New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Gwendolyn Brooks' birth, we turn to our extensive archive to present this look back at the legacy of the legendary poet. The first African-American to win a Pulitzer Prize for her 1949 poetry collection, Annie Allen, Brooks went on to influence generations of poets. In this compilation made from a 1984 program and parts 1 and ...

Missouri Poet Laureate (2012-2016), William Trowbridge is the third person appointed since the creation of the position in 2007. In this reading at Rockhurst University's 2014 Midwest Poets Series, Trowbridge reads poems from his numerous books that are now included in his collection of new and selected poems, Put This On, Please...

This conversation with Dave Smith, the author of more than 20 books of poetry, essays, memoir and fiction, is the second half of this interview recorded as part of the Midwest Poets Series. He talks about the importance of elegiac poetry and the influence of other poets on his work. Smith illustrates how writing poetry has allowed him to recover long forgotten memories by reading from his book The Wick of Memor...

Poet and visual artist Bianca Stone talks about her various projects, from her first full length book Someone Else's Wedding Vows to her 2016 illustrated collection, Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours, and reveals how she uses her visual art to create a new interpretation of the w...

Coming of age in the 1960s, Diane Williams struggled to be taken seriously as a writer and editor in the male dominated era. Now, a three time winner of the Pushcart Prize of Fiction, she is the author of numerous books, and the editor of the acclaimed literary journal Noon. In this live reading, she discusses her book of short fiction titled, ...

Edward Hirsch is a poet and "MacArthur genius" who heads up the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation and was most recently the editor of The Best American Poetry 2016. In the first part of this interview, he talks about editing that anthology and his book for readers called ...

Jo McDougall discusses her two recent books of poetry—The Undiscovered Room and In the Home of the Famous Dead—which explore various aspects of rural life, revealing the influence of the south and the midwest on her work. She also shares stories about her early life on a rice farm in r...

In front of an audience at the Kansas City Public Library, Juan Felipe Herrera, our first Chicano U.S. Poet Laureate (2015-2017), reveals how he, as the child of migrant farm workers, found his voice as a poet. Herrera reads from his books, including the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award-winning ...

In ancient Rome, an Augur was thought to be a herald or one who could interpret the natural signs as an indication of divine approval or disapproval of proposed actions. This public poetry reading, recorded in Washington D.C. and sponsored by the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers, features a group of women poets, all over the age of 60, sharing their work, and views on this post-election, America. Eleanor Wilner (shown), ...

"April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land..." The famous words of poet T.S. Eliot prompted us to mix this anthology of American poets, who examine the mysteries of love in various forms. Listen to former Poets Laureate Billy Collins, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Donald Hall and...

When Sinéad Morrissey won the 2013 T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize for her fifth book, Parallax, that spurred U.S. publisher Farrar, Strauss and Giroux to release her first book in the states that pulls from all five of her award winning collections under the title Parallax: And Selected Poems. In t...

The first Poet Laureate of Belfast (2013-14), Sinéad Morrissey discusses her formative childhood during "the troubles" in Ireland and some influences for her poetry from gypsy relatives to her travels in China. In the first half of this interview, this author of five award-winning collections of poetry reads from early work in her books There Was Fire in Vancouver, ...

Though Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill was born in the UK, she was sent to live with her aunt in Ireland at age five. Now considered one of the country's leading poets writing all in Irish, she has won numerous awards for her books of poetry and essays, with her works translated into English by the likes of The New Yorker's Paul Muldoon. She reads from her poetry books ...

Writers Diane Glancy and Linda Rodriguez discuss co-editing the anthology The World Is One Place: Native American Poets Visit the Middle East. The pair, who both have Cherokee ancestry, discuss their interest in the parallels between Native peoples of the US and the Middle East. Glancy, who visited Syria and Jordan as an Arts America Speaker for the United States Information Agency in the early 1990s, shares some...

In the second half of our conversation with two time American Book Award-winning poet Al Young, he shares more from his book Something About the Blues: An Unlikely Collection of Poetry as well as a couple of poems included in his earlier books Coastal Nights and Inland Aftern...