Harriet: News & Community

Write Obama's inaugural poem? No pressure...really.  When poet Elizabeth Alexander was tapped for the task, she asked herself a simple question before entering action mode: How can a poet, someone who...

When tensions between Asian-American and African-American students at South Philly High erupted in violence last year,  professor and spoken word poet Michelle Myers initiated dialogue the best way she knew...

Well do we remember agèd Mrs. Houlihan, lioness of the third grade, who demanded we learn poems by heart and recite them for her pleasure. Now it turns out such...

A dishy ditty by John Milton has appeared in the archives at Oxford University. "An Extempore Upon a Faggot" "appears to have been signed by Milton but is written in a...

Poetry in Person: Twenty-five Years of Conversations with America's Poets, edited by Alexander Neubauer, was noted as a Chicago Tribune editor's pick. Here's why the collection of interviews is Tribune...

The Dylan Thomas prize is awarded annually to a writer under 30 in honor of the Welsh poet of the same name. This year, five out of six slots on...

Ten, a new anthology that reflects the multicultural makeup of contemporary British poets, counts for more than its outstanding verse, writes Lara Pawson in the Guardian: One of the reasons...

Before you see Franco's Ginsberg, remember Ginsberg's "Howl." In interview posted in our articles section, poet D.A. Powell speaks with Howl directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. They discuss how the...

So says Joseph Goosey of Mairéad Byrne's The Best Of (What’s Left Of) Heaven, a smelly potpourri of poems. Byrne's work is distinguished by the way she experiments with space,...

Themes of age and youth link up in Seamus Heaney's latest collection, Human Chain, writes Troy Jollimore in the Washington Post. The book is elegiac and yet fresh, marked by...