CLEVELAND, Miss. -- Natasha Trethewey smashes stereotypes about poets. She's not stuffy. Or shy. Or aloof. As U.S. poet laureate, the 46-year-old des...

This summer, I found myself re-reading Alice Walker's The Color Purple, a book that is both wonderful and awful. After finishing, I asked myself, "Why do some books by great authors (or parts of books by great authors) work so well, while others fail?"

One of the nation's youngest Poet Laureates and the first Southerner to receive that award since 1986, Natasha Trethewey's work marries "the ghost of history" with emotive poetry.

WASHINGTON — A poet-historian representing a younger generation of writers will soon take office on Capitol Hill, overlooking the politicians, i...

Facing an unprecedented wave of censorship, Tucson has unabashedly staked out its claim as ground zero in the defense of poetry and literary arts.

One of the most innovative poets and authors over the last 25 years, Tafolla's genre-bending bilingual verse from San Antonio's West Side barrio has given voice to several cherished volumes of poetry and stories.

Most of us who create art dwell in the gap between what we know and don't know. All I need to know, I've learned by being a poet: keep my broken heart open, don't harden over what's too hard to feel, create what's ready, and persevere. It's my practice.

The truth about American poetry is that it is in very bad shape. The professional poetry establishment has taken care to mark serious criticism comin...

The U.S. Poet Laureate is "the nation's official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans" - that is, according to the Library of Congress, which each year selects the holder of the position. What does that description mean?

In 1991 a Los Angeles Times editor assigned me to write an appreciation of "What Work Is" by Philip Levine. Now Levine has been appointed poet laureate by the Library of Congress, and suddenly everybody is writing about him.

NEW YORK -- The country wants to know more about its next poet-in-chief. Sales have jumped for books by Philip Levine, a Pulitzer Prize winner who on...

Narrative Magazine: W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate of the United States, has been writing his widely read poems for five decades. Throughout his poetry r...

More on Merwin The Poetry Foundation As we reported below, William Stanley Merwin has been named the 17th US poet laureate, succeeding Kay Ryan at th...

WASHINGTON — A writer who stopped using punctuation in the 1960s and spent much of the last 30 years secluded in Hawaii will become the nation's...

Treasure Island ends with several pirates still marooned on the island, Long John Silver survives, and most of the loot remains in situ. In Return to...

LONDON — O Beckham, where art thou? David Beckham has become an unlikely muse to Britain's poet laureate, who has written a verse about the soc...

Former state poet laureate Lucille Clifton, a National Book Award winner whose work was lauded for its "moral quality," died Saturday at Johns Hopkins...

I'm sure I'd leafed through The Children's First Book of Poetry when I was a child, but it was more the memory of my mother reciting any number of poems that I cherished.