New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

Winner of the 2012 Bellday Prize for his fourth book of poetry, Pie 8, Dennis Finnell discusses his unique approach to composing this work and how it differs from his 2014 collection, Ruins Assembling. In this interview with New Letters magazine editor Robert Stewart, Finnell talks ab...

The essay "I Am Joe's Prostate," by Thomas E. Kennedy garnered New Letters the National Magazine Award in the category of the essay in 2008. In this interview, Thomas E. Kennedy talks about that and other essays in his collection, Riding the Dog: A Look Back at Am...

Father/daughter poets Willis Barnstone and Aliki Barnstone, regular contributors to New Letters magazine, talk about how they influence each other's work. Aliki, who was named the Missouri Poet Laureate in June 2016, had her first book published before her father's, when she was just twelve years old. Now, his books of poetry and translations far outnumber hers. They read one of their earliest collaborations, published in New L...

Poet and journalist Dunya Mikhail, a Kresge Fellow and winner of the Arab American Book Award, reads poetry from her three books: The War Works Hard, Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea and The Iraqi Nights. S...

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...

Novelist Whitney Terrell talks about his time being embedded with the military in Iraq, writing nonfiction for Slate Magazine and The Washington Post, and how the stories he he...

In the second half of this interview with poet Geoffrey Brock (shown) and novelist Padma Viswanathan, the husband and wife couple discusses their shared interest in translation. Brock reads a translation of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese from his award-winning book Disaffections: Complete Poems 1930–1950, while Viswanathan reveals how she came to d...

Best-selling writer John Berendt discusses his 1994 creative nonfiction book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which has come of digital age 21 years later as the first Metabook, an interactive e-book and audio drama app that promises to usher in a new age in publishing. In this 201...

From his first novel, Prague, which became an acclaimed best-seller in 2002, to his fifth novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Phillips has been writing widely varied novels about subjects that naturally pique his interest. He discusses ...

Justin Martin is the author of several biographies, but his fifth book, Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians, is his first group biography. It explores a critical four-year period in the life of Walt Whitman and his artistic associates before the Civil War. Citing a lifelong curiosity to understand the real people he writes about and not the mythical figures t...

In the first half of this conversation with novelist Padma Viswanathan (shown) and poet Geoffrey Brock, the husband and wife writing duo share how they balance their writing careers and family life. Viswanathan reads from her novels The of Toss of a Lemon and The Ever After of Ashw...

Born in Arkansas to artistic "back to the land" parents who were interested in Zen Buddhism, Jonathan Stalling began to seriously study the Chinese language at age 13. Now, he is a translator of Chinese poets such as Shi Zhi and the Editor-in-Chief of Chinese Literature Today at the University of Oklahoma, where he also teaches. Stalling discusses how China's oral poetic tradition has informed and shaped his own books, and shares w...

The author of several best-selling books, Lisa See returns to New Letters on the Air to discuss her novel, China Dolls, that traces the nightclub life of Asian Americans from 1938 to after World War II. Told through the voices of three young women who meet at auditions, See talks about the re...

We remember Arkansas native and former Rhode Island Poet Laureate C.D. Wright, who died suddenly in January 2016 at the height of her writing career. The MacArthur Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award winner authored 17 books with two published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press, including the posthumous April release,...

In the second half of this interview with Philip Lee Williams, the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association, he discusses his most recent works of poetry, The Flower Seeker: An Epic Poem of William Bartram and The Color of All Things: 99 Lov...