It’s the holiday season, and the season of year-end celebration. In that spirit, we are pleased to announce that 58 new recordings from the Library’s Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature have been posted online! The newly released recordings span three decades, from the 1960s-1980s, and feature writers reading, giving talks, and participating in panels at the Library’s Capitol Hill campus. I want to make special note of the 1998 recording, “A winter’s evening of English and American light verse,” with former Consultant in Poetry (now called Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry) Anthony Hecht.

Anthony Hecht. Photo credit: Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, University of Rochester.
There are a wealth of recordings in the collection, now 432 strong, featuring such authors/pairings as:
- Margaret Atwood and Galway Kinnell
- James Baldwin
- Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill
- Gwendolyn Brooks, Michael S. Harper, and Robert Hayden
- Marianne Moore
- Robert Frost with Randall Jarrell
- Alan Ginsberg and Ishmael Reed
- Audre Lorde
- Mario Vargas Llosa
- Adrienne Rich
- Kurt Vonnegut
- Eudora Welty