New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

Known for her vivid metaphors and the unabashed sensuality of her writing, Alice Friman’s honors include the Ezra Pound Poetry Award for her third book, Zoo.  In this public poetry reading she shares work from that book, as well as from her 2006 collection, The Book of the Rotten Daughter, in which she braves issues of death and aging wit...

Poet Hadara Bar-Nadav views art as a collaboration and a conversation, whether it be with readers, paintings, architecture, music, or sculpture. She refers to many works of art in her 2012 collection The Frame Called Ruin, which was the Editors Selection for the Green Rose Prize from New Issues Press. In her 2013 collection, ...

The former Poet Laureate of Missouri, David Clewell, has only ever wanted to be a poet--not a novelist, or an essayist, or any other kind of writer. However, he is a proponent of creating characters, fictionalizing people from his life-- the girl who got away, the conspiracy theory-loving Uncle Bud, or the father, angry with Orson Welles for getting the best of him. In this program, David Clewell reads from his two books, the 2011 collection, ...

Listed as a 2012 Best Book of the Year in various newspapers and magazines, Canada depicts an unusual tale of transgressions set against the backdrop of North Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. The 1996 winner of both the Pulitzer and PEN/Faulkner Awards, Richard Ford talks with fellow writer Whitney Terrell in front of an audience at the Kansas City Public Library as part of the Writers at Work ser...

Linda Rodriguez is a self-proclaimed “feminist, activist, and unashamed liberal,” who has now given those attributes to Skeet Bannion, the Native American heroine of her mystery novels.  She talks about how her series was conceived after the debut book, Every Last Secret, won St. Martin’s Malice Domestic First Novel Competition, and was a finalist for the International...

Award-winning author Daniel Woodrell, who penned two novels made into successful films, Woe to Live On (Ride with the Devil) and Winter’s Bone, discusses his novels, ...

Naomi Benaron, a trained scientist, marathon runner, and massage therapist, is also the author of two award-winning fiction books, Love Letters from a Fat Man, a set of short stories published by BkMk Press, and the 2010 Bellwether Prize-winning novel, ...

In November 2013, the National Book Foundation presents the noted novelist E.L. Doctorow with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Doctorow, author of Ragtime...

Prolific poet and winner of the 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, Anne Waldman is younger than the Beat Generation, but she did know many of its prominent voices.  She talks about her life-long friendship with Allen Ginsberg, and their role in founding the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University.  This other half of the 2010 interview at the Associated Writing Programs conference features two poems from her PEN Center Literary Awa...

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 ...

In this compilation program featuring archive audio from a 2009 interview as well as a 2013 update, Linda Rodriguez, the winner of the Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, talks about her poetry collection, Heart's Migration, which took her 20 years to write...

Sergio Troncoso discusses his journey from the small border town of Ysleta to his education at Harvard and eventually Yale, where he now teaches. His collection Crossing Borders: Personal Essays reveals a bit about his life on the Mexican-American border and how it varies from his current life in New York City, where he works to instill the same sen...

Part of UMKC’s celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month in 2012, this public reading features writers of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritage, Richard Blanco (shown) and Fred Arroyo. Richard Blanco shares his experience growing up torn between Cuban and American cultures and reads poems from his melodic 2012 collection, Looking for the Gulf Motel.  A...

Members of the Kansas City Latino Writers Collective discuss the importance of community to their creative work and their connection with The Writers Place. President Gabriela Lemmons, board member Miguel Morales, and founding member José Faus discuss the formation of the group and its outreach, while Xànath Caraza reads f...

It was decades ago when author Thomas Fox Averill heard the song "Tennessee Stud" by Jimmie Driftwood.  He enjoyed the lyrical story of courtship, love, and fugitive life so much, that he first used the song as a lullaby for his children, then decided to write a novel about it....