New Letters on the Air

Anchee Min

ontheair@newletters.org (New Letters magazine) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:08:11 -0600

Best-selling memoirist and fiction writer, Anchee Min talks about her life in China and America, and how both have shaped her many books, including Red Azalea and Becoming Madame Mao. In this interview, she details some of the human rights abuses she witnessed as a girl during the Cultural Revolution, including cannibalism, patricide, and starvation.

Matt Sax

ontheair@newletters.org (New Letters magazine) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:22:31 -0600

24-year-old actor and playwright Matt Sax talks about his hip-hop musical, Clay. Full of Shakespearian undertones, the play is a coming-of-age story that follows a young man’s journey from a broken home to musical stardom. Sax discusses the play’s origins at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, and how it has evolved on several stages before taking it off-Broadway via the Lincoln Center.

"The Elegy"

ontheair@newletters.org (New Letters magazine) — Wed, 5 Nov 2008 11:57:44 -0600

With a nod to the Day of the Dead, this program looks at the poetic form that honors death--the elegy. It features elegiac poets, Stanley Plumly (author of Now that My Father Lies Down Beside Me) and Patricia Clark (My Father on a Bicycle), who talk about how poetry lifts the lament to the level of celebration. They include readings from favorite elegies and a discussion of what separates them from country music lyrics.

Jack Fuller

ontheair@newletters.org (New Letters magazine) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:03:36 -0500

Former Chicago Tribune president and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing, Jack Fuller discusses the importance of newspapers and the differences in a journalist’s approach to writing to that of a novelist. Fuller, the author of seven novels, talks about his most personal story to date, his 2008 book, Abbeville, that is loosely based on his grandfather’s rise, fall, and rebirth in a small farm town in central Illinois.

Claudia Rankine

ontheair@newletters.org (New Letters magazine) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 11:02:26 -0500

Jamaican-born poet Claudia Rankine’s work “goes directly to the objective of literary writing--to write a book that is deeply interesting despite the expectations that received forms give us,” according to interviewer and New Letters editor Robert Stewart. The two discuss her early collection Plot and her multi-genre book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely that combines prose and poetry with incongruous illustrations.

Mary Jo Bang

ontheair@newletters.org (New Letters magazine) — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 11:20:25 -0500

Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, Mary Jo Bang reads from her prize-winning fifth collection, Elegy, that traces the year following the death of her son. This manuscript was originally chosen to be published as the winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnoia Award from the Poetry Society of America because it cuts "a guiding path for the reader."