In this moment with poet Claudia Rankine

A Poetry Personal and Political
Claudia Rankine on ‘Citizen’ and Racial Politics
by Felicia R. Lee, The New York Times, November 28, 2014

Jacqueline Woodson: Publishing must and will change

The Pain of the Watermelon Joke
by Jacqueline Woodson, The New York Times, November 28, 2014

Thank you, Ursula K. Le Guin!

I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now.... Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art--the art of words.

--Ursula K. Le Guin

Read more:

“We Will Need Writers Who Can Remember Freedom”: Ursula Le Guin and Last Night’s N.B.A.s
by Rachel Arons, The New Yorker, November 20, 2014

Novelist James McBride on winning his National Book Award

Traveling With John Brown Along the Road to Literary Celebrity
James McBride on His Novel ‘The Good Lord Bird’

by Julie Bosman, The New York Times, November 24, 2013

Poetry matters: NPR talks with Nikky Finney

"And I have this - I have a friend Dorianne Laux - lives in North Carolina. And she's married to poet. And she tell me this great story at the Dodge Poetry Festival this year. She said they bought one of those real estate boxes that the agents put outside the house with the information about the house inside.

"So they put it outside their house. Their house was not for sale but they stuffed poems inside the box. And so people would stop and they thought they were taking out, you know, information that would give them the square footage about the house. And they would unfrill the paper and it would be, you know, the square footage of the human heart instead. And they would stand at the window, she said, and watch people reading the poems slowly and how slowly the car might take off. That's what we do as poets."

          --Nikky Finney

Nikky Finney Ponders Possibilities Of The Poetry Profession

Neal Conan, Talk of The Nation, NPR, June 20, 2013