friendship

Jonathan Penner reads from Going Blind (1977) as well as work published in periodicals.

Grace Paley reads prose appearing in her two collections Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974) and Later the Same Day (1985).

In this reading, originally given with Aurelie Sheehan, Beth Alvarado shares an excerpt from the short story collection Not a Matter of Love (2006).

Gerald Stern reads from This Time: New and Selected Poems (1998), Last Blue (2000), and American Sonnets (2002).

Taha Muhammad Ali reads primarily from his book So What (2006) in the original Arabic, with Peter Cole reading each poem's translation in English.

Elizabeth Libbey reads poems from her first book, The Crowd Inside (1978), as well as early drafts of poems that would go on to be collected in Songs of a Returning Soul (1981). 

Leslie Ullman discusses process and reads poems from her collection Natural Histories (1979), including "Bravado," "Fur," "Last Night They Heard the Woman Upstairs," and "Midwife"; she also reads poems that would go on to be collected in Dreams by No One's Daughter (1987).

Roger Weingarten reads "The Tale of The Green Rose," which is the last poem in The Vermont Suicides (1978).

Elizabeth Evans reads from her novel As Good As Dead (2015).

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and novelist Maxine Kumin reads from her then-recent collection Nurture (1989), together with poems written throughout her career, as well as two poems that would go on to be collected in her next book, Looking for Luck (1992). Many of the poems consider connections between animals and humans. Kumin also reads a series of three elegies to her longtime friend Anne Sexton.

Roland Flint, Poet Laureate of Maryland at the time of this reading, opens with early poems from Say It (1979) and Resuming Green (1983). Flint reads from his National Poetry Series volume Stubborn (1990), interspersing work from Stubborn with recently written poems, some of which would go on to be published in Easy (1999). Flint also discusses his work as a translator of Bulgarian and reads several of his translations.

Vivian Gornick reads from Fierce Attachments (1987), a memoir of the author's past and present relationship with her mother. This University of Arizona Creative Writing faculty reading was originally given with Mary Elsie Robertson.

In this performance for the Writers at Work Series, Patrick D. Hoctel reads from a story set in Miramar, Baja California, titled "Playing with Light."

Maurya Simon reads poems from The Wilderness: New & Selected Poems 1980-2016 (2018). This reading was originally given with Peggy Shumaker as the inaugural reading in the Tom Sanders Memorial Reading Series. 

Yanyi reads from his two published collections, The Year of Blue Water (2019) and Dream of the Divided Field (2022), opening with two early, uncollected poems and closing with one recent draft. Intimacy emerges as a thematic center—in friendships, romantic relationships, and with the self.