Category Archives: Poetry

Deborah Levy with John Freeman, Reading, 30 October 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 30, 2019.

Deborah Levy, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and translated widely across the world. The author of highly praised novels, including Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka; and part one of her working autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know, she lives in London. Her latest novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, has been long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

In this episode, Deborah Levy was introduced by John Freeman, then read from her work. You can find the companion conversation here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also watch the videos of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Deborah Levy with John Freeman, Conversation, 30 October 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 30, 2019.

Deborah Levy, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and translated widely across the world. The author of highly praised novels, including Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka; and part one of her working autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know, she lives in London. Her latest novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, has been long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

In this episode, Deborah Levy joined John Freeman in conversation. You can find the companion reading here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also watch the videos of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Deborah Levy with John Freeman, 30 October 2019 – Audio

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 30, 2019.

Deborah Levy, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and translated widely across the world. The author of highly praised novels, including Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl; the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka; and part one of her working autobiography, Things I Don’t Want to Know, she lives in London. Her latest novel, The Man Who Saw Everything, has been long-listed for the 2019 Booker Prize.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also watch the videos of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico with Michael Wiegers, Poetry, 13 October 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lannan Meeting House in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 13, 2019.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Her first book, The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, and the Utah Book Award. Lima :: Limón, her second poetry collection, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2019.

Scenters-Zapico’s poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines including Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a CantoMundo fellowship. Scenters-Zapico is poet in residence at the University of Puget Sound.

This was a Poetry Sunday event.

In this episode, Natalie Scenters-Zapico was introduced by Michael Wiegers, then read from her work.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico, Poetry, 13 October 2019 – Audio

Recorded at the Lannan Meeting House in Santa Fe, New Mexico on October 13, 2019.

Natalie Scenters-Zapico is from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, USA, and Cd. Juárez, Chihuahua, México. Her first book, The Verging Cities (Center for Literary Publishing 2015), won the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award, NACCS Foco Book Prize, and the Utah Book Award. Lima :: Limón, her second poetry collection, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2019.

Scenters-Zapico’s poems have appeared in a wide range of anthologies and literary magazines including Best American Poetry 2015, POETRY, Tin House, Kenyon Review, and more. She is a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry, a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, and a CantoMundo fellowship. Scenters-Zapico is poet in residence at the University of Puget Sound.

This was a Poetry Sunday event.

In this episode, Natalie Scenters-Zapico was introduced by Michael Wiegers, read from her work, then answered questions from the audience.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also watch the video of this event there.

Sebastian Barry with Daniel Mendelsohn, Reading, 1 May 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 1, 2019.

Sebastian Barry is a novelist, poet, and playwright. His latest book, Days without End (2016), tells the story of Thomas McNulty, a 17-year-old fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland by enlisting in the U.S. Army in the 1850s. He is sent to fight Sioux and Yurok Indians and, ultimately, fights in the Civil War. The central love story of the novel is between two men and was inspired by Barry’s son’s homosexual relationship. Of his son’s relationship, Barry states, “I look at them and I think, ‘This is not something that needs our tolerance, this is something we should be emulating. There is magnificence here of soul.'”

The New York Times calls Days without End “a dreamlike Western with a different kind of hero.” He is “an orphan, a refugee from Ireland’s Great Famine, a crack shot, a cross-dresser and a halfhearted soldier, but mostly he’s in love with a young man.” In the novel Barry writes, “A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.” Days without End won the 2017 Costa Book of the Year Award, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Independent Bookseller’s Award.

Barry’s plays include The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998), and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007). His novels include A Long Long Way (2005); The Secret Scripture (2008), named Novel of the Year by the Irish Book Awards and Costa Book of the Year; and The Temporary Gentleman (2014). He has won, among other awards, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Independent Booksellers Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A Long Long Way and the top-10 best seller The Secret Scripture were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He was born in Dublin in 1955 and lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

In this episode, Sebastian Barry was introduced by Daniel Mendelsohn, then read from his work. You can find the companion conversation here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Sebastian Barry with Daniel Mendelsohn, Conversation, 1 May 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 1, 2019.

Sebastian Barry is a novelist, poet, and playwright. His latest book, Days without End (2016), tells the story of Thomas McNulty, a 17-year-old fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland by enlisting in the U.S. Army in the 1850s. He is sent to fight Sioux and Yurok Indians and, ultimately, fights in the Civil War. The central love story of the novel is between two men and was inspired by Barry’s son’s homosexual relationship. Of his son’s relationship, Barry states, “I look at them and I think, ‘This is not something that needs our tolerance, this is something we should be emulating. There is magnificence here of soul.'”

The New York Times calls Days without End “a dreamlike Western with a different kind of hero.” He is “an orphan, a refugee from Ireland’s Great Famine, a crack shot, a cross-dresser and a halfhearted soldier, but mostly he’s in love with a young man.” In the novel Barry writes, “A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.” Days without End won the 2017 Costa Book of the Year Award, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Independent Bookseller’s Award.

Barry’s plays include The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998), and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007). His novels include A Long Long Way (2005); The Secret Scripture (2008), named Novel of the Year by the Irish Book Awards and Costa Book of the Year; and The Temporary Gentleman (2014). He has won, among other awards, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Independent Booksellers Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A Long Long Way and the top-10 best seller The Secret Scripture were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He was born in Dublin in 1955 and lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

In this episode, Sebastian Barry joined Daniel Mendelsohn in conversation. You can find the companion reading here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Sebastian Barry with Daniel Mendelsohn, 1 May 2019 – Audio

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on May 1, 2019.

Sebastian Barry is a novelist, poet, and playwright. His latest book, Days without End (2016), tells the story of Thomas McNulty, a 17-year-old fleeing the Great Famine in Ireland by enlisting in the U.S. Army in the 1850s. He is sent to fight Sioux and Yurok Indians and, ultimately, fights in the Civil War. The central love story of the novel is between two men and was inspired by Barry’s son’s homosexual relationship. Of his son’s relationship, Barry states, “I look at them and I think, ‘This is not something that needs our tolerance, this is something we should be emulating. There is magnificence here of soul.'”

The New York Times calls Days without End “a dreamlike Western with a different kind of hero.” He is “an orphan, a refugee from Ireland’s Great Famine, a crack shot, a cross-dresser and a halfhearted soldier, but mostly he’s in love with a young man.” In the novel Barry writes, “A man’s memory might have only a hundred clear days in it and he has lived thousands. Can’t do much about that. We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards.” Days without End won the 2017 Costa Book of the Year Award, the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the Independent Bookseller’s Award.

Barry’s plays include The Steward of Christendom (1995), Our Lady of Sligo (1998), and The Pride of Parnell Street (2007). His novels include A Long Long Way (2005); The Secret Scripture (2008), named Novel of the Year by the Irish Book Awards and Costa Book of the Year; and The Temporary Gentleman (2014). He has won, among other awards, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, the Independent Booksellers Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. A Long Long Way and the top-10 best seller The Secret Scripture were short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. He was born in Dublin in 1955 and lives in County Wicklow, Ireland.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also watch the videos of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Tracy K. Smith with Joy Harjo, Reading, 6 February 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 6, 2019.

Tracy K. Smith was appointed the 22nd United States poet laureate in 2017 and was reappointed for a second term in 2018. During her first term, Smith gave readings and led discussions as a part of a pilot project in rural communities in New Mexico, South Carolina, and Kentucky. She has continued to pursue engagements in small towns across America, stating, “Poetry invites us to listen to other voices, to make space for other perspectives, and to care about the lives of others who may not look, sound or think like ourselves.” Her poem “The United States Welcomes You” begins:

Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light?

Her memoir Ordinary Light (2016) was described by the Guardian as “A powerful meditation on being a daughter and, by the end, on being a mother, too.” In it she writes of her mother’s impending death: “When the dark outside was real*not just the dark of approaching winter, and not just the dark of rain, which we’d had for days, too*her dying came on. We recognized it. We circled her bed, though we stopped short of holding hands, perhaps because that gesture would have meant we were holding on, and we were finally ready to let her go.”

Smith has published four books of poetry: Wade in the Water (2018); Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book; Duende (2006); and The Body’s Question, winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, earned her MFA at Columbia, and was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities and director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

In this episode, Tracy K. Smith joined Joy Harjo in conversation. You can find the companion conversation here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.

Tracy K. Smith with Joy Harjo, Conversation, 6 February 2019 – Video

Recorded at the Lensic Theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico on February 6, 2019.

Tracy K. Smith was appointed the 22nd United States poet laureate in 2017 and was reappointed for a second term in 2018. During her first term, Smith gave readings and led discussions as a part of a pilot project in rural communities in New Mexico, South Carolina, and Kentucky. She has continued to pursue engagements in small towns across America, stating, “Poetry invites us to listen to other voices, to make space for other perspectives, and to care about the lives of others who may not look, sound or think like ourselves.” Her poem “The United States Welcomes You” begins:

Why and by whose power were you sent?
What do you see that you may wish to steal?
Why this dancing? Why do your dark bodies
Drink up all the light?

Her memoir Ordinary Light (2016) was described by the Guardian as “A powerful meditation on being a daughter and, by the end, on being a mother, too.” In it she writes of her mother’s impending death: “When the dark outside was real*not just the dark of approaching winter, and not just the dark of rain, which we’d had for days, too*her dying came on. We recognized it. We circled her bed, though we stopped short of holding hands, perhaps because that gesture would have meant we were holding on, and we were finally ready to let her go.”

Smith has published four books of poetry: Wade in the Water (2018); Life on Mars, which received the 2012 Pulitzer Prize and was selected as a New York Times Notable Book; Duende (2006); and The Body’s Question, winner of the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She received her undergraduate degree from Harvard, earned her MFA at Columbia, and was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University from 1997 to 1999. She is the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities and director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton University. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

This was a Readings and Conversations event.

In this episode, Tracy K. Smith joined Joy Harjo in conversation. You can find the companion reading here.

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website; you may also listen to the audio recording of this event there. Photos from this event are available on Flickr.