New Letters - On the Air - Audio feed
45 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 12 ratingsA weekly radio program, hosted by Angela Elam. The program now stands as the longest continuously-running broadcast of a national literary radio series, with more than 1,200 programs by many of the world’s most prominent writers.
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Episodes
New Letters On the Air Back to the Writing Well
August 14, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBOur "Classics Series" continues as we go "Back to the Writing Well" to hear from writers of place, including the late Pat Conroy. Famous for his novels about the south, with several made into movies such as The Great Santini, he finally puts his father to rest with his 2013 memoir, ...
New Letters On the Air The Writing Well
August 07, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBWe continue our "Classics Series" by going to the writing well to fill our creative spirits with advice from several fiction writers, including Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jane Smiley, who reveals her "Five Writing Tips." The author of the trilogy of novels...
New Letters On the Air Clarion Collection
July 31, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBWe begin our "Classics Series" with our program celebrating our 2013 Clarion Award for Best Radio Talk/Interview Program from the Association for Women in Communications, which features audio excerpts from our award-winning interviews. Jamaica Kincaid reads from her novel Mr. Potter, based loosely on her life and relationship with her father, while ...
New Letters On the Air Favorites
July 24, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBThis program features excerpts from shows of the past decade with multi-award winning poet Nikki Giovanni; a new poetry voice for the decade, Marcus Wicker; Booker Prize winning Australian writer, Thomas Keneally, whose novel was the basis for the film Schindler's List; the always inspiring workshop poet, ...
New Letters On the Air Women Writing Women
July 17, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBIn this special anthology program novelist Meg Wolitzer (shown) and poet Molly Peacock both discuss the importance of writing about the lives and work of women. Wolitzer reads from her novel The Female Persuasion while Peacock shares poems from her collection...
New Letters On the Air Molly Peacock
July 10, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBAmerican-Canadian essayist, poet and biographer Molly Peacock gives an in-depth look into her latest work, The Analyst, her 2017 poetry collection that traces her decades-long relationship with her...
New Letters On the Air Joy Harjo: Save America's Treasures Selection
July 03, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBTo show your support, email [email protected] Current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (2019-2021) talks about her Native American heritage and reads poetry from her fourth book, In Mad Love and War, that won the American Book Award, the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Poetry Prize, and the William ...
New Letters On the Air Cheers to All the Years
June 26, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBTo show your support for our radio program, email [email protected] and let UMKC know what New Letters on the Air means to you. As we near what may be the end of our 43 years of broadcasting, we look back at our decades of publishing the National Magazine Award-winning New Letters, the American Book Award-winning BkMk (BookMark) Press, and the radio show, New Letters on the Air...
New Letters On the Air Nikky Finney
June 19, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBPoet Nikky Finney discusses how her sense of social justice was informed by her father, the first African American Chief Justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court, revealing how growing up in the political household shaped her art. She reads a poetic tribute to her father from her second book, Rice, as well as her long, piercing poem "Dancing with Strom" from her fourth collection, the National Book A...
New Letters On the Air Etheridge Knight: Past American Voice
June 12, 2020 05:00 - 3.52 KBThe late Etheridge Knight began writing poetry in the 1960s, when he was imprisoned for armed robbery, where he discovered that "art is ultimately about freedom." This program features excerpts from a 1986 poetry reading and a 1989 interview by Rebekah Presson, when they discuss the role of black men in society and his use of prison as a metaphor. The author of four books, his work continues to inspire younger ...
New Letters On the Air Claudia Rankine
June 05, 2020 05:00A 2016 MacArthur "Genius" and a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, Claudia Rankine discusses her fifth poetry book, Citizen: An American Lyric. This multi-award-winning work features poetry and prose along with art, ranging from contemporary pieces and William Turner's paintings of The Slave Ship and talks about her collaboration with he...
New Letters On the Air That's It!
May 29, 2020 05:00This special program features the final issue of new works of poetry, fiction, essays and reviews, edited by Robert Stewart for New Letters: Volume 86 Nos. 1 and 2. In this Diastole House reading in February 2020,...
New Letters On the Air Virginia Brackett
May 22, 2020 05:00Virginia Brackett, the author of 15 books, discusses her 2019 family memoir, In the Company of Patriots. She reveals how she used family stories, scrapbooks, letters, and interviews to trace the life of her father, Captain Edmund C. Roberts, who was killed in the Korean War when she was only eight months old. The Park University Professor Emeritus of English als...
New Letters On the Air Jericho Brown
May 15, 2020 05:00Guggenheim fellow Jericho Brown describes the joy he finds in writing poetry and how his work helps him examine his world as a gay black man. He talks about some of his poetic mentors—from Emily Dickinson to Alice Walker—and the lessons he strives to pass along to his students at Emory University. He also reveals the story behind changing his name and discusses his childhood in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was raised by fundamental Christians. Brown reads from his second collec...
New Letters On the Air Meg Wolitzer
May 08, 2020 05:00New York Times Bestselling author Meg Wolitzer reads from her most recent novel, The Female Persuasion, and discusses its themes of feminism and the tendency to idealize our mentors. Her work has long centered on the experiences of women, with three of her books having been adapted for film, including ...
New Letters On the Air Ben Lerner
May 01, 2020 05:00MacArthur Fellow Ben Lerner discusses his third acclaimed novel, The Topeka School, a finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award. The multi-award winning fiction writer and poet was interviewed at the Kansas City Public Library on the Plaza during his residence as the fall 2019 UMKC Cockefair Chair Writer-in-Residence. A previous program featured a long reading from the novel; in this half of the...
New Letters On the Air Ada Limón
April 17, 2020 05:00In this 2020 reading at Rockhurst University for the Midwest Poets Series, Ada Limón talks about her creative process and shares work from her National Book Critics Circle Award-winning collection, The Carrying. While she uses poetry to explore loss and pain—from her own struggles with infertility to the world's devastation from climate change—she also reads praise and love poems—including t...
New Letters On the Air Marcus Jackson
April 10, 2020 05:00Cave Canem Fellow Marcus Jackson reads from his 2019 Ohioana Award-winning poetry book, Pardon My Heart, as well as from his debut collection, Neighborhood Register. An Ohio native, who teaches in the MFA program at The Ohio State University, he discusses the importance of Cave Canem in his dev...
New Letters On the Air Mark Doty
April 03, 2020 05:00Esteemed poet Mark Doty discusses his work, including Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems, winner of the 2008 National Book Awards, and his 2013 book-length poem and meditative bestiary called A Swarm, A Flock, A Host: A Co...
New Letters On the Air Feminist Poets: Past American Voices
March 27, 2020 05:00This program pays tribute to the past American voices of feminist poets from the last century, who opened doors at publishing houses for the vast numbers of talented women writers today. Listen to excerpts from Pulitzer Prize winners Maxine Kumin (1925-2014) and Carolyn Kizer (1925-2014), as well as MacArthur "genius" fellow Adrienne Rich (1929-2012). We'll also list...
New Letters On the Air Kim Shuck
March 20, 2020 05:00Kim Shuck is San Francisco's seventh Poet Laureate and the first from a recognized Native Nation. Shuck, a citizen of Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, takes on the disappearance of native women in the United States in her poetry book, Murdered Missing, winner of the 2019 PEN Oakland Censorship Award. During her reading at Haskell Indian Na...
New Letters On the Air Adrienne Rich: Past American Voice
March 13, 2020 05:00This Past American Voice episode features the late, great poet Adrienne Rich, who died in 2012. Known for her perfectly crafted, award winning poems, she was also a fearless spokeswoman for the Feminist Movement, gay rights and peace. This program features excerpts from a 1995 New Letters on the Air interview and from a 2002 Cockefair Chair presentation at the University of ...
New Letters On the Air Patricia Smith
March 06, 2020 06:00In the second half of this interview, Patricia Smith, a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, reads from her book Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah, the 2014 winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt Award. Smith also shares a poem from her earlier National Poetry Series Award-winning collection, ...
New Letters On the Air DaMaris Hill
February 28, 2020 06:00In the final part of the "On Writing, On Race" program at the Kansas City Public Library, DaMaris Hill, the youngest and first living American poet to be signed to Bloomsbury Publishing, reads poems from her book, A Bound Woman is a D...
New Letters On the Air Anthony Grooms
February 21, 2020 06:00Anthony Grooms, the author of Bombingham, reads from his newest novel, The Vain Conversation, a finalist for the 2020 Townsend Prize for Fiction. In part one of this show produced from a presen...
New Letters On the Air Ernest Gaines: Past American Voice
February 14, 2020 06:00We pay tribute to one of America's best fiction writers, Ernest Gaines (1933-2019), whose career really took off with his fourth novel, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. A native of Louisiana, Gaines brought to life...
New Letters On the Air Patricia Smith
February 07, 2020 06:00Patricia Smith is the author of seven poetry books and a four-time National Poetry Slam Champion, the most successful poet in the competition's history. In part one of this conversation, she reads from her recent book, Incendiary Art, 2018 winner of an NAACP Image Award and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and discusses the why she chose to write so much about the late Emmett Till, who was killed ...
New Letters On the Air Tyehimba Jess
January 31, 2020 06:00Tyehimba Jess, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry reads from his multi-award winning Olio at the Kansas City Public Library, during his 2019 visit to the Unesco Creative City of Music. The book delves into the voices of African...
New Letters On the Air Glenn North
January 17, 2020 06:00Glenn North, the inaugural Poet Laureate of the 18th and Vine Historic Jazz District, shares passages from his 2015 book City of Song (re-released in 2019 by Spartan Press). Excerpted from the Kansas City Public Library's 2017 program, To Make a Poet Black and Bid Him Sing, the...
New Letters On the Air Russell Banks
January 10, 2020 06:00Acclaimed novelist, retired Princeton professor and mountain climber, Russell Banks discusses his recent memoir, Voyager:Travel Writings. Interviewed by his former student and now fellow novelist, Whitney Terrell, Banks reveals how his childhood traumas played into his relationships in front of an aud...
New Letters On the Air Kathryn Nuernberger
January 03, 2020 06:00Poet and essayist Kathryn Nuernberger, the former editor of Pleiades Press at the University of Central Missouri, now lives and teaches in Minnesota. She discusses how she once shied away from being a "woman writer" and why she now embraces it, as she reads from her 2017 essay collection, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past, and shares p...
New Letters On the Air December Festivals
December 20, 2019 06:00In this special radio anthology, we feature stories and commentary about the December holiday season from our rich archives. The late Rabbi Gerald Kane discusses the origins of Hanukkah, which inspired our recording of the now late Grace Paley, reading her widely anthologized short story, "The Loudest Voice." (Listen to more of our reco...
New Letters On the Air Randall Freisinger
December 13, 2019 06:00A decades-long resident of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Randall Freisinger gives insight into the often wintery world of his surroundings. Now retired from teaching, he shares poetry from his 2019 book, Windthrow and Salvage, which contains the 2007 ...
New Letters On the Air Bojan Louis
November 29, 2019 06:00A member of the Navajo Nation, Bojan Louis is a poet, fiction writer, essayist and author of the 2018 American Book Award-winning poetry collection Currents, published by BkMk press. Louis, who worked for years as an electrician and formerly served as poetry editor for RED INK: An International Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts, and Humanities, discusses how his previous career and the culture and environment of the N...
New Letters On the Air Stewart O'Nan
November 22, 2019 06:00Though he's now the author of 17 novels and served as editor for The Vietnam Reader of Fiction and Nonfiction on the War, Stewart O'Nan didn't begin his career as a writer. He started out as a half-hearted engineer until advice from his wife led him writing books as varied as the best-selling novel, ...
New Letters On the Air Alan Proctor
November 08, 2019 06:00Alan Proctor's book, The Sweden File: Memoir of an American Ex-Patriate, was named one of the best memoirs in 2015 by The Kansas City Star. Released in its second edition in 2019 by Open Books Press, the memoir is made up of collected letters and essays from and about his late brother, Bruce Stevens Proctor. He talks about Bruce's life as a Pentagon insider who became an American deserter, and ...
New Letters On the Air Laura Kasischke
November 01, 2019 05:00National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Laura Kasischke discusses her journey to writing fiction. Now the author of ten novels, three of which have been made into films, she reads from her Independent Publisher Book Award-winning short story collection, If a Stranger Approaches You. Kasischke also talks some about her friendship with fellow fiction writer Antony...
New Letters On the Air Xánath Caraza
October 11, 2019 05:00The second part of our interview with poet Xánath Caraza features her two books that won second place in the 2019 International Latino Book Awards: her short story collection, Metztli, and her bilingual poetry book, Hudson, that reflects the famous river in New York. While in front of an audience at the Johnson C...
New Letters On the Air Mia Leonin and Gustavo Adolfo Aybar
October 04, 2019 05:00In this public reading at The Writer's Place in Kansas City, poets Mia Leonin and Gustavo Adolfo Aybar celebrate Hispanic island cultures. Aybar, a native of the Dominican Republic, is a Cave Canem Fellow who shares poems from his 2017 debut collection, We Seek Asylum, winner of Willow Books Literature Awards Grand Prize. Leonin, who has explored her Cuban-American heritage in her memoir ...
New Letters On the Air Sergio Troncoso
September 27, 2019 05:00Sergio Troncoso, whose recent essay appears in the 2019, Vol. 85 No. 4 issue of New Letters magazine, talks about his journey from the small border town of Ysleta to his education at Harvard and eventually Yale, where he now teaches. His collection Crossing Borders:...
New Letters On the Air Xánath Caraza
September 20, 2019 05:00Poet Xánath Caraza is a two-time International Latino Book Award-winner in 2018. In part one of this interview on stage at the Johnson County Arts and Heritage Center, she describes her approach to her creative writing, which often begins in Spanish, and talks about her partnership with literary translator, Sandra Kingery. She reads from her award-winning bilingual book, Sin Preambulos/Without Preamble...
New Letters On the Air Jo McDougall
September 13, 2019 05:00Named the Poet Laureate of Arkansas in 2018, Jo McDougall discusses her two recent books of poetry—The Undiscovered Room and In the Home of the Famous Dead—which explore various aspects of rural life, revealing the influence of the south and the midwest on her work. She also shares sto...
New Letters On the Air Kansas Poets Laureate
September 06, 2019 05:00The second half of this reading by former Kansas Poets Laureate begins with Wyatt Townley (2013-15), who introduces the Kansas Poet Laureate she followed, Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg (2009-13). Caryn reads from her poetry collection about yoga, as well as her prize-winning book, Chasing Weather. Denise Low (2...
New Letters On the Air Kansas Poets Laureate
August 30, 2019 05:00In part one of this program, former Kansas Poets Laureate, Kevin Rabas, Eric McHenry, and Wyatt Townley share their works, new and old, in a presentation sponsored by the Kansas Area Watershed Council at the U...
New Letters On the Air Dana Gioia
August 23, 2019 05:00In his book, Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, poet and critic Dana Gioia ponders the future of poetry at a time when traditional outlets for poetry are disappearing. Gioia, who was named California Poet Laureate in 2015, also reads from his 2001 collection of poems, ...