It's been a difficult year for many people. NPR's Elissa Nadworny talks with poet Danez Smith about using poetry to understand and process complex emotions like grief. As the year comes to an end, we ...

Every poem is deeply personal. The emotions are so real that you feel as though you were there with the author. You feel her ...

It happened before she expected it: Victoria Chang’s parents were struck by illness. First her father was severely debilitated by a stroke; then her mother died. She felt so isolated by caregiving ...

April is National Poetry Month. In the midst of a pandemic, this year’s celebrations have either been suspended, or the organizers have become more creative in their planning. Where most towns across ...

In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the ...

In 1991, following the sudden death of his first wife, Susan, Mike Bernhardt began writing poetry as a way to deal with his grief. In the poem “Sunday,” he writes, “Together, we survived the ...

In 2016, Jos Charles began writing a long poem called "a Year," which is broken up into sections by month. "Months allow one to consider time in discrete chunks while at the same time being very silly ...

Grief is a funny thing and can affect people in weird and uncomfortable ways. No one knows that more than Liz Newman, a poet and native of Amherst. Newman lost her father, Steve Cooksey, in January ...

The idea for my book, The Last Poem, started while I was listening. At an event hosted for me in New York, people had gathered for a casual afternoon, less sit-down, more mingle. Small clusters of ...

It happened before she expected it: Victoria Chang’s parents were struck by illness. First her father was severely debilitated by a stroke; then her mother died. She felt so isolated by caregiving ...