The last time I tripped over a rock and cut my hand, I didn’t cry. It hurt so bad I think I even laughed a little. Instead, the last time I cried was after reading a poem. Writing right now, I find it ...

Timing gives a special twist to Adam Zagajewski's "A Defense of Ardor." The unquestioned giant of Polish poetry, Nobel laureate , died in August. The crown is passing from an era of titans -- Milosz, ...

The Yakima Coffeehouse Poets, a nonprofit formed in 2014 to represent the interests of poets and poetry lovers in Central Washington, is the organization behind this monthly poetry column, which runs ...

For years, author and poet Nikki Giovanni couldn’t cry. Even as a child watching her father punch her mother, she suppressed her tears. “I watched my parent’s marriage and I had to make up my mind and ...

Nikki Giovanni has a thing about words, even a single one — like “needed.” “I’m not needed,” the beloved poet, drinking coffee at a hotel lounge in midtown Manhattan, insisted during a recent ...

Since I’m a woman without a calculator, I don’t just take off the underwear I was wearing—I take everything off. That’s because I’m too dirty to give it to you…. My dad was like that too. He’d give ...

Dreams do come true. I say this because I had the amazing opportunity to sit down with my hero, the iconic poetic genius Nikki Giovanni on “Salon Talks.” To put that in context, I’d ask you to imagine ...

"I'm not a grown man — I'm a growing man," Alexander says. His new memoir started as a book of love poems, but ended up being a collection of... Poet Kwame Alexander reflects on 'Why Fathers Cry at ...

ONLY rarely, and almost never when still alive, does a poet become the object of a cult. Sylvia Plath, age thirty, died in London in 1963, leaving behind her a sheaf of terrifying poems. Since then, ...

In 2013, researchers led by Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, published a paper on “hedonic reversal,” a form of “benign masochism” in which people take pleasure ...