Poets & Writers Theater

“I look back, just with a little wonder. Wonder that I stuck with this thing.” In this 2004 interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS NewsHour, Philip Roth reflects on his writing career and the role of a writer. Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018.

This independent documentary film directed by Oscar Corral explores Tom Wolfe’s writing life and his fourth novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown, 2012), which is set in Miami and focuses on the subject of immigration. Wolfe died at the age of eighty-seven on May 14, 2018.

In this 2013 video, Lucie Brock-Broido reads her poem “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World” from her collection Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. Brock-Broido died on March 6, 2018 at the age of sixty-one.

María Kodama discusses the work of her late husband, Jorge Luis Borges, at the Library of Congress, which Borges often called his home. Kodama is joined by Saúl Sosnowski, a professor of Latin American Literature and Culture at the University of Maryland.

At a public memorial at New York City’s Strand Book Store, family members, colleagues, and writers including Gay Talese, Fran Lebowitz, and Paul Krugman remember and honor Fred Bass, the bookstore’s longtime owner who died at the age of eighty-nine on January 3. The bookstore was founded by Bass’s father in 1927, and he began working there at the age of thirteen, taking over its management in 1956.

“I didn’t know I was being helpful to anybody. I was just telling a story I wanted to tell.” Ursula K. Le Guin talks about her Earthsea series and the unexpected connections she has made with her readers. Le Guin died on January 22, 2018 at the age of eighty-eight. 

“Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea....” At the Lannan Foundation in 1998, William Gass reads from his second novel, The Tunnel (Knopf, 1995), which took twenty-six years to write and earned him the 1996 American Book Award. Gass died on December 6, 2017 at the age of ninety-three.

“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.

Denis Johnson reads a selection of short stories to a captive audience as part of the Spring 2016 Barbara and David Zalaznick Creative Writing Reading Series at Cornell University. Johnson died at the age of sixty-seven on May 25, 2017.

“We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.” The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, who died on February 14, 2015 at the age of eighty-seven, speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown in a 2010 interview about the need for working-class life to be represented in poetry.

The late Pulitzer Prize–winning poet is seen here in 1997 reading selections of his work at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego for the series “Artists on the Cutting Edge,” accompanied by interview segments discussing his influences. The former Vermont poet laureate died at his home in Sheffield, Vermont, this past Tuesday.

“This is not a rehearsal. This is your life.” Maya Angelou is the author of more than thirty books, including her influential memoir of the Jim Crow South, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She received numerous awards throughout her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was presented to her by President Obama in 2011. Angelou died at the age of eighty-six in 2014. A rare figure whose work was both scholarly and accessible, Angelou was undeniably inspiring.

Nobel Prize–winner Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian novelist whose One Hundred Years of Solitude established him as a colossus of twentieth-century literature, died on April 17, 2014 in Mexico City at the age of eighty-seven.

“Do you know what it feels like to wait for your son to come home alive every night?" Award-winning poet Wanda Coleman, often called the “unofficial Poet Laureate of L.A.,” died Friday at the age of sixty-seven. Coleman’s book of poetry Mercurochrome was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001. In this clip from May 2013, she reads at California State University.

Watch this recent movie trailer for Big Sur, based on Jack Kerouac’s novel of the same name, which chronicles the beatnik author’s transition from a rebellious and reluctantly famous young man into an emotionally troubled adult. The book debuted in 1962; Jack Kerouac, born in 1922, died in 1969, only seven years after its publication.

Renowned author Doris Lessing—who wrote notable novels such as The Grass Is Singing, The Golden Notebook, and The Good Terrorist and won the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature—died on November 17, 2013 at age ninety-four. Watch this BBC News video that reflects on her colorful personality, prolific writing career, and occasionally controversial life.

“What makes the engine go? Desire, desire, desire.” Stanley Kunitz, who died in 2006, is seen here at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 2000 reading “Touch Me.”

“How nice it is to disappear, float into a mist.” Musician and poet Lou Reed died on Sunday at the age of seventy-one. In this video, he recites the haunting and timely lyrics to “Vanishing Act.”

Irish poet Seamus Heaney, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995, died on August 30, 2013. This video features a compilation of excerpts from the many occasions the celebrated poet recited his popular poem, “Digging.”

“Hubert Selby was the underdog and the voice for the...downtrodden, and was marginalized because he spoke up for the little guy,” says Henry Rollins. “But you see the great humanity and the warmth and richness that he brought to things.” The author of nine novels who died in 2004 is celebrated by two of his greatest champions, Rollins and Amiri Baraka, in this video from Open Road Media.