New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

We celebrate the working man by revisiting B.H. Fairchild's poetry collection, The Art of the Lathe.  This book gives insight into the life and work of Fairchild's father in Liberal, Kansas, and deals with workers who survived the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl.  A Califor...

At just twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed made the impulsive decision to trek the 1100 mile Pacific Crest Trail, alone, and without any previous experience.  Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail took over twenty years to write and has since been selected by O...

Winner of the 2012 Wallace Stevens Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Academy of American Poets and the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Gary Snyder discusses the changing worlds of poetics and the environment.  Although his Zen-inspired poetry conveys themes existing in the natural world, Snyder talks about why he would not describe himself as a “nature writer.”  He also recalls his early career as a young poet in San Francisco in the mid-1950s, and a particula...

American master of form, Maxine Kumin, discusses her poetry and its topics as varied as bears in the wilderness to skinny-dipping with William Wordsworth. In this 2001 public reading for the Midwest Poets Series Kumin reads works old and new including poems from her collection,...

Richard Peck (A Year Down Under), Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo ...

  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 in stores; ...

After recovering from a nearly fatal accident, all Peggy Shumaker wanted to do was read. The poet, and Alaska’s State Writer Laureate, 2010-2012, eventually began to write again, and while she didn’t intend to write a memoir, her book of short pieces, Just Breathe Normally, i...

The poet James Richardson has called himself an “accidental aphorist,” but his well-crafted works are no accident. He has received awards from the Poetry Society of America and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His 2004 book, Interglacial: New and Selected Poems and Aphorisms, was National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and...

In part two of this interview with Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort, the winner of the 2005 Crystal of Vilenica Award in Slovenia and the 2008 Burda Poetry Prize in Germany reads from her 2011 book, Collected Body, and talks about how her grandmother and female ancestry inspired...

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

By the time director Ang Lee adapted the novel Woe to Live On into the 1998 movie ...

For Father’s Day, we revisit 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner, Leonard Pitts Jr., who has gained fame from his syndicated column that deals with social issues, race, and family life, that make up his book, Forward from This Moment: ...

In part one of this interview, Belarusian poet Valzhyna Mort discusses her work, in particular her book, Factory of Tears. She admits that her poems are never truly finished and discusses how translating the...

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, ...

This month's Save America's Treasures Archive selection. There's no better poet to hear around Memorial Day than the late John Ciardi (1916-1986), a WWII gunner for the Army Air Force.  The author of more than 35 books, Ciardi was also the long-time poetry editor of The Saturday Review and host of National Public Radio's "A Word in Your Ear," but he got his start at the University of Kansas C...