressed. The poet carefully observes a subject’s actions, capturing the ways in which a single movement or gesture can communicate a vast complexity of sentiment. From the tactility of fabric and the sibilant sounds and motions of “zipping” a skirt to the “sparks” of consonance, an intimate tone is set. Write a poem that employs a variety of sounds to convey the complex feelings within a resonant image or moment. How does the variance in sound and actions create a sense of productive tension?
