photo by Curt Richter Gore Vidal has been one of America's most distinct voices for more than half a century. The author of more than 20 novels, hundreds of essays, and several plays for screen and stage, Vidal is perhaps best known for the eloquent and witheringly sarcastic political commentary that has made him a darling of the American left. With dependably erudite attacks on right-wing figures, this quixotic scion of a privileged political family, friend of the Kennedys and playwright Tennessee Williams, has staked out a unique position in American political and intellectual life.

This recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar consists of an hourlong conversation between Vidal and Jay Parini, his literary executor, a poet, biographer, and critic. Vidal discusses the influences on his work as a historical novelist, his views on the American educational system, and his admiration for figures including Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. George W. Bush, then serving his final week in office, is the target of particular scorn, as Vidal levels a litany of complaints accusing his administration of "shredding" the Bill of Rights and striving "to make lying the national pastime." In a question-and-answer session,Vidal discusses efforts to bring Tennessee Williams's final play to the public, as well as his feelings on disgraced financier Bernard Madoff and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(59:09) / 27.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Gore Vidal and Jay Parini. Used with generous permission from Gore Vidal and Jay Parini.

Photo by Nick Vagnoni Andrea Barrett's acclaimed novels and short-stories are marked by their investigation of scientific and historical themes. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Barrett explains how she began to write about science and history in the short story form after the disappointment of writing four unsuccessful novels. "With nothing to lose," Barrett recounts, "I began to write about the thing that I actually loved the most, but had never dared to write fiction about before." She follows this account with an excerpt from "Ship Fever," the title novella of her National Book Award-winning first collection of short stories. In it, Lockland Grant, a bright young doctor who has come to the island of Gros Île in 1847 to treat the population of newly landed Irish immigrants, has fallen victim to the typhus epidemic raging through the community.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(11:13) / 5.2 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Andrea Barrett. Used with generous permission from Andrea Barrett.

photo by Curt Richter William Kennedy is best known for the novels of his Albany Cycle. A singular epic of that capital city and its Irish-American clans in the 19th and 20th centuries, the work has earned Kennedy comparisons to James Joyce and Saul Bellow. Among its novels are Billy Phelan's Greatest Game (1979), The Flaming Corsage (1996), and Ironweed (1983), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a PEN/Faulkner Award, and was chosen by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.

In this audio recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Kennedy reads two unpublished pieces. The presentation begins with a brief (5:30) essay recounting Kennedy's first short story, "Eggs," and the lukewarm reaction it garnered from his friends and family. This is followed by a reading from the opening chapter of Kennedy's unnamed novel-in-progress. A continuation of the Albany Cycle, this forthcoming novel focuses on Daniel Quinn, a reporter for the Albany Times Union and the grandson of the Daniel Quinn from Kennedy's Quinn's Book.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(29:27) / 13.5 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 William Kennedy. Used with generous permission from William Kennedy.

Photo by Nick Vagnoni Valerie Martin is the author of three collections of short fiction, including The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories; several novels, including Tresspass and Mary Reilly, which was made into a movie with Julia Roberts and John Malkovich; and a nonfiction work about St. Francis of Assisi.

In this recording from the 27th Key West Literary Seminar, Martin reads from her Orange Prize-winning historical novel, Property. Set on a plantation outside New Orleans in 1828, Property is narrated by Manon Gaudet, a slaveowner whose husband has fathered two children with one of Manon's slaves. In the passage presented here, Manon meets with her brother-in-law following an insurrection in which Manon has been shot in the shoulder, the slave has run away, and her husband has been killed.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(13:54) / 6.4 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Valerie Martin. Used with generous permission from Valerie Martin.

photo by Ellen Warner Richard Wilbur is a former United States Poet Laureate and the only writer since Robert Frost to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry twice. In this recording from the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar, Wilbur reads and comments upon numerous poems, translations, lyrics, and light verse spanning his career.

Wilbur begins the reading with two poems, "The Reader" and "Man Running," from the then-unpublished Collected Poems, 1943-2004, and continues with "A Barred Owl," "For Charlee," Valeri Petrov's "A Cry from Childhood," and "This Pleasing Anxious Being," all from Mayflies. From 1989's New and Collected Poems, Wilbur chooses "The Ride," "Lying," "On Having Mis-identified a Wild Flower," Vinicius de Moraes's "Song," and "Hamlen Brook"; from The Mind-Reader, he reads "The Writer" and "A Wedding Toast." Wilbur's early collections Ceremony, Things of This World, and Advice to a Prophet are represented by "Museum Piece," "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World," "Two Voices in a Meadow," and "Pangloss's Song: A Comic-Opera Lyric," written for the 1956 musical version of Voltaire's Candide, which Wilbur collaborated on with Lillian Hellman and Leonard Bernstein. Wilbur's reading concludes with several humorous poems, including "A Late Aubade," the two-part "Flippancies" (including "The Star System" and "What's Good for the Soul Is Good for Sales"), "To His Skeleton," "The Prisoner of Zenda," and several verses from his book for children, The Disappearing Alphabet.

Wilbur's hourlong reading was given in memory of John Malcolm Brinnin, an influential early KWLS organizer. In a brief (1:26) introduction, program chair Irving Weinman discusses Brinnin and the regular game of Anagrams he played with Brinnin and Wilbur.

Wilbur joins us again in January 2010 as our guest of honor for Clearing the Sill of the World.

From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes
(1:03:12) / 29.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2009 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.

photo by Michael Blades


Tesla's drawing for the AC dynamo;
U.S. patent 390,721 Samantha Hunt is the author of The Invention of Everything Else, which has been shortlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize for Fiction. In this recording from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Hunt discusses the subject of her historical novel, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla, whose revolutionary inventions included alternating current and wireless technology. Briefly employed by Thomas Edison, Tesla routinely found himself on the wrong side of American capitalism and died impoverished and marginalized. In Hunt's passage, Tesla recounts his initial meeting with the financially-driven American inventor who sought to keep Tesla's inventions from reaching the public.

"'Capitalism! Ever heard of it?'
'Yes, I have,' I said. 'I've heard of it. I'm not certain I agree.'
"There's nothing wrong with capitalism,' he told me."
'Except that in order to sell something, a person must first own it, and how can a person own these things that we are inventing? How could I own alternating current? That's like owning thunder or lightning.'
'Men own thunder all the time. That's how America works. And please, I've heard enough about your alternating current. ... AC is dangerous, and more importantly'– Edison drove his finger once directly into the center of my chest– 'my light bulbs don't work on it.'"

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(14:05) / 6.6 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Samantha Hunt. Used with generous permission from Samantha Hunt.

photo by Nick Vagnoni David Levering Lewis's two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize, is the definitive work on the life and thought of a complex American intellectual. In this lecture from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Lewis examines Du Bois's largely-forgotten work as a writer of historical fiction, whose journey "beyond the borders of social science certitude" was the result of a "poetic temperament combined with an intellectual's dissatisfaction about the limits of the historically knowable." Lewis discusses Du Bois's early historical novels, The Quest of the Silver Fleece and Dark Princess; as well as the later Black Flame Trilogy (The Ordeal of Mansart, Mansart Builds a School, and Worlds of Color). In a brief question and answer session, Lewis comments on Du Bois's persecution at the hands of the U.S. government during the 1950s, his reputation as a "ladies' man," and his early life and education in Great Barrington, MA.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(25:35) / 11.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 David Levering Lewis. Used with generous permission from David Levering Lewis.

photo by Nick Vagnoni Eric Foner is one of America's preeminent historians, especially known for his work on the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction. In this fascinating lecture from the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Foner explores the social and political implications of historical inquiry, and the role of the imagination in the historian's work. Drawing on sources as diverse as Jane Austen, Friedrich Nietszche, Newt Gingrich, and Diane Feinstein, Foner says society's understanding of history is both reflected in and shaped by contemporary thought. Rebutting a popular claim regarding "facts" in the historical record, Foner argues that "the constant search for new perspectives [is] the lifeblood of historical understanding."

“The line between historical scholarship and historical fiction is not as hard and fast as we sometimes might think. ... Every novel is an expression of the sensibility of the novelist; and, as E.H. Carr wrote, 'to study history, study the historian.' The reason historical interpretations change is that historians change, as does the world around them.”

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth
(38:44) / 17.8 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Eric Foner. Used with generous permission from Eric Foner.

Bishop photo by Rollie McKenna
Wilbur photo by Stathis Orphanos The 1993 Key West Literary Seminar was devoted entirely to Elizabeth Bishop. A series of readings-in-tribute offered her fellow poets the opportunity to discuss Bishop and her influence.

In this recording from the event, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur reads Bishop's "Little Exercise." Originally published in her debut 1946 collection North and South, the poem ostensibly describes a thunderstorm "roaming the sky" over the mangrove islands, palm-lined boulevard, herons, and sleeping indigents characteristic of Key West, a place each poet called home. Wilbur also reads his translation of "Song," by Vinícius de Moraes, the Brazilian poet and Bossa Nova pioneer who co-wrote many of João Gilberto's hits. Bishop herself translated de Moraes, and included his work in her landmark Anthology of Twentieth-Century Brazilian Poetry, along with poems by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Manuel Bandeira and others in translations by North American poets including Wilbur, Paul Blackburn and Mark Strand. Wilbur discusses he and Bishop's shared affinity for Edgar Allan Poe and their fascination with "stages and half-stages of the mind," and concludes by reading a selection of his own poems which he says were inspired, influenced, or enjoyed by Bishop, including "A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra" and "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World" from his 1956 collection Things of This World; and "In Limbo," from his 1976 The Mind-Reader.

Wilbur returns to KWLS in 2010 as our guest of honor for Clearing the Sill of the World.

From KWLS 1993: The Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
(18:22) / 8.4 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 1993, 2009 Richard Wilbur. Used with generous permission from Richard Wilbur.

photo by Curt Richter Billy Collins served two terms as United States Poet Laureate and founded Poetry 180, a teaching aid for high school students based on the belief that "poems can inspire and make us think about what it means to be a member of the human race." Collins has joined us for the Seminar nearly every year since he left the Library of Congress office, and is an annual favorite of the students who join us from Key West High School.

This recording was made in January of 2003, during Collins's second term as Laureate. He reads a selection of poems, including "Shoveling Snow With Buddha," "Monday," "Flock," "Creatures," "The Lanyard," "The Country," "Surprise," "No Time," "Love," "Sonnet," "Japan," "Forgetfulness," "Consolation," "On Turning Ten," and "Nightclub."

Collins will join us again in 2010 for Clearing the Sill of the World.

(30:31) / 14 MB

To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2009 Billy Collins. Used with generous permission from Billy Collins.

Here's a recording of Allan Gurganus delivering a laugh-out-loud lecture titled "A Still Small Voice Under the Cannonade: Field Notes towards Fiction's Pact with History," during the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar. We'll amend this post with complete liner notes after the Seminar.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(42:31) / 38.9 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Allan Gurganus. Used with generous permission from Allan Gurganus.

Here's a recording of Geraldine Brooks reading from March, during the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar. We'll amend this post with complete liner notes after the Seminar.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(20:14) / 18.5 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Geraldine Brooks. Used with generous permission from Geraldine Brooks.

Barry Unsworth is the author of 16 published novels, including the Booker Prize-winning Sacred Hunger, and his newest, Land of Marvels, which The Washington Post has called "immensely intelligent and entertaining."

In this recording from the first session of the 2009 Key West Literary Seminar, Unsworth reads a passage from Land of Marvels, concerning Somerville, the British archelogist whose work on an ancient Assyrian site is threatened by a railroad being constructed by a German company, and Jehar, the financially-motivated Arab he pays to report on the railway's progress.

From KWLS 2009: Historical Fiction and the Search for Truth.
(20:01) / 18.3 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2009 Barry Unsworth. Used with generous permission from Barry Unsworth.

We will soon begin to release audio recordings from our 1993 Seminar devoted to poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). The event was organized by John Malcolm Brinnin, a friend of Bishop's since the 1940s, and brought together many of Bishop's intimates for a weekend of informal tribute. In many ways, it anticipated the field of Bishop scholarship as we know it today.

At the time, Bishop's extra-literary life was largely unknown to the public; her private letters and unpublished works were still private and unpublished, and the experiences revealed by biographies and oral histories were mainly known to those she shared them with. Brinnin recognized a beginning flood of interest in Bishop, writing in an invitation to Octavio Paz of "the slow but sure rise of Elizabeth's reputation, from the devoted attention of an elite to the acclaim of an ever-broadening audience." He ended up orchestrating an event that offered a richer, deeper, more fully-known Bishop than ever before.

Among those Brinnin gathered in Key West was Robert Giroux, Bishop's longtime editor and publisher, whose reading from her letters (a selection of which he published the following year as One Art) was likely the first public presentation of this important material. Bishop's close friend and fellow poet James Merrill also took part. He read a selection of her poems along with the poems they inspired him to write, linking the pairs with private anecdotes that reveal and offer insight into each poet's creative process. Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel Prize winner whom Bishop translated into English, joined Richard Wilbur and Ashley Brown, who had translated portions of Bishop's anthology of 20th-century Brazilian poets. Alice Quinn, editor of the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box (the "uncollected" Bishop poems) was here with Alice Helen Methfessel, Bishop's companion in her last years and the executor who has made possible so much of what we now know of Bishop. In addition to the readings and discussions, Bishop's watercolors (loaned by Methfessel) were exhibited to the public for the first time. The collection, curated by William Benton and later documented in his book Exchanging Hats, presents a folk-art version of the Key West Bishop knew and loved in the 1930s and 1940s. Finally, in a ceremony coordinated by the Friends of the Library USA, her former home at 624 White Street was added to the national register of Literary Landmarks.

Our audio engineers at Private Ear Recording Studios have remastered the original recordings from nine cassettes and converted them into digital .wav files for our use. We're now in the editing process– listening to the recordings, selecting the material that will be of most use to readers, fans, and scholars, and securing permissions from various copyright holders. The production of these recordings for the web has been a particular goal of our audio archives project. We look forward to sharing them with you here soon.

We're delighted to note that our partners at PennSound have added three more recordings from the KWLS archives. Our 2003 recordings by C.D. Wright and Forrest Gander, and a 2008 recording by Maggie Nelson, all recently posted here at home, are now also part of PennSound's estimable collection.

For years, PennSound has been the best place to go for free, downloadable poetry readings by many of the 20th century's most original poets. We're grateful for the opportunity to work with the good people at PennSound and for the chance to reach their listener-readers. Check out their author index here, where you'll find rare readings by William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Koch, Michael Palmer, and others.

Mark Doty is the author of eight books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose. He has received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and his Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems is nominated for the 2008 National Book Award in poetry. In this recording from our 2008 Seminar, Doty reads a selection of work inspired by a visit to Key West in 1997, including a section from his 2007 memoir Dog Years, and the poems "Sea Grape Valentine," "Watermelon Soda," and "Catalina Macaw."

       from "Watermelon Soda"

       Strange island,
       to yield a walking
       hot-pink soda can
       inhabited by a lucky
       Modernist crab,
       carrying on his back
       a tropic shelter
       by Barragan
       or Corbusier,
       perennially modish
       if not quite practical...

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (11:19) / 5.2 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Mark Doty. Used with generous permission from Mark Doty.

Forrest Gander is the author of several collections of poetry, essays, and the novel As a Friend, published by New Directions in 2008. He has translated the works of several Latin American poets including Coral Bracho and Pura Lopez-Colome, and is the editor and co-translator with Kent Johnson of two books by Bolivian poet Jaime Sáenz. In this recording from 2003, Gander reads a selection from his body of work, including an early version of "Present Tense" (its first public reading); a translation of Sáenz's "Someone Must Be Called Twilight"; and, from the collections Science & Steepleflower and Torn Awake, "To Live Without Solace" and "To The Reader."

From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (19:59) / 9.2 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2008 Forrest Gander. Used with generous permission from Forrest Gander.

C.D. Wright is the author of numerous collections of poetry and prose, including Cooling Time: An American Poetry Vigil (2005). She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (twice), the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Bunting Institute, as well as Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. In this audio recording from 2003, Wright reads from One Big Self (2003), her collaboration with photographer Deborah Luster, which portrayed inmates at three Louisiana prisons.

In the old days they would have sent you to America
The one called Grasshopper raises wild things
sparrows     hares     you name it
They've got a muleskinner here that can make one sit down and talk
Then there's the wren nesting in the razor wire

From KWLS 2003: The Beautiful Changes. (15:54) / 7.3 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2003, 2008 C.D. Wright. Used with generous permission from C.D. Wright.

Ann Beattie is the Edgar Allan Poe Chair of the University of Virginia's Department of English and Creative Writing. A short story writer and a novelist, she has received critical acclaim for her body of work and has been called "one of our era's most vital masters of the short form" by The Washington Post. In this recording from 2008, Beattie reads from a virtuosic essay-in-progress on the subject of ambient sound in works of literature. Beginning with accounts of poet John Ashbery's "managed chance" method of composing, the noises of drunken Parrotheads in Key West, and a discussion of clichés "whose repetition deadens language," Beattie arrives at a luxuriant analysis of technique in the fiction of James Joyce ("The Dead"), Raymond Carver ("Are These Actual Miles?"), and Richard Yates ("The Best of Everything").

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (31:42) / 14.5 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Ann Beattie. Used with generous permission from Ann Beattie.

Maggie Nelson reads two long poems, "The Mute Story of November" and "The Halo Over the Hospital," from her book Something Bright, Then Holes (Soft Skull Press, 2007). In a brief introduction, Nelson gives credit for the title of her book to Annie Dillard, whose essay "Seeing" refers to Marius van Senden's 1932 Space and Sight, about previously blind persons returned to sight.

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (15:10) / 6.9 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Maggie Nelson. Used with generous permission from Maggie Nelson.

This 2008 reading features poet Kevin Young reading a selection of then-recent work, including "Aunties," "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," "Black Cat Blues," "Hang Dog Blues," "Flash Flood Blues," "Ode To The Hotel Near The Children's Hospital," "Farm Team," "I Walk The Line (for Johhny Cash)," "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere," and four odes to food, including "To Chicken," "To Homemade Wine," "To Catfish," and "To Boudin."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (21:51) / 10 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Kevin Young. Used with generous permission from Kevin Young.

We are proud to announce a collaboration with PennSound, the digital poetry archive project at the University of Pennsylvania. PennSound, founded by Charles Bernstein and Al Filreis as part of UPenn's center for contemporary writing, maintains perhaps the finest collection of audio recordings by 20th century poets on the web. Among the more than 1,500 recordings on their site are such rarities as Jack Spicer's 1956 Vancouver lectures; a 1967 recording of George Oppen reading his masterpiece "Of Being Numerous" in its entirety; James Schuyler reading "Hymn to Life" from the Chelsea Hotel in 1986; several recordings of Gertrude Stein in the 1930s; and major collections of readings by Robert Creeley and John Ashbery. We've been working with managing editor Michael S. Hennessey for the past month developing PennSound's KWLS page, which debuts with KWLS readings by John Ashbery, Meghan O'Rourke, James Tate, and Charles Simic. You can read Hennessey's blog post announcing the page here. You'll find the complete list of PennSound recordings, indexed by author, here. And you can read the PennSound manifesto here. Many thanks to Hennessey and all the good people at PennSound for their work in making KWLS recordings part of this important online collection.

Meghan O'Rourke is a poetry editor at The Paris Review, and a culture critic and advisory editor at Slate. This recording from our 2008 Seminar captures O'Rourke's crisp and elegant reading of several poems from her first collection, Halflife (2007), including "Peep-Show," "Sleep," "Descent," "Spectacular," "Inventing a Horse," "Halflife," "Troy," and "Hunt;" and two newer poems, "Ariadne" and "Grief."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (15:44) / 7.2 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Meghan O'Rourke. Used with generous permission from Meghan O'Rourke.

Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Díaz reads "Boyfriend," a short story from his 1997 collection, Drown.

I should've been careful with the weed. Most people it just fucks up. Me, it makes me sleepwalk. And wouldn't you know I woke up in the hallway of our building feeling my head had been been stepped on by my high school marching band. My ass would've been there all night if the folks in the apartment below hadn't been having themselves a big old fight at three in the morning. I was too fried to move, at least right away. Boyfriend was trying to snake girlfriend, saying he needed space, and she was like, "Motherfucker, I will give you all the space you need."

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (9:14) / 4.23 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Junot Díaz. Used with generous permission from Junot Díaz.

Uzodinma Iweala reads from his critically acclaimed debut novel Beasts of No Nation, which tells the story of Agu, a child soldier fighting in a civil war in an unnamed west African country. In this section we are introduced to Agu, his friend Strika, Luftenant, and Commandante, as Agu kills for the first time.

Luftenant is saying don't think. Just let it happen. He is saying that the second you are stopping to think about it, your head is turning to the inside of rotten fruit. Commandante is saying it is like falling in love. You cannot be thinking about it. You are just having to do it, he is saying, and I am believing him. What else can I be doing?

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (17:42) / 8.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Uzodinma Iweala. Used with generous permission from Uzodinma Iweala.

Kristen-Paige Madonia was the recipient of our inaugural Marianne Russo Scholarship, and will be a Writer in Residence at The Studios of Key West this October. In this recording from 2008, she reads her short story, "Cheap Red Meat," originally published in Pearl.

Every other Tuesday I buy groceries from the woman my husband is sleeping with. This is a new thing– knowing that he's doing the grocery checkout girl. But every week I cut along the printed dotted lines of the coupon advertisements, and paper-clip them to my shopping list on Tuesday, because Tuesday is the big red meat sale at Stuff Your Sack.

From KWLS 2008: New Voices. (11:40) / 5.1 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose 'save as'
This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Kristen-Paige Madonia. Used with generous permission from Kristen-Paige Madonia.

Hannah Pittard reads "The Year Helen Turned Forty-One," at the 2008 Key West Literary Seminar: New Voices. It begins:

The year Helen turned forty-one, she developed bronchitis and fell in love. He was tan, wore shorts in the winter, and had fantastically large calves. He rode a bicycle to which he attached his few possessions by way of a plastic grocery bag, and looked about ten years older than Helen. He was devastatingly aloof.
(14:40) / 22 MB


To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose save as:

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Hannah Pittard.

Novelist Francisco Goldman talks about José Martí, a seminal figure in the birth of the Cuban nation. The talk focuses on Martí's years in exile in New York (1878-1895), where he worked as a journalist, and later organized and raised funds for the revolutionary force which would eventually overthrow the Spanish. Goldman's informative history is followed by a reading of several excerpts from Martí's prose, including a piece about the 1884 presidential campaign between James G. Blaine and Grover Cleveland, in which Martí makes the following ever-timely remarks:

It's hard and nauseating, a presidential campaign in the United States. The mud comes up to the chairs. ... They lie and exaggerate knowingly. They stab each other in the belly and in the back. Every defamation is treated as legitimate. Every blow is good, as long as it staggers the enemy. He who invents an effective slander can strut proudly. An observer of good faith has no idea how to analyze a battle in which everyone considers it legitimate to campaign in bad faith.

Goldman also reads from Martí's "New York Under the Snow," about the great blizzard of 1888, "Tributes to Karl Marx, Who Has Died," and a description of the beach at Coney Island containing the memorable line "this immense valve of pleasure open to an immense people."

From the 2004 Key West Literary Seminar: Crossing Borders: The Immigrant Voice in American Literature. This lecture was given in the auditorium of the San Carlos Institute, which served as Martí's operational base in Key West, and which each January hosts all KWLS readings, discussions, and lectures. Goldman will be joining us again in 2009, when we turn to Historical Fiction and The Search for Truth. His novel The Divine Husband (2004) is an account of the love affair between Martí and María de las Nieves, famous throughout Latin America as "La niña de Guatemala, La que se murió de amor" (the girl from guatemala, she who died from love).
(48:20) / 22 MB



To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose save as:

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Francisco Goldman.

In response to a panel discussion titled Poets and Their Work: Poetry as Its Own Biography (personal I vs. poetic eye), John Ashbery delivers a "mini-lecture" on so-called confessional poetry and the work of Elizabeth Bishop. At the conclusion of the lecture, Ashbery reads his "Soonest Mended" (1966), from The Double Dream of Spring, inspired, he tells us, by Bishop's "Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance."
This is the (unpublished) lecture cited in Eugene Richie's introduction to Ashbery's Selected Prose. An excerpt:

It's only when I feel compelled to write poetry that is all of a piece, that I feel uncomfortable. Poetry bloweth where it listeth. It should never be thought of as a practical solution to life's mess. Its value is in its total uselessness. It's the roses we are always being urged to stop and smell.

Elizabeth Bishop is a poet in whom the two kinds of I/eye are fully, and beautifully, fused. We do not read her to discover the details of her biography, yet I feel that we end up knowing her— and I feel it all the more intensely in Key West, every time I walk past that little house, tucked behind the pandanus bush— better than many poets who set out to inform us about the particulars of their lives.

(12:04) / 5.4 MB



To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose save as:

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 John Ashbery.

Current U.S. Poet Laureate Charles Simic reads and comments upon his poems "White Room," "Mirrors at 4 a.m.," and "The Friends of Heraclitus." From the 2003 Key West Literary Seminar.

(7:32) / 3.5 MB To download, right-click here (Mac users: ctrl+click) and choose save as:

This recording is being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to the author. © 2008 Charles Simic. Used with generous permission from Charles Simic.