New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed

In the second half of this conversation with Stewart O'Nan at the Kansas City Public Library, he discusses his study of character and human nature in his writing. The author of 20 plus books, including Emily, Alone and Last Night at the Lobs...

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...

Growing up in a Philadelphia apartment above a liquor store, poet Ellen Bass thought her childhood was "the most mundane, pedestrian, unpoetic world you could possibly live in," but after many years and the death of her parents, she finds herself poetically inspired by that time, especially in her two recent books, L...

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 member of the Navajo Nation, Bojan Louis is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and author of the 2018 American Book Award-winning poetry collection Currents, published by BkMk press. Louis, who worked for years as an electrician and now serves as poetry editor for RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, and Humanities, discusses how hi...

Though he's now the author of 16 novels and served as editor for The Vietnam Reader of Fiction and Nonfiction on the War, Stewart O'Nan didn't begin his career as a writer. He started out as a half-hearted engineer until advice from his wife led him writing books as varied as the best-selling novel, ...

Ted Olson, a professor of Appalachian Studies at East Tennessee State University, discusses how his writing has been impacted by the region's history, literature and music. He reveals what he learned studying with poet Wendell Berry and the profound influence of editing poetry and stories by the late James Still, resulting in two Appalachian Book of the Year Awards for From the Mountain, Fr...

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 ...

Award-winning poet Terrance Hayes gives insight into his creative process in this public reading as part of the 2016 Hall Center for the Humanities Lecture Series at the University of Kansas. He shares work from his fifth collection, How to Be Drawn, a finalist for both the National Book and National Book Critics Circle Awards, and winner o...

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...

Latina author Sandra Cisneros, a recipient of the 2015 National Medal of Arts Award from President Obama in 2016 (the last time it was awarded), discusses her groundbreaking 1984 debut novel, ...

In the second part of this public presentation by Martín Espada at the Kansas City Public Library, the former tenant lawyer talks about how he was able to transfer his advocacy from the justice system to poetry, giving voice to those who are otherwise silenced. After a fresh reading of the title poem from Alabanza: New and Selected Poems (that varies quite a bit from his...

Coming of age in the 1960s, Diane Williams began her creative life in ballet and modern dance, until she fell in love with the literary world. She struggled to be taken seriously as a writer and editor in the male dominated era. Now, the three-time winner of the Pushcart Prize for Fiction is the author of eight books, and the editor of the acclaimed literary journal Noon, in which she has mentored numerous experimental wr...

Robert Stewart, the St. Louis born writer and editor of New Letters magazine, has written several books of poetry and essays. Winner of the Thorpe Menn Award for Literary Excellence and a National Magazine Award for Editorial Excellence, Stewart talks about his creative process and discusses how his blue collar past has inspired his writing, from his 1988 book Plumbers (reissued in 2017) to his 2018 collection of...

While working as a literary editor in London, Robin Robertson found himself losing the language of his native Scotland, so he has incorporated it into his poetry, including his book Swithering, which won the prestigious Forward Poetry Prize for best book. Now selections from that and his other four collections are gathered under one cover in the U.S. in a book called...