Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 21, 2001.

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, and scholar of classics who lives in Montreal. Her books include Men in the Off Hours; Autobiography of Red; Plainwater; Glass, Irony, and God; and Eros the Bittersweet. Ms. Carson, who received a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, has said, "I will do anything to avoid boredom…It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough." Ms. Carson teaches at McGill University.

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Length: 26:09; Size: 300 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 21, 2001.

Anne Carson is a poet, essayist, and scholar of classics who lives in Montreal. Her books include Men in the Off Hours; Autobiography of Red; Plainwater; Glass, Irony, and God; and Eros the Bittersweet. Ms. Carson, who received a Lannan Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship, has said, "I will do anything to avoid boredom…It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough." Ms. Carson teaches at McGill University.

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Length: 41:47; Size: 480 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 20, 2010.

Nicholson Baker's recently published Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization is a chronological juxtaposition of discrete moments from 1892 to December 31, 1941, based on accounts from contemporary reports of Britain's terror campaign of repeatedly bombing German cities even before the London blitz. Known for his original approach to a subject, his first novel, The Mezzanine, recounts one afternoon in the life of a man riding an escalator on his way to buy a shoelace and his second, Room Temperature, is about a father feeding a bottle to his six-month-old daughter, while Vox transcribes a long telephone conversation between two people who meet over a phone-sex call-in line.

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Length: 1:34:17; Size: 21.72 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on November 18, 2009.

"In dancing with the enemy one follows his steps even if counting under one's breath."
A native of South Africa, Breyten Breytenbach is a distinguished painter, activist, and prolific writer, and is widely recognized as the finest living Afrikaner poet. A staunch opponent of apartheid, he was a political prisoner in South Africa, serving solitary confinement from 1975 to 1982. While incarcerated, Breytenbach wrote 'n Seisoen in die Paradys (A Season in Paradise). Other prison writings were published as Mouroir: Bespieelende notas van 'n roman (Mouroir: Mirrornotes of a Novel) in 1983 followed by The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist. His latest book, All One Horse, is a haunting journey through Breytenbach's kaleidoscopic imagination, combining philosophical and lyrical prose pieces with his surreal paintings. The title is a nod to Chuang Tzu, and the writings are infused with glimmers of Eastern thought. His article "Obamandela" appeared in Harper's earlier this year. Today Professor Breytenbach is a Global Distinguished Professor of creative writing at New York University.

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Length: 0:57:15; Size: 13.2 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 21, 2009.

Rebecca Solnit is an activist, historian, and writer who lives in San Francisco. In her most recent book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Solnit surveys disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization, and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding, and housing each other. In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, she takes her readers on a leisurely journey through the prehistory, history, and natural history of bipedal motion. Previous publications include Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim and the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism). A contributing editor to Harper's, she frequently writes for the political site Tomdispatch.com and occasionally for the London Review of Books and the (U.K.) Guardian. Solnit received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2003.

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Length: 1:14:14; Size: 17.1 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 28, 2003.

Dennis O'Driscoll, one of Ireland's most widely published and respected critics of poetry, was born in County Tipperary, Ireland. A civil servant since the age of 16, he works for Irish Customs in Dublin.
He has published six collections of poetry, the most recent being Exemplary Damages. He has contributed to the Times Literary Supplement, Poetry, and the Harvard Review. O'Driscoll, who received a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1999, was a featured author for Readings & Conversations in 2001 and 2003.

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Length: 1:28:41; Size: 31.2 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 21, 2003.

No one has worked harder to bring the brutal extremities of political life in the 20th century into the orbit of American poetry than Carolyn Forché, poet, translator, anthologist, and human rights activist.

Her 1982 volume, The Country Between Us, commemorates two years spent working with human rights advocates in El Salvador; it contains some of the most powerful poems of political violence and political commitment ever written in the United States.

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Length: 1:15:09; Size: 26.5 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on September 26, 2001.

Billy Collins's poetry books are Picnic, Lightning; The Art of Drowning; Questions about Angels, which was a National Poetry Series winner; and The Apple that Astonished Paris.

He has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. Mr. Collins, who lives in New York and teaches at Lehman College, has been the United States Poet Laureate.

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Length: 1:13:41; Size: 26.6 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on January 22, 2003.

Helen Vendler, the A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, is one of the most influential critics of contemporary poetry in the United States. Her books include Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen Out of Desire; The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, and Critics; Seamus Heaney; and Yeat's Vision and the Later Plays.

A distinguished scholar, she has published acclaimed books on the odes of Keats and on the sonnets of Shakespeare, as well as reviews for The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The New York Review of Books.

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Length: 1:17:39; Size: 27.6 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 19, 2003.

Philip Levine is known for his original style and voice. Readers of American poetry recognize him as the preeminent American poet living and writing in the U.S.

Among his many awards are the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1987), a National Book Award for Poetry (1991), the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry (1991), and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1995).

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Length: 1:21:47; Size: 30.4 MB