Poets & Writers Theater

“To feel signs depends on how & why / the singer’s song puckers the mouth.” Yusef Komunyakaa reads his poem “A World of Daughters,” which appears in his collection Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), among other selections in this 2020 virtual reading for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series.

“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.

This behind-the-scenes short film directed by Yvonne Shirley of a 2018 T Magazine photo shoot at the Brooklyn Historical Society features Black American male poets, playwrights, and novelists—such as James Hannaham, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Ishmael Reed—speaking on identity in the publishing world and paying tribute to their favorite Black female writers.

Yusef Komunyakaa reads "The Great Migration" at New York City's Museum of Modern Art in conjunction with the exhibition, "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North." Komunyakaa's new poetry collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"After conquering / frontiers, the mind comes back to rest, / stretching out over the white sand." At a 92Y event, Pulitzer Prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa reads "Islands" from his poetry collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), and the Wire actor Wendell Pierce reads from his memoir, The Wind in the Reeds (Riverhead Books, 2015), in which he explores art's ability to redeem his native New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

"I read everything aloud as I'm writing, because the ear is a great editor. I think listening is the most important thing in the creative arts, but also in life." Yusef Komunyakaa, whose new poetry collection, The Emperor of Water Clocks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the importance of poetry as a celebration of language and as a way to give voice to the psyche.

The first in a series of three readings and discussions celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Poetry Society of America's Chapbook Fellowship features 2006 winner Dan Chelotti alongside that year's judge, Pulitzer Prize-winner Yusef Komunyakaa, introduced by PSA executive director Alice Quinn at New York City's Strand Book Store.