Running annually during the month of April, Poets in Pajamas invites Utah poets to read from their own work and the work of a poet they admire.
Informally trained and largely self-taught, Angelika Brewer was taught to read, write and embrace her creativity by her teenage mother and her almost entirely blind grandmother. With encouragement from a high school English teacher, she discovered the world of Spoken Word Poetry. She has been a featured speaker […]
“The best poems change all the while,” says Brenda Sieczkowski in this recording for our Poetry in Pajamas series. And she provides an example in the work of Kathryn Cowles, who, Sieczkowski says, has influenced her as a poet and a person. Cowles, a Provo native who studied […]
The youngest poet featured in this year’s installment of Poets in Pajamas, Chelsea Guevara discovered poetry in high school, but she had to wait until college before she heard the work of anyone not white or male. She discovered Rita Dove in her first semester at the University […]
An arts community becomes especially vibrant when the people help managing it are part of it. Willy Palomo’s job at the Utah Humanities is running the Center for the Book, whose mission is to “foster a love of books as well as the exploration of contemporary issues through […]
You probably know Matthew Ivan Bennett from his plays, whether for the stage — like his 2013 play about gender identity, Eric(a), or Mesa Verde, which explored the enduring scars of chronic illness — or for the radio (listen here for a recording of “Sleepy Hollow,” produced by […]
“I recently read Leila Chatti’s Deluge and was awed by her unflinching gaze at chronic illness,” says Kathryn Knight Sonntag, a writer, poet and landscape architect who lives in Salt Lake City. “In her twenties, Chatti, a young Arab-American woman, started bleeding and didn’t stop. Her physicians referred […]
Writers are sometimes drawn to other writers for what they have in common, like subject or theme. But they also can be drawn by the differences, in say craft or style. Something of both draws Ashley Farmer to Victoria Chang. “Victoria Chang is such a masterful, original poet […]
“I love how Joy Harjo’s poems tap into the spiritual, the animal, and the human all at the same time,” says Laura Stott, a poet, professor and the 2020 recipient of the Ogden City Mayor’s Award in the Arts. “They show how connected we all are on […]
Elizabeth Bishop’s “The End of March” has resonated with Lisa Bickmore since the first time she read it. It has spoken to the Utah poet of her own “deep desire for retreat — for solitude and silence — and also how impossible it is, or can feel, […]
“I love Pablo Neruda’s big-hearted exuberance, especially his odes,” says former Utah poet laureate (2012 – 2017) Lance Larsen. “Linguistically and metaphorically, ‘Ode to My Socks,’ goes everywhere. Neruda the man was a collector of antiques, maritime flotsam and jetsam, glassware, seashells, figureheads of ships. In 2019 I […]
Sunni Brown Wilkinson says Joseph Stroud’s Of This World is one of the best poetry collections she has ever read. “Joseph Stroud is a remarkable but less well-known poet, mainly because he purposely shuns the spotlight,” Wilkinson says. “He lives part of the year in a cabin in […]
In their citation for the 15 Bytes Book Award for Poetry, the jurors of the 2018 prize wrote: In her brilliant new collection, “The Worrier,” Nancy Takacs has presented her readers with her most finely nuanced and psychologically sophisticated collection of poetry to date. Each piece is an […]
During this month of April, 2021, we return to Poets in Pajamas, an audio series celebrating National Poetry Month launched last year at the beginning of the pandemic. In this series, we ask Utah poets to read one of their own works, as well as a work by […]
