New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

Though she came to writing late, having spent nearly two decades as a librarian and professional storyteller, Janice N. Harrington draws from myriad experiences to create her poetry and children's stories. Her first children's book, Going North, was inspired by her move from segregated Alabama when she was eight and won the Ezra Jack Keats Award. Life in Alabama also influenced her 200...

As part of Park University's Ethnic Voices Poetry Series at the Kansas City Public Library, Maija Rhee Devine recounts how her extraordinary past and family history inspired her novel, The Voices of Heaven. In this interview in front of an audience, she discusses the difficulties of sharing the...

Winner of the first ever Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction in 2012, Irish author Anne Enright talks about her often darkly humorous approach to writing about love, desire, death, and family. Recorded at the Kansas City Public Library, this author of five novels and two short story collections reads from her Man Booker Prize-winning novel,...

Acclaimed crime fiction writer and Emmy-winning investigative reporter, Hank Phillippi Ryan reads from her Mary Higgins Clark award-winning novel, The Other Woman, and its sequel, The Wrong Girl. ...

We begin the celebration of Women's History Month with a tribute to Maxine Kumin, who died on February 6, 2014 at the age of 88. A former Consultant in Poetry to Library of Congress (now known as the US Poet Laureate), Kumin is heralded for her poetry and her dedication to feminism. Associated with contemporaries Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, and close friend, Anne Sexton, Kumin worked as an essayist, children's auth...

Kansas native Robert Day has penned several books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novel, The Last Cattle Drive, and the short story collection, ...

In honor of the United Nations' World Day of Social Justice on February 20th, this show features excerpts from six of our 2013 programs, highlighting the courage and strength of writers who use their gifts with the written word to understand and nurture their fellow man, including Bellwether Prize winner, Naomi Benaron; MacArthur Genius ...

February 2014 marks the release of the book adaptation of the documentary, The Black Power Mixtape 1967 to 1975, which features commentary by Sonia Sanchez. One of the most important writers of the Black Arts Movement and author of more than 20 books of poetry, prose, and drama, Sanchez recently completed her term as Philadelphia's first Poet Laureate. In this 2012 interview, this author, professor, and lecturer talks about how she discovered poetry, her use of Brechtian theatre tech...

Edwidge Danticat returns 15 years after her first interview on New Letters on the Air to talk about her literary successes, including The Dew Breakers, her novel; ...

Poet Walter Bargen, the author of over a dozen books, served as Missouri's first Poet Laureate from 2008 to 2010. Throughout his laureateship, Bargen vigilantly spread poetry and his poetic philosophies across the state, while continuing to write poems drawn from the ordinary and everyday moments that ultimately, for him, make up the "quintessential American experience." In this interview, he talks about how the laureateship shaped some of his recent poetry included in his 2013 book, ...

In this compilation of archive interviews from 1988 and 1996 along with part of a previously unaired 2004 recording, we look back at the life of Amiri Baraka, who died on January 9, 2014. Formerly LeRoi Jones, this founder of the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s was later forced out of the role as New Jersey Poet Laureate for a controversial poem written after 9/11 called "...

Taiwanese-American poet Shin Yu Pai was born in Illinois, raised in California, schooled in Massachusetts, Colorado, and Washington State and has lived in Texas and Arkansas, in big cities and small towns, yet people still think of her as a foreigner. She discusses how her poetry's improved with her wanderlust and reads from her seventh collection, Adamantine, and her earlier work, ...

We celebrate our 2013 Clarion Award for Best Radio Talk/Interview Program from the Association for Women in Communications with audio excerpts from our award-winning interviews. Jamaica Kincaid reads from her novel Mr. Potter, based loosely on her life and relationship with her father, while Luis Alberto Urrea discusses how his family history shaped his novel, ...

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 ...

The acclaimed author of twenty-nine books, including the well-known Schindler’s List (originally Schindler’s Ark) and the controversial ...