Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2023 Lannan Foundation event celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Copper Canyon Press, Paisley Rekdal presents her hybrid collection, West: A Translation, and Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Tradition, reads a selection of poems, followed by a conversation with Arthur Sze and the press’s editor in chief Michael Wiegers.

“I’ll dig in, / into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.” The late Denise Levertov reads poems from her collections Evening Train (New Directions, 1992) and Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996) in this video from a 1993 event at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.

“To love yourself so much you don’t wanna exploit anybody. Can you imagine not wanting to exploit anyone?” says Sonia Sanchez in her lecture to students in this 1991 episode of Writers Uncensored presented by the Lannan Foundation. This vintage episode features Sanchez and Lucille Clifton reading from their work and talking about their respective paths as poets.

"The dangerous undertow will return you home. One bite of anything can kill." Jim Harrison, author of more than three dozen books, including the novella Legends of the Fall (Delta, 1979), reads a selection of poems and speaks with Peter Lewis for the Lannan Foundation in 2002. Harrison passed away on March 26 at the age of seventy-eight.

“Sing of disappointments more repeated than the batter of the sea....” At the Lannan Foundation in 1998, William Gass reads from his second novel, The Tunnel (Knopf, 1995), which took twenty-six years to write and earned him the 1996 American Book Award. Gass died on December 6, 2017 at the age of ninety-three.

With an introduction by poet Naomi Shihab Nye, Carrie Fountain reads from her books Burn Lake (Penguin, 2010) and Instant Winner (Penguin, 2014) as part of the Lannan Foundation's Poetry Sundays in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Fountain and Nye will be panelists at Poets & Writers Live in Austin, Texas on January 9.