Poetry

Grammy-award winning singer, songwriter and actor JILL SCOTT. She recently released her sixth studio album “To Whom This May Concern”--her first new music in a decade. SCOTT has been making music for more than 25 years. Her 2000 debut, “Who Is Jill Scott?: Words and Sounds Vol. 1” was well received with double platinum sales, three Grammy nominations and a sound that helped define neo-soul.

poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. Her new memoir is called "The Flower Bearers." It's in part about the day she married Salman Rushdie, which is also the day her dearest friend suddenly died. Eleven months later, Rushdie was stabbed multiple times and nearly killed while he was being interviewed onstage. She also writes about her mental health issues, her late best friend and her childhood.

Limón's work documents everything from kingfisher birds to the cosmos itself. "I'm embracing my strangeness," she says of her poetry. Her new collection is Startlement.

Sinclair grew up in a devout Rasta family in Jamaica. When she cut her dreadlocks at age 19, she became "a ghost" to her father. Her memoir is How to Say Babylon. Originally broadcast Oct. 4, 2023.

Christian Wiman's new book is called "Zero At The Bone: 50 Entries Against Despair." He teaches at Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Sacred Music.

Safiya Sinclair, grew up in a Rasta family in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Her father is a reggae singer and guitarist. Her hair was twisted into dreadlocks until she was 19. She came to realize that for her, being Rasta meant living in a cage. It was through reading and writing poems that she came to better know herself and to break out of the cage and enter the larger world.

A new tribute album offers musical interpretations of Ginsberg's poems. The poet and countercultural activist spoke to Terry Gross in 1994 about his poem "Howl," which was inspired by his mother.

"I'm not a grown man — I'm a growing man," Alexander says. His new memoir started as a book of love poems, but ended up being a collection of essays and poems about love, divorce and raising children.

Smith's poems, which are addressed to his young children, describe what their ancestors endured and escaped. He also examines the joy and anxiety of parenthood, especially as a Black father.

Our Missing Hearts imagines a world of governmental cruelty — and the armies of citizens who both facilitate and resist. It's a masterful work that epitomizes the possibilities of storytelling.

Joy Harjo is the first American Indian appointed to the position of U.S. poet laureate. She has a new memoir, Poet Warrior, that’s in part about her family’s history.

Mike Birbiglia explores his ambivalence about parenthood in the new book, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad. Stein collaborated on the memoir, contributing her side of the story through poems, published under the name J. Hope Stein.

Ewing's 1919 looks back on a century-old riot in Chicago, set off after a black teen drowned while being stoned by white people. She says the systemic racism that plagued the U.S. then still exists.

Musician Leonard Cohen left behind many unpublished poems and lyrics when he died in 2016. Now his son Adam, who spoke to Fresh Air in 2018, has a new album of his dad's songs, Thanks for the Dance.

Classical music critic Lloyd Schwartz reads a poem about his late mother, who had Alzheimer's Disease. Schwartz's latest collection is Little Kisses.

The former U.S. poet laureate, who died March 15, was a prolific writer as well as a conservationist and a conscientious objector during World War II. He spoke to Fresh Air in 2008.

Musician and writer Leonard Cohen died in 2016, leaving behind many unpublished poems and lyrics. His son Adam Cohen discusses The Flame, a collection of some of Leonard's final works.

Hall, who died on Saturday, wrote about farm work and his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, in the 1993 memoir Life Work. He and Kenyon spoke to Fresh Air in 1996, and Hall was interviewed again in '02 and '12.

Growing up in southwestern Virginia in recent decades, poet Molly McCully Brown often passed by a state institution in Amherst County that was once known as the "Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded."

Kay Redfield Jamison's new book describes how Lowell's manic-depressive illness influenced his life and work. "His manias tended to lead him into writing a fresh kind of poetry," she says.