Poets & Writers Theater

“One of the things we must do as poets is certainly to answer the most important question: What does it mean to be human?” says Sonia Sanchez, recipient of the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize, in this virtual celebration with poets Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine.

“How do you take the nightmares and dreams and put them onto paper?” asks Julie Taymor in this trailer for the second season of Poetry in America featuring interviews with Marilyn Chin, Katie Couric, Elena Kagan, John Kerry, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Created and directed by Harvard professor Elisa New, each episode explores and interprets a single American poem.

“It takes facility, it takes brilliance, it takes verve!” Marilyn Chin talks to Joseph Ross about what it takes to write poetry and reads poems from her fifth collection, A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"One roams the heavens for a perfect answer / One transfixed like a dead doe, a convex mirror." Marilyn Chin reads "One Child Has Brown Eyes" from her latest poetry collection, Hard Love Province (Norton, 2014).