Theater video tags: National Book Award

“My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns. / At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.” Jenny Xie, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads “Rootless” and “Ongoing” from her debut poetry collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Xie is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“What may exist between appearance, and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something that is nearly nothing…” Diana Khoi Nguyen, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads from her debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018). Nguyen is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The Poet X is my third novel, but it’s the first one published.” At the New York State Writers Institute, Elizabeth Acevedo speaks about making the transition from poetry to fiction, facing rejection, and learning to persevere in the process of publishing her first novel, The Poet X (HarperTeen, 2018), which is longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award in young people’s literature.

In this 2009 interview with poet Elizabeth Spires, former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall reads poems and speaks about the writing life. For more Hall, read “Turning Time Around: A Profile of Donald Hall” by contributor John Freeman from the November/December 2014 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Hall passed away on June 23, 2018 at the age of eighty-nine.