April 20, 2012 - The 2012 winner of the Laurence O'Shaughnessy prize for Irish poetry is Gerard Smyth. The prize is given annually by the Center for Irish Studies at the University of St. Thomas. Smyth is visiting the St. Thomas campus and stopped by MPR's studios. He shares a poem from his collection “The Fullness of Time” - and it includes a nod to Minnesota's own Robert Bly.
May 14, 2012 - MPR’s Euan Kerr profiles Twin Cities native Maya Washington, who uses a short film she created about a deaf performance poet to challenge elementary school students to think about - and perform poetry.
May 25, 2012 - Essayist Peter Smith shares a poem on mowing the lawn. It captures the essence of the eternal struggle of adults getting kids to actually do the task.
August 1, 2012 - For the 5th anniversary of the 35W bridge collapse, Minnesota poet laureate Joyce Sutphen reads her poem "Someone Just Like You."
March 8, 2013 - On this MPR News Presents program, Minnesota author Louise Erdrich speaks at Concordia University in St. Paul about her National Book Award-winning book, "The Round House," and her love of writing. Erdrich also reads from the book.
September 22, 2014 - Poetry has long fascinated former Star Tribune editorial board member Jim Lenfestey, both as a reader and a writer. Back in 1970 a bookseller gave him a collection of poems by Han Shan, or Cold Mountain, a Chinese poet who lived 1400 years ago.
August 21, 2015 - A tiny publisher in Duluth has released an anthology of poetry about Minnesota's biggest lake, titled “Amethyst and Agate: Poems of Lake Superior.” The collection from Holy Cow! Press celebrates the many moods of Lake Superior, and the powerful connection it has to the people who live near its vast shoreline.
November 6, 2015 - MPR’s Marianne Combs profiles a group of six Black women Minnesota writers Carolyn Holbrook, Lori Young-Williams, Andrea Jenkins, Shannon Gibney, Tish Jones, and Mary Moore Easter. They gathered at the The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis for a reading series called “More Than a Single Story.”
May 4, 2016 - A dozen years before the beginning of the Second World War, the Nazis began what would become the unparalleled slaughter of Europe’s “undesirables,” most of whom were Jews. Millions would die, but there were survivors as well, each with a unique story. Classical MPR’s Mindy Ratner has gathered a collection of conversations with some of those touched directly by the Holocaust and those conversations form the basis of Kaddish: Reflections on the Holocaust in Music and Words.
July 14, 2016 - People in our community are expressing their feelings about the death of Philando Castile in many ways. 15 local poets gathered at the Penumbra Theater in St. Paul for a community reading. It was part of Black Poets Speak Out, a poetry-driven protest that began after the death of Michael Brown in 2014.