Literary figures/poets

Sze has a new collection of poems, "The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998" (Copper Canyon Press) Sze is second-generation Chinese-American. His poems reflect his many different influences: science and math, Asian ancestry, Buddism, and the American Southeast were he lives. Sze is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Poet Myra Shapiro talks with our Book Critic Maureen Corrigan about her life and work. Her first collection "I'll See You Thursday" was published in 1996 by Alley Press.

Poet Billy Collins. His newest book "Picnic, Lightning" (Univ of Pittsburgh) is his sixth collection. His other books include, "The Art of Drowning," (Univ of Pittsburgh Press), and "Questions about Angels" (William Morrow & Co.,1991), which was selected as a winner of the National Poetry Series Competition in 1990. John Updike says of Collins' poetry, "Billy Collins writes lovely poems. . .

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass (pronounced like grass) talks about his new book "Poet's Choice: Poems for Everyday Life" published by Ecco Press. It's a collection of Hass' favorite recent poems by other poets. Hass served as Laureate from 1995-1997. He is also the author of "Sun Under Wood," "Human Wishes," "Praise," "Field Guide," and a book of essays titled "Twentieth Century Pleasures," which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at the University of California at Berkeley.

Our newest poet laureate Robert Pinsky. His latest book "The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems" is in paperback (Farrar Straus & Giroux).

Poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch has combined his two occupations to produce his new book, "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade." (W. W. Norton) The work is a collection of essays whose topics range from the scheme to use cemeteries as golf courses to poignant stories from his twenty year career as an undertaker. Lynch says he thinks that the meaning of life is connected to death, and his book primarily discusses the impact of the dead on the living.

McCarriston is the author of several books including "Eva-Mary" which is a collection of poems about the domestic abuse that McCarriston, along with her mother and brother, suffered at the hands of her father. She reads and talks about her poem "Last Frontier," about her relocation to Alaska.

Peter Balakian is Professor of English at Colgate University, and the author of a new memoir "Black Dog of Fate: An American Son Uncovers His Armenian Past. He grew up in an affluent New Jersey suburb, unaware of the tragedy that was part of his family's past: the genocide of a million Armenians in 1915 by the Ottoman Turkish government. He started to learn about the past when he discovered the document of his grandmother's human rights suit against the Turkish government, and the lost memoir of his great uncle, a bishop in the Armenian church.

Shore's new collection of poems "Music Minus One" (Picador) reads like a memoir of her youth growing up in the 1950s in New Jersey. She's won several prizes for her two previous volumes of poetry and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship.

A Village Voice critic once wrote of Sundiata, "...like Billie Holiday, Sundiata surprises with images and tumbling phrases that blend with subtle rhythmic variations." Although he's an established and respected artist, he's just completed his debut CD, "The Blue Oneness of Dreams."