Ada Limón, named the U.S. Poet Laureate last year, will serve two more years, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has announced, making the California native the third laureate to serve for as long as three years. Limón is composing a poem that will be engraved on NASA's Europa Clipper mission. The spacecraft will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.
Poet Maya Angelou’s debut memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” is her most famous work. The coming-of-age story has influenced writers and touched millions of people. Yet its title is not original to Angelou: She borrowed it from a poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar that he composed, at least in part, in response …
This post was first published on “From the Catbird Seat,” the blog of the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center. Rob Casper, head of the center, wrote it. Today is one of the biggest days of the year for the Poetry and Literature Center — it’s the day of the poet laureate announcement. I want to …
This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division. Abraham Lincoln was fond of poetry: He wrote poems, read them, received them and was the subject of many. So states “Abraham Lincoln and Poetry,” a unique example of the numerous guides the Library makes …
The following guest post is by Jeff Shotts, executive editor at Graywolf Press, publisher in association with the Library of Congress of the anthology “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time” by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. Regular, daily poetry programming on the airwaves has not only been saved, it’s been revitalized. American Public …
This is a guest post by Andrew Gaudio, a reference librarian in the Researcher and Reference Services Division. As the Library of Congress’ specialist in Latin language and literature, I have come to appreciate a small but important body of Latin texts from the American British colonies and early United States written during the 17th, …
This is a guest post by Anne Holmes of the Poetry and Literature Center. It was first published on “From the Catbird Seat,” the center’s blog. This summer, we kicked off our refreshed “Poetry of America” series with a selection of new recordings. Originally launched in 2013 as a counterpart to the Library’s “Songs of …
This post is an interview of Antonio Parker, a 2018 summer intern with the Junior Fellows Program. He is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. This summer, he is interning with the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Tell us a …
This is a guest post by Anne Holmes of the Poetry and Literature Center. As April winds down, our celebration of National Poetry Month at the Library of Congress is still going strong: Today we launch “From the Catbird Seat,” a new poetry podcast series from the Poetry and Literature Center. Each Thursday for the …