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Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González hosts this two-part event celebrating the ten debut poets featured in “The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets” from our January/February 2025 issue. The virtual event includes readings from the poets, as well as conversations about their debut books, their influences and inspirations, and their individual paths to publication.
Edges of Ailey is an immersive exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art centered around the twentieth-century choreographer, dancer, and artist who founded the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The show spotlights multimedia presentations of Ailey’s work, recorded footage, notebooks and drawings, as well as works that inspired Ailey and have been inspired by him in the forms of literature, music, and visual art. Write a poem centered on movements of the body, whether a creative motion like a dance move or the everyday, repetitive motion of carrying out a task. Allow yourself the freedom to experiment with page space—choosing different sizes or styles of script, incorporating small drawings or cutouts—to create a collage-like piece.
In this Harvard Radcliffe Institute event, Ilya Kaminsky reads a selection of poems from his collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), including “We Lived Happily During the War” and “While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses,” and discusses being an immigrant and poet in between languages in a conversation with Stephanie Sandler.
“Some things, then, cannot be repaired and must go on, into a kind of dusk that seems somehow endless,” reads Matthew Nienow from his poem “Dusk Loop,” which appears in his second poetry collection, If Nothing (Alice James Books, 2025), in this reading and conversation for the Table For Deuce podcast hosted by poets Kate Hanson Foster and Michael Schmeltzer. Nienow’s collection is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In a Sight and Sound magazine interview from last November, filmmaker David Lynch, who passed away earlier this month, was asked about the inspiration for his latest album with longtime collaborator Chrystabell. Publicity materials for the album described how Lynch experienced a mysterious, revelatory vision while out for a nighttime walk in the woods. In the interview, Lynch admits this revelation isn’t quite what happened, but that he does “walk in the woods in my mind.” Jot down notes about the type of atmosphere, shape, mystery, or emotions you associate with a walk in the woods, and how might you “walk in your mind.” Allow your imagination to wander freely into any shadowy corners. Then, compose a poem that results from this creative exercise.
“Don’t worry about aesthetic categories or limitations. Have fun.” —Jonathan Fink, author of Don’t Do It—We Love You, My Heart?
Hala Alyan reads her poem “Light Ghazal,” which appears in her fifth poetry collection, The Moon That Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024), in this short film directed by Jake McAfee and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation, in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets, for their Read By poetry film series.
Three prizes of $1,000 each and online publication in Arts & Letters are given annually for a group of poems, a short story, and an essay.
In this 2024 Guest Writers Series event hosted by the University of Utah’s Creative Writing department, Monica Youn reads poems about magpies from her fourth collection, From From (Graywolf Press, 2023), and Béatrice Szymkowiak discusses how natural history inspired her debut collection, B/RDS (University of Utah Press, 2023).
Ariel Francisco’s poem “On the Shore of Lake Atitlán, Apparently I Ruined Breakfast,” published in the Academy of American Poets’ Poet-a-Day series, recounts a puckish remark which derails the upbeat mood of a meal with the speaker’s mother and aunt. Commenting about the poem, Francisco acknowledges his teenage immaturity returning to him as an adult on this trip to Guatemala, his mother’s homeland. “This poem tries to capture what I often do in real life: upend a beautiful moment with something flippant,” he says. This week write a poem that attempts to capture a tendency you have, perhaps one that you’ve been self-critical about in your life. Francisco’s poem strikes a lighthearted tone throughout, which you might decide to mirror, or you could magnify your behavior’s ultimate consequences for a dramatically darker note that turns unexpectedly bright.
