Watch 6:10
At this D.C. jail, a book club offers a safe space
Reading and writing can provide a profession, a passion or an escape from reality. In Washington, D.C., the Free Minds Book Club positions the activities as mechanisms through which incarcerated people can express themselves in healthy and constructive ways. As…
Joy Harjo becomes first Native American named U.S. poet laureate
Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden said in a statement that Harjo helped tell an "American story" of traditions both lost and maintained, of "reckoning and myth-making.
W.S. Merwin, prize-winning poet of nature, dies at 91
A Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate, Merwin completed more than 20 books.
Watch 2:25
Why this poet says there is no ‘single story spun on a single tongue’
Erica Dawson, a professor and writer, said she was surprised while on book tour recently to be faced with the same question over and over again, about speaking for “the black experience.” Black poets "never went away. We don’t only…
2019 marks the first mass copyright expiration in more than two decades, freeing up works like Robert Frost's "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" for academic, creative and commercial use.
Renowned Israeli author Amos Oz has died of cancer at age 79. His novels, essays and short stories made him one of Israel’s most widely read writers, and reportedly, a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. Throughout his life,…
Poets and literary editors share a timeless present -- one that never shrinks, breaks or runs out of battery life.
What’s the value of asking questions to which we don’t know the answer? Poet Franny Choi’s “Introduction to Quantum Theory” does just that, and she calls it “one of the scariest things” she’s ever written. Choi offers her brief but…
In this digital and divided society, it can often seem that language is used primarily to deliver criticism and express rage. But poet Ada Limón shares her humble opinion on why she sees people turning to poetry for language that…
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