Known for short, compact writing and for living a very quiet life, Kay Ryan has taken on a big and very public role as the nation’s Poet Laureate. For more than thirty years, Ryan has lived and taught ...

Poetry can resemble incantation, but sometimes it also resembles conversation. Certain poems combine the two—the cadences of speech intertwined with the forms of song in a varying way that heightens ...

As a child at the White House, Caroline Kennedy got early lessons in the power of words. Her father, President John F. Kennedy, was famously eloquent. Her mother Jacqueline adored poetry and kept a ...

The poetry of Pilar Fraile Amador, widely published in her native Spain, uses words to create and explore surreal spheres of personal and political identity. In a bilingual recitation, Lizzie Davis ...

Annie Zaidi is one of those rare contemporary writers who has tried her hand at different formats and dabbled with various styles – poetry, novellas, short stories, articles, play scripts and even a ...

Although Rita Dove has won most of the honors available to an American poet — she was the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her 1986 collection “Thomas and Beulah,” ...

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. By Ian Sansom. Harper. 341 pages. $27.99. The subtitle for Ian Samson’s book “September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem,” is such an unexpected combination of ...