Mar 28 2026
Everett Ruess was only twenty years old when he disappeared into the canyon country of southern Utah in 1934, yet the few years he spent wandering through the American West created a legacy that has lasted nearly a century. He traveled largely alone with horses or burros, carried books and art supplies into remote country, …
Mar 27 2026
Born on March 27, 1926, Frank O’Hara helped make the ordinary movement of a day feel worthy of poetry. A lunch break, a telephone call, a movie star glimpsed in a headline, a taxi rushing through Manhattan, a friend encountered unexpectedly, a glass of juice, a painting, a love affair, or a walk through Midtown …
Mar 26 2026
“My music is built in—it’s already natural. I don’t play with the meter.” – Gregory Corso Born on March 26, 1930, Gregory Corso emerged from one of the most chaotic childhoods in modern American literary biography to become a central poet of the Beat Generation. He never followed the expected route into literary life. There …
Mar 25 2026
Some singers perform a song. Aretha Franklin could take possession of one. Lyrics written by somebody else suddenly sounded autobiographical, melodies opened into gospel testimony, and a familiar pop song could emerge from her hands and voice sounding as though it had been waiting for her all along. That extraordinary ability made Franklin far more …
Mar 24 2026
Lawrence Ferlinghetti did more than write poems. He built places where poetry could happen. As a poet, publisher, bookseller, painter, translator, activist, and indefatigable advocate for free expression, he helped transform San Francisco into one of the great literary centers of postwar America. City Lights became simultaneously a bookstore, a publishing house, a gathering place, …
Mar 23 2026
Born on March 23, 1965, in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Gary J. Whitehead has built a poetic career from the things many people pass without examining closely enough: chickens scratching at the ground, insects occupying a house, a dog straining at the end of a leash, workers laying bricks, water rising through a flooded home, an …
Mar 22 2026
A reader can enter a Billy Collins poem through something as ordinary as a dog, a cup of coffee, a book left open on a table, a morning walk, a forgotten name, or the strange little thoughts that surface while doing almost nothing at all. The language usually seems friendly enough. Then, somewhere along the …
Mar 21 2026
Born on March 21, 1923, Nizar Qabbani became one of the most widely read and recognizable poets of the modern Arab world by writing about subjects that were simultaneously universal and deeply controversial: love, desire, women, heartbreak, freedom, political disappointment, war, exile, and the complicated relationship between the individual and society. His poetry often used …
Mar 20 2026
For more than thirty years, Fred Rogers entered a television house, changed from a jacket into a cardigan, traded his dress shoes for sneakers, and spoke directly to children as though each one were the only person in the room. There were no frantic edits, shouted instructions, elaborate special effects, or attempts to compete with …
Mar 19 2026
Born on March 19, 1933, Philip Roth spent more than half a century transforming the anxieties, ambitions, appetites, contradictions, and reinventions of American life into fiction. Newark neighborhoods, Jewish families, sex, marriage, illness, politics, literary ambition, aging, historical upheaval, and the unreliable stories people tell about themselves all became material for a novelist who rarely …
