poetry

Ali Cobby Eckermann, an Australian indigenous poet forcibly taken from her family as a child, discovered without warning last week she had just won one of the richest literary prizes in the world.

Scientific evidence showing health benefits from engaging in the arts is still weak. But Los Angeles students in their 80s say their poetry class gives them joy, solace, community and a voice.

Driven to save his culture, an ethnic Assyrian living in Britain is recording ancient tales of adventure sung by modern-day bards. The songs echo stories from ancient Greece to the Bible.

The former Poet Laureate recently joined NPR fans on Facebook Live. He talked about the inspiration for a poem imagining a Keith Richards-based mythology, and offered a tip to aspiring writers: Read.

Solmaz Sharif's collection, Look, has just been shortlisted for a National Book Award. Playing on the military language in a Department of Defense lexicon, it's a wrenching look at war and duality.

Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson and Rita Dove are just three of the authors on the shortlists for the National Book Awards. The 20 books still in contention for the prizes were unveiled Thursday.

And then there were 40: This week, the National Book Foundation revealed the writers who are still in contention for its literary prize. It capped the rollout Thursday with the fiction nominees.

On July 1, 1916, nearly 20,000 British soldiers died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme in northern France. The battle went on for months, and more than a million men were killed or injured.

Can a computer write a sonnet that's indistinguishable from what a person can produce? A contest at Dartmouth attempted to find out. With our online quiz, you too can give it a try.

Over 1,000 students submitted their work for Words Unlocked, a poetry contest for juveniles in corrections. Two young poets split the top prize — and they've shared their poems with NPR.

It was a simple idea: Would you, our listeners, tweet us poems for National Poetry Month? Your response contained multitudes — haiku, lyrics, even one 8-year-old's ode to her dad's bald spot.

Words Unlocked, a poetry contest for juveniles in corrections, has drawn more than 1,000 entries. Its judge, Jimmy Santiago Baca, says it was a poetry book that helped him survive his own prison term.