imagination

Alice Fulton reads from three books: Powers of Congress, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. "Losing It," from Powers of Congress, was collected two years after this reading.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa reads widely from her extensive body of work; this reading includes uncollected and unpublished poems.

G.C. Waldrep discusses the creation and experience of poetry as a spiritual practice, with special emphasis on parabolic and apocalyptic traditions.

Stephen Dunn opens with poems from Full of Lust and Good Usage (1976), which would be published the year following this reading. He then reads from Looking for Holes in the Ceiling (1974) before closing with poems that would later appear in A Circus of Needs (1978).

Stephen Dunn and Dave Smith read from their poems.

Harriet Doerr discusses old age, living in Mexico, and the need to combine experience, imagination, and observation when writing. She reads the first chapter of a story published in 1986 called "Picnic at Amapolas," and she also reads a short excerpt from a chapter called "Immense Distances, Extraordinary Events" in her novel Stones for Ibarra (1984), which covers a woman's experience sorting through her deceased husband's belongings.

Steve Orlen reads extensively from his collection The Bridge of Sighs (1992). His selections follow the book's four major themes, which he describes as poems of childhood, poems of love and marriage, poems of relationship, and poems of grace.

Aracelis Girmay discusses intersections between ways of thinking about poetry, ecologies, and climate change. She also reads from the black maria (2016) and Kingdom Animalia (2011). This reading was given as part of the Climate Change & Poetry Series.

Dorothea Lasky gives a lecture on material imagination, poetry, and ghosts. She also reads two poems from Milk (2018). This lecture was originally given with Joshua Beckman and Terrance Hayes as part of the 2018 Bagley Wright Lecture Series conference "You Are Who I Am Talking To: Poetry, Attention, & Audience."

Roberto Tejada reads poems from Why the Assembly Disbanded (2022), which he describes as inhabiting the "actual and surreal" US-Mexico Borderlands. He also reads from a manuscript in progress begun during the Coronavirus pandemic titled Carbonate of Copper, informed by a widening and blurring sense of the self, the human, and the non-human.