New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

To show your support for our radio program, email telltheprovost@umkc.edu and let UMKC know what New Letters on the Air means to you. As we near what may be the end of our 43 years of broadcasting, we look back at our decades of publishing the National Magazine Award-winning New Letters, the American Book Award-winning BkMk (BookMark) Press, and the radio show, New Letters on the Air...

Poet Nikky Finney discusses how her sense of social justice was informed  by her father, the first African American Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, revealing how growing up in the political household shaped her art. She reads a poetic tribute to her father from her second book, Rice, as well as her long, piercing poem "Dancing with Strom" from her fourth collection, the National Book A...

New Letters On the Air Nikky Finney

The late Etheridge Knight began writing poetry in the 1960s, when he was imprisoned for armed robbery, where he discovered that "art is ultimately about freedom." This program features excerpts from a 1986 poetry reading and a 1989 interview by Rebekah Presson, when they discuss the role of black men in society and his use of prison as a metaphor. The author of four books, his work continues to inspire younger ...

New Letters On the Air Etheridge Knight: Past American Voice

A 2016 MacArthur "Genius" and a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Claudia Rankine discusses her fifth poetry book, Citizen: An American Lyric. This multi-award-winning work features poetry and prose along with art, ranging from contemporary pieces and William Turner's paintings of The Slave Ship and talks about her collaboration with he...

This special program features the final issue of new works of poetry, fiction, essays and reviews, edited by Robert Stewart for New Letters: Volume 86 Nos. 1 and 2. In this Diastole House reading in February 2020,...

Virginia Brackett, the author of 15 books, discusses her 2019 family memoir, In the Company of Patriots. She reveals how she used family stories, scrapbooks, letters, and interviews to trace the life of her father, Captain Edmund C. Roberts, who was killed in the Korean War when she was only eight months old. The Park University Professor Emeritus of English als...

Guggenheim fellow Jericho Brown describes the joy he finds in writing poetry and how his work helps him examine his world as a gay black man. He talks about some of his poetic mentors—from Emily Dickinson to Alice Walker—and the lessons he strives to pass along to his students at Emory University. He also reveals the story behind changing his name and discusses his childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was raised by fundamental Christians. Brown reads from his second collec...

New York Times Bestselling author Meg Wolitzer reads from her most recent novel, The Female Persuasion, and discusses its themes of feminism and the tendency to idealize our mentors. Her work has long centered on the experiences of women, with three of her books having been adapted for film, including ...

MacArthur Fellow Ben Lerner discusses his third acclaimed novel, The Topeka School, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. The multi-award winning fiction writer and poet was interviewed at the Kansas City Public Library on the Plaza during his residence as the fall 2019 UMKC Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence. A previous program featured a long reading from the novel; in this half of the...

Nikky Finney, winner of The Sewanee Review's 2020 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, talks about her development as a poet and her early literary influences--from Nikki Giovanni to the Affrilachian poets, and reads from her 1985 first book On Wings Made of Gauze and her 2011 National Book Award-winning collection, ...

In this 2020 reading at Rockhurst University for the Midwest Poets Series, Ada Limón talks about her creative process and shares work from her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection, The Carrying. While she uses poetry to explore loss and pain—from her own struggles with infertility to the world's devastation from climate change—she also reads praise and love poems—including t...

Cave Canem Fellow Marcus Jackson reads from his 2019 Ohioana Award-winning poetry book, Pardon My Heart, as well as from his debut collection, Neighborhood Register. An Ohio native, who teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, he discusses the importance of Cave Canem in his dev...

Esteemed poet Mark Doty discusses his work, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2008 National Book Awards, and his 2013 book-length poem and meditative bestiary called A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Co...