Get Lit Minute

In this episode, we discuss the life and work of Mahogany L. Browne, a writer, organizer & educator. She is the Executive Director of Bowery Poetry Club & Artistic Director of Urban Word NYC & Poetry Coordinator at St. Francis College. Browne has received fellowships from Agnes Gund, Air Serenbe, Cave Canem, Poets House, Mellon Research & Rauschenberg. She is the author of Woke: A Young Poets Call to Justice, Woke Baby & Black Girl Magic (Macmillan), Kissing Caskets (Yes Yes Books) & Dear Twitter (Penmanship Books). She is also the founder of the Woke Baby Book Fair (a nationwide diversity literature campaign) & as an Arts for Justice grantee, is completing her first book of essays on mass incarceration, investigating its impact on women and children. 

Included in this episode is a reading by Browne herself of "Working Title," written in response to the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson. 

Support the show

Support the show

In this week's episode, we discuss Etheridge Knight and his life and works. Knight was an African-American poet who made his name in 1968 with his debut volume, Poems from Prison. With roots in the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, and the Black Power Movement, Etheridge Knight and other American artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African-American cultural and historical experience.

Excerpt from "Belly Song (for the Daytop Family)"

And I and I / must admit

that the sea in you

 has sung / to the sea / in me

and I and I / must admit

that the sea in me

 has fallen / in love

 with the sea in you

because you have made something

out of the sea

 that nearly swallowed you

And this poem

This poem

This poem / I give / to you.

This poem is a song / I sing / I sing / to you

from the bottom

 of the sea

 in my belly

This poem

This poem

This poem / is a song / about FEELINGS

Support the show at getlit.org

Support the show

Support the show

In this week's episode of the Get Lit Minute, we discuss the work of Hanif Abdurraqib as well as the relationship between pain and artistry. We also read an excerpt from "They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us."

Learn more about Get Lit’s work here.

Support the show. 

Support the show

Support the show

This week, we learn about Tiana Clark, a 2019 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow and a recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize. She writes “Think about curating a museum exhibit. You get to decide how your reader is going to walk through your collection, or through your poem. Some pieces of art might have a ten-foot velvet rope, some others might be an interactive exhibit where you get to touch it, but you get to control that experience."

Learn more about Get Lit’s work here.

Support the show 

Support the show

Support the show

This week we learn about Jericho Brown, the 2020 Pulitzer -prize Winner for poetry and author of the viral poem “Bullet Points.” “I don’t think a poem should be a record for our lives,” he writes, “What I mean is that a poem should be a living organism.” 

To learn more about Get Lit’s work visit getlit.org. Support the show at getlit.org/donate.

Support the show

Support the show

This week we focus on Lucille Clifton, the author of more than sixteen books of poetry. The mother of six children, Lucille writes, “I continue to write because writing is a way of continuing to hope. Perhaps for me it is a way of remembering I am not alone.” 

This season of Get Lit Minute focuses exclusively on Black artists and writers. To learn more about Get lIt’s work visit get lit.org. Support the show (getlit.org/donate).

Support the show

Support the show

In the words of Amiri Baraka, James Baldwin was “God’s Black revolutionary mouth.” 

Host Nia Lewis guides us through the life of one of America’s foremost literary geniuses. From his childhood in Harlem to his prolific writing years in France, we learn about one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, and conclude with a reading of the iconic “The Fire Next Time.” 

This season of Get Lit Minute focuses exclusively on visionary Black artists and writers. To learn more about Get Lit’s work, visit getlit.org.

Support the show

Support the show

In this episode of Get Lit Minute, we discuss the life and work of William Carlos Williams. A full-time doctor and literary figure, Williams helped change the language of American poetry by mimicking the language of the American people. Williams' life and work is an example of the experience we all have when deciding to become an artist.

Williams is strongly associated with the American modernist movement in literature and saw his poetic project as a distinctly American one; he sought to renew language through the fresh, raw idiom that grew out of America's cultural and social heterogeneity, at the same time freeing it from what he saw as the worn-out language of British and European culture. “No one believes that poetry can exist in his own life,” Williams said. “The purpose of an artist, whatever it is, is to take the life, whatever he sees, and to raise it up to an elevated position where it has dignity.”

Historical Research: The Poetry Foundation

"This is Just to Say — A Poem and its Parodies". The Attic. Retrieved 31 July 2019

Support the show

Support the show

In this episode, we focus on Persian mystic, poet, and lecturer, Rumi. We follow his path across the Middle East with his theologian father and the artistic influences and mentors that guided his writing into adulthood. We conclude with the iconic poem, Breezes at Dawn, which compels us all to ask, in this time of quarantine-quiet, what do you really want? 

Historical Research: Encyclopedia Brittanica

Support the show

Support the show

This week, we focus on American confessional poet and novelist, Sylvia Plath. We trace the multitude of experiences, both painful and revelatory, that led to Plath's most famous work, The Bell Jar. Though Plath did not receive wide-spread acclaim during her lifetime, she became one of the most well-known poets of the 20th century, largely due to the strength of her poetry collection Ariel. Her work remains an incisive, important insight into mental health and the pursuit of an enlarged life. 

Historical Research: The Poetry Foundation
More: GetLit.Org

Support the show

Support the show