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A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Happy birthday to Maya Angelou, who turns eighty-six today. In this clip, the poet, author, and civil-rights activist open up about her childhood as part of an episode of Oprah Presents Master Class, which originally aired in January 2011.
Graphic designer and filmmaker John Koenig reads from his “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” an original lexicon of emotions we don’t have words for. In this clip, he illustrates the word keta, “an image that inexplicably leaps back into your mind from the distant past."
Graphic designer and filmmaker John Koenig reads from his “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” an original lexicon of emotions we don’t have words for. In this clip, he illustrates one of his words, sonder, “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”
Happy National Poetry Month! Last week U.S. poet laureate Philip Levine read three of his poems at the Rogue Festival in Fresno, California, accompanied by the Benjamin Boone Evolution Quartet. All music was written specifically for each poem.
Selina Foster and Willy Palomo from Westminster College in New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, perform "Poet and Mathematician" at the 2014 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
"Sorry, Google Doesn't Know Jealousy," a poem by Denise Duhamel, is read by sixty-five poets, including Terrance Hayes, Richard Blanco, Collin Kelley, Michelle Buchanan, Diego Quiros, Emma Trelles, Amy Gerstler, Maureen Seaton, Matthew Hittinger, Stephen Mills, and Major Jackson.
High school teacher Sarah Hope tells "the story that hurts to tell" as part of the Story Project, a storytelling series at Smokebrush Foundation for the Arts in Manitou Springs, Colorado. The theme of the event, held earlier this month, was Healing.
"Pigeons on the grass, alas..." While the quality of the audio is rather poor, this clip from 1934 offers a fascinating glimpse of Gertrude Stein talking briefly and then reading part of her libretto from the opera "From Four Saints in Three Acts."
The author of the debut poetry collection Everything We Call Ordinary, forthcoming later this year from Tourane Poetry Press, presents "Family, Culture, and How a Poet Makes His Bread" at a recent TEDx event at San Jose State University.
"We kind of lose that sense of wonder that we have with language," says Thom Caraway, the poet laureate of Spokane, Washington. "Any toddler or kindergartener is running around just saying words out loud because they like how they sound." Caraway, who recently hosted a pizza and poetry night at Balboa Elementary Montessori in Spokane, discusses why young children have a way with words and talks about his own experience with poetry.
