Poets & Writers Theater

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” In this 2018 PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age. Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States today.

In this PBS NewsHour video, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada highlight their favorite books for summer reading, which include Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question (Pantheon, 2019), and José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2018).

“Your buttons can’t hold all the love / rippling up the middle of your ribcage…” José Olivarez reads his poem “You Get Fat When You’re in Love” from his debut poetry collection, Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2018). Olivarez is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.