Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of the first African-Americans to develop a national reputation for his poetry, was born on this day in 1872. To celebrate his life and work, the Library held a literary birthday reading earlier today featuring noted poets Holly Bass and Al Young, who read selections from Dunbar’s poetry and discussed his […]
Last Thursday, second lady Jill Biden came to the Library of Congress to read her children’s book Don’t Forget, God Bless Our Troops to the sons and daughters of military families. I usually spend my time at the Library focusing on promoting literature to adults, but on that day I thought about its impact on […]
The Library of Congress Blog yesterday celebrated the 125th anniversary of Ernest L. Thayer’s iconic baseball poem “Casey at the Bat” by featuring a recording of the poem made for the occasion, by Washington Nationals radio broadcaster Dave Jageler. Fans of the poem definitely will want to compare Jageler’s interpretation to the classic 1909 recording […]
The following is a guest post written by Courtney Deal, a summer intern at the Library of Congress Poetry and Literature Center. Two years ago when Philip Levine was named Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, I began volunteering at the Poetry and Literature Center at the Library of Congress. I helped pass out flyers at […]
The following is a guest post by Mark F. Hall, a research specialist in the Library of Congress’s Digital Reference Section. The chivalrous tales of King Arthur and his knights have remained popular in various genres and formats from the Middle Ages to the present day. The historical Arthur is believed to have lived in […]
Yesterday would have been the 92nd birthday of Mona Van Duyn, and what better way to commemorate her legacy as the first female Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry than to spend it celebrating the women to have held the position? Since an act of Congress changed the title of Consultant in Poetry to Poet Laureate […]
Kevin Young is the author of eight volumes of poetry, including Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels (Knopf, 2011), which won an American Book Award, and Book of Hours (forthcoming in 2014). He is also the editor of eight other collections, most recently The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink and The Collected […]
Next Wedensday, May 1st, Marilyn Chin will join poets Brenda Shaughnessy,Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, and Kevin Young in “Necessary Utterance: Poetry as Cultural Force,” a reading to celebrate Natasha Trethewey’s year as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. Chin, like Monday’s featured poet Patricia Smith, was selected by Trethewey as a […]
Next Wednesday, May 1, 2013, Natasha Trethewey, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, will close the Spring literary season with the “Necessary Utterance: Poetry as Cultural Force” reading and lecture. To celebrate her year as Poet Laureate, she has selected five poets whose writing she feels illustrates the best of what poetry can do as force […]
The following is a guest post by Abby Yochelson, English and American Literature Reference specialist at the Library of Congress’s Main Reading Room, Humanities and Social Sciences Division. Can you help me find a novel I read about twenty years ago about time travel back to the dinosaur age? I’m trying to find a poem […]