Divya Victor — First Petition

Host Pádraig Ó Tuama shares “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, a favorite childhood poem of his, and offers an audio postscript to Season 10 of Poetry Unbound. Later in 2026, he will bring us more Poetry Unbound to look forward to — find out what and when here. In the meantime ... Show More

Have you ever watched, in awe, as a skilled gymnast or skater lifts off and completes a dizzying number of revolutions in less than a second before landing safely back down? That’s how you may feel upon reading the great Leonard Cohen’s urgent, dreamlike poem “I, 8” from Book of ... Show More

Will you leave this episode feeling uplifted, envious, curious, or something else entirely? Yes. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poem “Subarctica” transports you to a vividly specific time — “the coldest December / on record, I haven’t left my mother’s / house in over a week” — where the pr ... Show More

An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.”Ada Limón i ... Show More

This week on Magic Lessons, Elizabeth Gilbert advises Hope, a spoken-word poet in Ohio. A self-described introvert, Hope wants to take her poetry to the next level, but she's scared to submit her work to journals and enter poetry slams. She's paralyzed by a deep fear of rejection ... Show More

<p>Elisa New believes anyone can have fun reading a poem. And that if you really want to have a blast, you shouldn't limit poetry to silent, solitary reading  - why not sing, recite, or perform it as has been the case for most of its history?</p> <p>The Harvard English professor ... Show More

#PodcastersForJustice Award-winning author and essayist, Vanessa Veselka, spoke to me about her transformation as an artist, writing out of necessity, and the journey from nervy debut to National Book Award longlist. Vanessa is the author of the debut novel Zazen, which won the P ... Show More

Join Quenton Baker and special guests for a celebration of and conversation on their new book ballast. This event occurred on April 26, 2023. Ballast is a poetic sequence using the 1841 slave revolt aboard the brig Creole as a lens through which to view the vitality of Black live ... Show More

Jacqueline Woodson writes books to be savored. She is best known for her memoir "Brown Girl Dreaming" along with her works "After Tupac and D Foster," "Feathers" and "Show Way." Her accolades include the MacArthur "Genius Grant" and the National Book Award. In this excerpt of a c ... Show More

This week on Magic Lessons, Elizabeth Gilbert advises Britta, a former lawyer-turned- writer in Amsterdam struggling to make progress on her second book. After success with her first novel, Britta made several failed attempts to start her second. She can’t find the flow and fears ... Show More

Hillary opens this season of You and Me Both with something we could all use right about now: hope. Joining her is Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, who inspired so many people with her stirring poem, The Hill We Climb, on Inauguration Day. Amanda talks with Hillary about what i ... Show More

Can we understand a culture and a region when we don’t read its authors? And what nuances do we miss when we read them in translation? How are authors and poets from the Middle East reaching new audiences? I speak to poet Zeina Hashem Beck, from Lebanon, living in California, abo ... Show More

In this ground-breaking work, Michael Sells (the Barrows Professor Emeritus of the History and Literature of Islam and Professor emeritus of comparative literature at the University of Chicago) translates sixty-one poems that form the Tarjuman al-ashwaq or The Translator of Desir ... Show More