Jump to navigation Skip to content
In this installment of the Visions of America: All Stories, All People, All Places series hosted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and PBS Books, Kaoukab Chebaro, head of Global Studies at the Columbia University Libraries, discusses the importance of first-person storytelling and her work in preserving the individual history of Arabs across the globe.
“He was a very gentle person, and he was a great storyteller.” In this Penguin Classics video celebrating the hundredth birthday of James Baldwin, Nikki Giovanni talks about her experiences meeting the late author and reading his works.
“In colonial times, gardens were utilitarian. A cross between a grocery store and a pharmacy. In the gilded age, they became an entrance to high society, a place of conspicuous display,” narrates the main character in Paul Schrader’s 2022 film Master Gardener, a man with a secret past who works as the horticulturalist of an estate owned by a wealthy dowager. This week write a poem about a garden, perhaps a large and well-known one visited by tourists, a seasonal garden tended by family members that you frequented as a child, or one you pass occasionally on a neighborhood walk. You might explore the functions of the garden; list colors, shapes, textures, and smells; or make conjectures about its guiding aesthetics. What can a garden reveal about its gardener and the space in which it resides?
“The reason why I favor long poems—not just writing them but reading them—is that it just feels like a much truer picture of the self, or selves.” In this Books Are Magic event, Jason Koo reads from his latest poetry collection, No Rest (Diode Editions, 2024), and discusses the narrative opportunities of long poems in a conversation with Bessie Flores Zaldívar.
In Divya Victor’s poem “Blood / Soil,” which appears in her collection Curb (Nightboat Books, 2021), she writes about Sureshbhai Patel, a man who had traveled from India to visit his son and infant grandson in Alabama and was assaulted by police for alleged suspicious behavior while taking a neighborhood stroll. As she describes the physical encounter, Victor includes Newton’s laws of motion and experiments with the visuals of typography and spacing in her incorporation of quotations to draw attention to movement and a sense of confrontation between bodies and language. Write a poem inspired by a news incident that feels resonant to you and provokes a strong emotion. Consider adding bits of science, research, or reported dialogue that might help create a more expansive, interpretive angle.
Poet, translator, and editor Urayoán Noel reads two poems from the Letras Latinas Oral History Project, an archive that began in 2005, in this Poets House video. For more about Letras Latinas, read this Q&A with director Francisco Aragón in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this video, the University of California in Berkeley celebrates their Arts Research Center’s 2023 Poetry & the Senses program with a reading by Indigenous writers and program facilitators Beth Piatote, Natalie Diaz, and Craig Santos Perez on the theme of reclamation. Perez’s new collection, Call This Mutiny: Uncollected Poems (Omnidawn, 2024), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In the twentieth anniversary edition of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine writes in the preface about her use of the first-person voice “to bear witness to the witness” and provide emotion while maintaining an intimacy within the text. “Anybody could embody the first person and be our guide through the text,” writes Rankine. “For me, at the time, this was a liberating mechanism for getting at the ineffable affective disorder of the moment without disconnecting from the people affected by it.” Write a poem about an event currently unfolding in the world, either locally or on a global scale. Deploy the first-person “I” as a tool to guide the reader through what’s being witnessed. Are there multiple emotional truths at play? How can you give them shape?
A prize of $1,000, publication by Fleur-de-Lis Press, and 25 author copies will be given triennially for a debut poetry collection. Jeanie Thompson will judge.
In this Haymarket Books event, Faylita Hicks reads from her second poetry collection, A Map of My Want (Haymarket Books, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. The event includes an introduction by Aricka Foreman and readings by Andrea Change, Billy Tuggle, Carmendy Tuggle, and Ruben Quesada.
