The Renunciations: Poems is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended. […]
The National Poetry Series was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry annually through participating publishers. In addition, the National Poetry Series has partnered with Miami Book Fair to award the Paz Prize in Poetry, which ensures bilingual publication for a book […]
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as U.S. poet laureate, celebrates the stories of her ancestors and family as well as the influences that shaped her work in Poet Warrior: A Memoir. She returns to the Miami Book Fair to talk about the memoir and her historic three terms as laureate. Presented in […]
Avni Doshi's Burnt Sugar: A Novel is a story of love and betrayal between a mother and her daughter, who now confronts the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her. It’s a journey into shifting memories and the subjective nature of truth. In Shruti Swamy’s The Archer, a young Indian woman […]
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi is set in a dreamlike alternative reality, where the house inhabited by its namesake protagonist is no ordinary building: Within its infinite labyrinth of halls, an ocean is imprisoned. And as Piranesi explores his dwelling, a terrible truth begins to unravel. Moderated by Madeline Miller, author of Circe.
In A Confederacy of Dumptys: Portraits of American Scoundrels in Verse, actor, author, and illustrator John Lithgow, with cutting humor, offers a rogues’ gallery of American villains, powerful men and women who were corrupt, venal, criminal, adulterous, racist, or just plain disgusting.
In A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance, poet, essayist, and cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib examines how Black performance, from music to dance to schoolyard fistfights, is woven into the fabric of American culture. Moderated by Leonard Pitts Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of The Last Thing You Surrender: […]
In Dream Girl: A Novel, Laura Lippman shares the story of writer Gerry Andersen, injured in a freak fall and confined to a hospital bed in his high-rise apartment. Then late one night, the phone rings – and the caller claims to be the “real” Aubrey, the title character from Andersen's most successful novel, Dream […]
Drawing on both political observations and personal experience as a Black son of the South, New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow heralds a call to action in The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto by which Black people can finally achieve equality, on their own terms. Moderated by writer and podcaster Touré, author […]
Dawn Turner’s memoir Three Girls from Bronzeville: A Uniquely American Memoir of Race, Fate, and Sisterhood is about three Black women – Turner, her younger sister Kim, and her best friend, Debra – friends since childhood. In examining their fates, the author offers an exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the forces that allow […]
Somebody’s Daughter: A Memoir is Ashley C. Ford's powerful debut work, a story of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana battling her body and her environment, within a family fragmented by incarceration. For Celestial and Roy, the couple at the center of Tayari Jones‘ An American Marriage: A Novel, the American dream in […]
Mindfulness doesn’t have to be an individualistic solution to our challenges. In Sit Down to Rise Up: How Radical Self-Care Can Change the World, Shelly Tygielski argues that mindfulness can also be a powerful tool for spurring profound social change by going inward. Moderated by Arianna Huffington, author and founder of The Huffington Post.