Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 5, 2008.

Brian Turner is a soldier-poet whose debut book of poems, Here, Bullet, won the New York Times “Editor’s Choice” selection. His poetry has been published in Poetry Daily, The Georgia Review and other journals, and in the Voices in Wartime Anthology. Here, Bullet is a harrowing, beautiful first-person account of the Iraq war featuring poems that reflect Turner’s experiences as a soldier. The poems speak with compassion, sympathy, and horror of the first-hand experience of war and with immediacy of loss, beauty, comradeship, and longing for home and the familiar; he deplores the violence and acknowledges the grief and terror of war.

>Bruce Weigl is the author of 12 collections of poetry, most recently Declension in the Village of Chung Luong which created “an eloquent spokesman for an entire generation of Americans whose lives were broken by the war and a country whose moral confusion desperately needed addressing.” His memoir, The Circle of Hahn, tells of his childhood in Ohio; his induction into the U.S. Army in 1967, and year in Vietnam that led to his passion for that country’s poetry and culture; and of a redemptive meeting in 1996 with his daughter-to-be at an orphanage outside Hanoi. He also has three collections of essays as well as translating and publishing books of Vietnamese poetry. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harpers, and many other publications. In 2006 he was awarded a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

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Length: 1:39:59; Size: 23.5 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 27, 2008.

Linh Dinh is the author of Fake House, where we meet American and Vietnamese characters such as a white man considering ordering an Asian mail-order bride; a Vietnamese man wondering why more young women in his village don't accept money to marry foreigners; and a white woman who believes she's the ugliest female in the world. His second volume of stories, Blood and Soap, was chosen by the Village Voice as one of the best books of 2004. Dinh has also authored four books of poetry including Jam Alerts, All Around What Empties Out, American Tatts, and Borderless Bodies. He is also the editor of the anthology Night, Again: Contemporary Fiction from Vietnam.

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Length: 1:18:32; Size: 37.2 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 13, 2008.

Eamon Grennan has said, "As far as I'm concerned, poetry is about elegy. Every poem is a memory of some kind, a celebratory elegy. Poems are like shells. Something is gone and that's why you write." His volumes of poetry include So It Goes, Still Life with Waterfall, and his latest, The Quick of It. He writes in both the ancient tradition of mournful remembrance in attention to the natural world and the modern impulse to seize and preserve the moment. Grennan returns to his native Ireland yearly for "voice transfusions" from his home in New York, where he teaches at Vassar College.

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Length: 1:32:24; Size: 22.1 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 3, 2007.

Martin Espada, called "the Pablo Neruda of North American authors" by Sandra Cisneros, has published thirteen books as a poet, essayist, editor and translator. Of his most recent collection of poems, The Republic of Poetry, Samuel Hazo writes: "Espada unites in these poems the fierce allegiances of Latin American poetry to freedom and glory with the democratic tradition of Whitman, and the result is poetry of fire and passionate intelligence." His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, The Nation, and The Best American Poetry.

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Length: 1:27:32; Size: 40.1 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 18, 2000.

W.S. Merwin poet, translator, and environmental activist, has become one of the most widely read poets in America, with a career spanning five decades. The son of a Presbyterian minister, for whom he began writing hymns at the age of five, Merwin went to Europe as a young man and developed a love of languages that led to work as a literary translator.

Over the years, his poetic voice has moved from the more formal and medieval to a more distinctly American voice. W.S. Merwin's recent poetry is perhaps his most personal, arising from his deeply held anti-imperialist, pacifist, and environmentalist beliefs. In 2005 he will have three new books: Migration: Selected Poems 1951-2001; a book of poems called Present Company; and the memoir Summer Doorways which chronicles his days as a student in seminary school and at Princeton, through the next years spent as a tutor for children of privilege living abroad.

William Merwin was the recipient of the 2004 Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Length: 0:32:19; Size: 8.6 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 28, 2001.

Thomas Lynch is a poet and essayist whose books include The Undertaking, which was nominated for a National Book Award; Still Life in Milford; Skating with Heather Grace; and Bodies in Motion and at Rest.

Mr. Lynch lives in Milford, Michigan, where he works as a funeral director.

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. 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: 0:33:54; Size: 9.0 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 27, 2002.

Jim Harrison has published thirteen collections of poetry, including The Shape of the Journey: New and Collected Poems; After Ikkyu; The Theory and Practice of Rivers; Natural World: A Bestiary; Returning to Earth; and Locations. He has worked as a screenwriter, book reviewer, literary critic, food columnist, sportswriter, and conservationist.

Other works include a collection of novellas, The Summer He Didn't Die, and Legends of the Fall, which was made into a celebrated film. Mr. Harrison has been honored with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He was born in northern Michigan in 1937 and continued to reside there until recently. He and his wife now divide their time between Montana and Arizona.

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Length: 1:17:53; Size: 21.9 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on April 10, 2002.

Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and educated at Stanford and Columbia universities. Her books include Blood, Tin, Straw; The Dead and the Living; The Father; The Gold Cell; and The Wellspring. Ms. Olds teaches at New York University and helps run its writing workshop program at Goldwater Hospital, a public facility for the severely physically challenged. Ms. Olds served as the New York State Poet Laureate from 1998 to 2000.

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Length: 1:25:11; Size: 20.0 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on December 11, 2002.

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, considered Germany's most important living poet, is also a highly regarded essayist, journalist, dramatist, editor, publisher, and translator. Born in 1929 in Bavaria, he was educated in German universities and also the Sorbonne in Paris.

His many awards include the Nuremberg Cultural Prize and the Pasolini Prize. The most recent volume of his poems to be translated (by Michael Hamburger) into English is Kiosk, published in 1997.

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Length: 1:10:37; Size: 18.2 MB

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on March 14, 2007.

Charles Simic has published over sixty books of poetry as well as many translations of French, Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian, and Slovenian poetry. He was born in Yugoslavia in 1938 and moved with his family to the United States in 1953. His poetry first appeared in The Chicago Review . The poet Seamus Heaney describes Simic's work as, "Surrealist, and therefore comic, but with a specific gravity in his imagining that manages to avoid the surrealist penalty of weightlessness."

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Length: 1:13:59; Size: 50.83 MB