New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

In the second half of a conversation with Georgia State Poet Laureate (2012-present) Judson Mitcham talks in front of a WUGA audience in Athens, GA, about his two novels, The Sweet Everlasting and Sabbath Creek, both winners the Townsend Prize for fiction. Mitcham's voice is an important part of...

We go to the writing well to fill our creative spirits with advice from several fiction writers, including Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley,who reveals her "Five Writing Tips." The author of the trilogy of novels...

Nature writer and activist Gary Ferguson is the author of nearly two dozen books, including the award-winning Decade of the Wolf, Hawk's Rest and Through the Wood...

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...

Adam Zagajewski, the 2016 recipient of the Griffin Lifetime Achievement Prize for Excellence in Poetry, was born in Lwow, Poland, but when he was four months old, his family was expelled by Ukrainians to Silesia, which at the time was part of Germany. In this reading at Rockhurst University's Midwest Poets Series, he shares his poetry, which interweaves stories of his childhood, his parents, and fellow exiles of his neighborhood, along with art, classical composers, and his own self port...

A 2016 MacArthur Genius Fellow and author of Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine discusses the motivation for writing this multi-award-winning work that features poetry, essays, and art, ranging from contemporary pieces to William Turner's paintings of The Slave Ship. Woven throughout the conversation, like t...

In 2015, Rigoberto González received The Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle. This public reading at the University of Missouri-Kansas City gives insight into his life as he reads vignettes and poems from his three books published in the same year: the memoirs, Red-Inked Retablos and Autobiogr...

The recipient of the 2015 National Medal of Arts Award from President Obama, Latina author Sandra Cisneros discusses her groundbreaking 1984 debut novel, The House on Mango Street, which is now required reading in many schools. The founder of the ...

Benjamin Alire Sáenz was born in New Mexico, but later moved to El Paso, Texas, where he was a priest for a few years before leaving the order. He went on to earn a Masters degree in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso. It was there that he formed a complicated fascination for the city of Juárez, Mexico. Inspired by a real-life bar in Juárez, Sáenz’s Everything Begi...

In front of an audience at the Kansas City Public Library for the Writers Place 2016 Inaugural William H. Hickok Reading Series, Juan Felipe Herrera, our first Hispanic U.S. Poet Laureate (2015-17), 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...

For the past 34 years, Rockhurst University has brought poets from around the country to do readings for the Kansas City public as part of the Midwest Poets Series. During this time, the series has hosted many different poets, including a few who live in Missouri, such as the state's first poet laureate (2008-2010), Walter Bargen, who is the author of more than a dozen books; Michelle Boisseau, who t...

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 2015 interview, this author of five award-winning collections of poetry reads from early work in her books There Was Fire in Vancouver...

While working as a literary editor in London, Robin Robertson found himself losing the language of his native Scotland, so he has incorporated it into his poetry, including his book Swithering, which won the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize for best book. Now selections from that and his other four collections are gathered under one cover in the U.S. in a book called ...

Scottish poet, translator and editor Robin Robertson, a three-time winner of Britain's prestigious Forward Poetry Prize, talks with New Letters magazine editor Robert Stewart, while in Kansas City for Rockhurst University's 2015 Midwest Poets Series. Known for his translations of ancient Greek works, they discuss how mythology has influenced his writing, as he reads from his 2014 collection Sailing ...