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Saturday 4/8: Chris Hayes presents A Colony in a Nation in conversation with Wesley Lowery. St. Joseph’s College, 6 p.m, $30.
Claudia Rankine and Garnette Cadogan give the keynote address at the Focus Festival running on Saturday and Sunday. Bard Graduate Center Gallery, 7 p.m., $20.
...moreOcean Vuong’s first poetry collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, took the literary community by storm, and not without good reason: Vuong’s voice is brave and deeply felt; he wears his heart on his sleeve and turns pain into beauty.
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Saturday 11/26: Sarah Kay, Maeve Higgins, Phil Kaye, and Mark Doss read for refugees, as part of the Festival to Improve the World. The Wild Project, 4 p.m., $10.
Monday 11/28: Jason Diamond launches Searching for John Hughes with a conversation with Danielle Henderson.
...moreSunday 9/18: Join the Rumpus at the Brooklyn Book Festival. The Rumpus is table 238 in front of the courthouse steps. Multiple stages and venues host the best writers and book lovers in the borough. Brooklyn Borough Hall, 10 a.m., free.
...moreThe staff at Poets & Writers put out a call to writers—“some of our most thoughtful and articulate citizens”—to share their perspectives on important issues for the next US president. Fifty writers weigh in, including Javier Zamora, Mira Ptacin, and Ocean Vuong.
...moreOver at the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews Ocean Vuong’s new collection of heartbreakingly gorgeous poems, Night Sky With Exit Wounds. Kakutani writes:
...moreThere is a powerful emotional undertow to these poems that springs from Mr. Vuong’s sincerity and candor, and from his ability to capture specific moments in time with both photographic clarity and a sense of the evanescence of all earthly things.
First, we close out National Poetry Month with Sophie Klahr breaking down literary conventions in “Slant,” and Sandra Simonds offering two powerful poems about sexuality and shame.
Meanwhile, Brandon Hicks illustrates what he has learned from famous author’s photos.
Then, in the Saturday Interview with Carol Edelman Warrior, poet and playwright Storme Webber says that “we’re all traveling on this Earth.
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The New Yorker profiles Ocean Vuong, who muses on the English language, growing up around women, Frank O’Hara, and the vestigial nature of clichés. And with his first book of poetry published just last week, he addresses the feelings of strangeness that accompany the act of making poetry and writing into a career:
...moreWhen the poet-novelist Ben Lerner joined the faculty, he introduced Vuong to the notion that a life of writing might be possible.
It’s that time of year again, where writers young and old, from all corners of the country, come to congregate in one gigantic, frenetic, neurotic, alcohol-infused crowd, in a couple of fancy hotels no one can really afford, to stay in and talk shop (or not, depending on how your writing’s been this year).
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