New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

Acclaimed novelist, retired Princeton professor and mountain climber, Russell Banks discusses his recent memoir, Voyager:Travel Writings. Interviewed by his former student and now fellow novelist, Whitney Terrell, Banks reveals how his childhood traumas played into his relationships in front of an aud...

In the second part of this conversation, poet and "MacArthur genius" Edward Hirsch discusses how the sudden death of his son inspired his 2014 book Gabriel: A Poem, which was longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award and won the National Jewish Book Award. Though he had written elegiac poetry in the past, this book length poem proved especially difficult to create. Describ...

Arab-American writer Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis and is now a long-time resident of Texas with her husband, photographer Michael Nye. She discusses how her late father has impacted her writing. Aziz Shihab was a journalist who emigrated from Palestine to Missouri, where he met her mother and made the U.S. his home, though he always went back to visit family, including his mother who lived to be 106. In the second part of...

Texas-born Joaquín Zihuatanejo is the only poet so far to win both the American Individual World Poetry Slam and the European World Cup of Poetry Slam. Hear his prize-winning "Poem for John" and readings from his sixth collection, Arsonist, published in 2018 after winning the Anhinga-Robert Da...

Justin Martin is the author of several biographies, but his fifth book, Rebel Souls: Walt Whitman and America's First Bohemians, is his first literary and 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 they becom...

Vietnam veteran and National Book Award-winning fiction writer Tim O'Brien discusses his experiences and reads from his now classic short story collection, The Things They Carried, as part of the NEA's Big Read. Originally released in 1990, the book fol...

A lawyer-turned-poet, Monica Youn has written three books of poetry, and now teaches creative writing in New York. Twice a finalist for the National Book Award, she reveals why she felt the need to leave the legal field for creative writing after her second poetry book. In part one of this conversation, she also discusses how historical views on a woman's place in society and her own struggles with infertility helped shape her third book, ...

Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry reads from his multi-award winning Olio at the Kansas City Public Library, during his 2019 visit to the Unesco Creative City of Music. The book delves into the voices of African...

Scottish-born writer Margot Livesey began reading at an early age and later went on to pen a book of short stories and eight novels, and most recently, a book on the craft of writing called The Hidden Machinery: Essays on Writing. In this 2018 presentation at the Kansas City Public Library, Livesey talks about her evolution as a reader and writer, and shares passages from her ten...

In this public reading at The Writer's Place in Kansas City, poets Mia Leonin and Gustavo Adolfo Aybar celebrate Hispanic island cultures. Aybar, a native of the Dominican Republic, is a Cave Canem Fellow who shares poems from his 2017 debut collection, We Seek Asylum, winner of Willow Books Literature Awards Grand Prize. Leonin, who has explored her Cuban-American heritage in her memoir ...

We look back on the life of the prolific poet W.S. Merwin, who died in March 2019. In this 2000 interview with fellow poet H.L. Hix, the former U.S. Poet Laureate, who was often inspired by nature and concerned with ecology and preservation, reads from The Folding Cliffs, which refers to his long-time home in Hawai...

In this live reading at Commerce Bank's The Box Gallery, poets Wyatt Townley, H.C. Palmer, Brian Daldorph, Melinda Hemmelgarn, a...

Edward Hirsch is a poet and "MacArthur genius" who heads up the prestigious Guggenheim Foundation and was the editor of The Best American Poetry 2016. In the first part of this interview, he talks about editing that anthology and his book for readers called ...

Poet and essayist Kathryn Nuernberger, the former editor of Pleiades Press at the University of Central Missouri, now lives and teaches in Minnesota. She discusses how she once shied away from being a "woman writer" and why she now embraces it, as she reads from her 2017 essay collection, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, and shares p...

National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Laura Kasischke muses on topics ranging from motherhood to beauty queens, as she reads from several of her books now published under one cover by Copper Canyon, the 2017 book, Where Now: New and Selected Poems. Also an author of novels and short stories, she then sits down onstage at the Kansas City Public ...