This week we highlight our poetry programs from the 2021 Festival, including conversations with Nikki Giovanni ("Make Me Rain"); francine j. harris ("Here Is the Sweet Hand") and Patrick Rosal ("The Last Thing"); and Claudia Rankine ("Just Us"), Phillip B. Williams ("Mutiny") and Kevin Young ("African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song").
Free tickets are available for our two in-person National Book Festival events featuring Will Shortz, Adrienne Raphel and Nikki Giovanni. Register now!
Join us on Thursday, April 29, at 7 p.m. ET, for a National Poetry Month program. Poets Victoria Chang ("Obit") and Brenda Shaughnessy ("The Octopus Museum") discuss their poetry collections, which address issues of loss, fear, and the future of the planet.
Joy Harjo is the 23rd and current United States Poet Laureate — the first Native American to receive the honor. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, her most recent poetry collection is "An American Sunrise: Poems," from which she here reads the poem "Running."
Our ongoing celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival continues with the inauguration of Jason Reynolds as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People's Literature in 2019. This post includes prompts for writing and thinking that young readers, families and teachers can use to explore the the author and the author’s work—recommended for ages 9+.
This online series, a continuation of the themes raised in our June 5 program, “Carla Hayden and Lonnie Bunch: Cultural Institutions at Times of Social Unrest,” features Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in conversation with some of the nation’s great literary figures.
Our ongoing celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival continues with poets Natasha Trethewey and Jenny Xie discussing “the poetry of place” and their new books, “Monument: Poems New and Selected” (Trethewey) and “Eye Level” (Xie), on the Poetry & Prose stage at the 2019 Festival.
Our ongoing celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival continues with Kevin Young reading and discussing his poems on the Poetry & Prose stage at the 2015 Festival.
Our ongoing celebration of the Library of Congress National Book Festival continues with 18th U.S. Poet Laureate Philip Levine reading and discussing his poems on the Poetry & Prose stage at the 2012 Festival.
