Richard Powers’ characters are often both artists and scientists—disciplines he sees as intertwined. In a delicious moment in this March 2008 reading, he describes the commonality between art and ...

In this new episode of SAL/on air, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, and Jim Rainey, an award-winning reporter with the Los Angeles Times, spoke with hometown hero Timothy Egan ...

In this episode of SAL/on air, former U. S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove shares poems from Sonata Mulattica. This collection tells the story of George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. Previously a footnote i...

This reading by Adam Zagajewski, recorded in March 2001, was postponed from its original date by the forces of Mother Nature. On February 28, 2001, the Nisqually Earthquake struck. In wry form, Zagaje...

This talk by celebrated novelist Wallace Stegner, recorded in 1990, is really a master class on the intermingling of life and art. With equal measures of charm and critique, Stegner questions the very...

“I live in a space between,” Imbolo Mbue says in this talk.

Maxine Kumin, whom we lost in 2014, once said that, quote, “The garden has to be attended every day, just as the horses have to be tended to. Not just every day, but morning, noon and night. Writing...

As with any condition, until we have language for what we are experiencing, until we can name it, we often feel controlled by it. In January of 2019, Soraya Chemaly renamed and redefined anger for us.

When Barry Lopez died at the age of 75 this past December, we knew we had lost one of the greats. His writings have frequently been compared to those of Henry David Thoreau, as he brought a depth of e...

“Every generation has to reiterate, rewrite what those genres are and what they mean in the vocabulary of the moment. So the elegy is not a set genre, it’s not a set form. We each have to re-w...