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This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. Poets Katie Farris and Ilya Kaminsky offer a collaborative presentation of their works on deafness, the challenges of facing cancer, and the war in Ukraine.

Blending performance with conversation, the poets explore how poetry can make meaning out of tragedy and steady us through hardship.

About the Poets:
Ilya Kaminsky was born in Odessa, former Soviet Union, in 1977, and arrived to the US in 1993, when his family was granted asylum by the government. He is the author of "Deaf Republic" and "Dancing In Odessa" and co-editor and co-translator of many other books. His work was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the National Jewish Book Award, the Whiting Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Metcalf Award, and Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Neustadt International Literature Prize, and T.S. Eliot Prize (UK). He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets’ Fellowship, and an NEA Fellowship. He currently teaches in Princeton and lives in New Jersey.

Katie Farris is a poet, writer of hybrid forms, and translator. Her most recent book is "Standing in the Forest of Being Alive," which Publishers Weekly named one of the Top Ten Books of 2023. She is also the author of the chapbook "A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving," which won the Chad Walsh Poetry Award from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her earlier collection is "boysgirls," a hybrid-form book. Her awards include the Pushcart Prize, Orison Prize, and Anne Halley Prize from Massachusetts Review. She also is the award-winning translator of several books of poetry from the French, Ukrainian, Chinese, and Russian. In addition to her poetry and translations, Farris writes prose about cancer, the body, and its relationship to writing, such as in her recent, widely circulated essay in Oprah Daily. She graduated with an MFA from Brown University, and is currently an Associate Professor of Poetry at Princeton University.

This event is part of the Being Human Festival (US) 2026 and is organized in partnership with the Princeton University Humanities Council and co-sponsored by the Lewis Center for the Arts. In partnership with humanists and humanities organizations across the country, the National Humanities Center is supporting numerous public events across the U.S. These community-focused events, organized and presented by local artists, scholars, and educators, highlight the incredible breadth of the humanities and demonstrate how they add depth and meaning to our lives, help us understand ourselves and one another, and provide context for the complex world around us. The American edition of the Being Human Festival, begun in 2024, is the latest international expansion of the Being Human effort, launched in the United Kingdom in 2014.

This event was recorded on April 27, 2026

This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. Past and current members of the editorial board share readings of their work published in "US1 Worksheets," an annual anthology of poetry compiled by the DVP/US1 Poets Cooperative.

Past and current members of the editorial board stewarding the fifty-three year publishing history of "US1 Worksheets" share their first work published in the anthology and a current poem of their choosing, putting their growth and development as artists into relief through the mirror of the anthology's past issues.

On display at the reading will be a recently donated complete collection of the anthology, from its origin in 1973 to its most recently published seventieth volume, which arrived in the fall last year.

Public Humanities programs are presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This event was recorded on April 26, 2026.

This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. Poets featured in the book appear in person and virtually to present readings of their work, offering a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war’s destruction of the natural world.

About "Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War"
Edited by Anne Coray, J.C. Todd, and Teresa Mei Chuc
Forewords by Scott McVay and Rick Steiner

"Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War" offers a groundbreaking and vital perspective on war’s destruction of the natural world—the creatures, plants, soil, water, and atmosphere of Earth. In poems and contextual comments, 61 contemporary poets focus on military damages to the ecosystems on six continents and the moon. Framed by a cogent introduction and a pair of forewords, one on the poetry and the other on global consequences, the poems are accompanied by a tally of ecological costs and a set of thought-provoking discussion and writing prompts for teens and adults. This compelling anthology alerts readers to environmental degradation of our planet while affirming nature’s resilience and regeneration.

Contributors: Ninety poems, each paired with an Author’s Note, by U.S. and international poets, including John Balaban, Gillian Clarke, Camille T. Dungy, Ferida Duraković, W.D. Ehrhart, William Heyen, Cynthia Hogue, Denise Low, Craig Santos Perez, Vivian Faith Prescott, Eric Paul Shaffer, Jillian Sullivan, Brian Turner, Pamela Uschuk, and Mai Der Vang.

Featured readers:
J. C. Todd, co-editor of "Convergence: Poetry on Environmental Impacts of War." Her most recent books are "Beyond Repair" (Able Muse Press, 2021) and the bilingual English–Lithuanian "What Kept Me Awake? / Kas neleido užmigti?" (PDR, 2024). A former Fellow of the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, she has poems in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Pedestal, Prairie Schooner.

Richard Levine is the author of "Taming the Hours: An Almanac with Marginalia" (forthcoming), "Now in Contest, Selected Poems," "Contiguous States," and five chapbooks. A Vietnam veteran, he co-edited “Invasion of Ukraine 2022: Poems,” is Associate Editor of BigCityLit.com, and the recipient of the 2021 Connecticut Poetry Society Award.

MaryAnn L. Miller is a poet, printmaker, and book artist, she has four published collections of poetry. Miller has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has appeared in the anthologies "Illness as a Form of Existence," "Welcome to the Resistance," and "Stained." Her poem "Petrarch’s Map" is part of a collaboration with Steamroller Printers.

Alexander Essien Timothy is a professor of Language Arts Education at the University of Calabar, Nigeria. His research interest is in innovative strategies for teaching English and Literature-in-English. He loves storytelling, especially with Tortoise as main character. He writes poems, and short stories as a hobby.

Jaylan Salah is an Egyptian poet, translator, destination manager at Trip500, and film critic for Geek Vibes Nation and InSession Film. She has published two poetry collections, translated eleven books into Arabic, and her poem “You Can’t Dress Me Up, Auntie A” inspired the short film "The Bride."

Lavinia Kumar’s latest prose book is "Spirited American Women: Early Writers, Artists, & Activists." She’s published three poetry books and four chapbooks. Her poems and flash fiction are in a variety of poetry journals & three anthologies. She’s received four Pushcart and one Best of Net nominations. Her website: laviniakumar.net

Sean Mclain Brown is a combat disabled Marine Corps veteran. His writing is heavily influenced by his experience in combat and living with consequences of war. His writing has appeared in more than 50 journals and is featured in "An Introduction to the Prose Poem" and "Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace."

For more poetry programming, see the digital brochure for "Verse and Voice: A Festival of Poetry" taking place April 18 to May 4 at the library.

Public Humanities programs are presented with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this programming do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This event was recorded on May 04, 2026.

This recording is presented by Princeton Public Library. Writer and art historian Patricia Albers discusses her book "Everything is Photograph: A Life of André Kertész," the first full biography of the innovative “father of modern photography.”

About the Book (from the publisher):
Born in Budapest in 1894, André Kertész soared to star status in Jazz Age Paris, tumbled into poverty and obscurity in wartime New York, slogged through 15 years shooting for House & Garden, then improbably reemerged into the spotlight with a 1964 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. By the time of his death in 1985, he had exhibited around the world, taken more than 100,000 images, and steered the medium in new and vital directions: He was the first major photographer to embrace the Leica, the camera now mythically linked to street photography, and he pioneered subjective photojournalism, publishing what is arguably the world’s first great photo essay.

Drawing on dozens of interviews, previous scholarship, and deep archival research, and interrogating the images themselves, Patricia Albers retrieves aspects of Kertész’s life that he and his pictures gloss over, among them the ordeals of trench warfare, the impact of the Holocaust, and the tale of his tangled romances. She takes Kertész from the Eastern front in World War I to the Paris of Piet Mondrian, Colette, Alexander Calder, and a lively central European diaspora. From Condé Nast’s postwar media empire to the “photo boom” of the 1970s. She revisits Kertész’s relationships with other photographers, among them his “frenemy” Brassaï and protégé Robert Capa. She breathes life into a gentle, generous, and unassuming man endowed with Old-World charm but also sputtering with grievance and rage and inclined to indulge in deception.

"Everything Is Photograph" immerses readers in the heyday of a now lost version of photography. Formally vigorous, emotionally rich, and aesthetically charged, Kertész’s images speak of the medium as a tool for human connection, self-narration, self-invention, and inquiry about the world, even as they project its mysteries.

About the Author:
Patricia Albers is a California-based writer, editor, and art historian. She is the author of "Joan Mitchell, Lady Painter: A Life," the acclaimed first biography of the abstract painter. Her previous books include "Shadows, Fire, Snow: The Life of Tina Modotti" and "Tina Modotti and the Mexican Renaissance." Albers’s essays, art reviews, and features have appeared in numerous museum catalogs and publications, including SquareCylinder, San Francisco Magazine, the San Jose Mercury News, and the New York Times. She has served as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Humanities and a juror for the Biographers International Plutarch Award.

This event was recorded on May 06, 2026.

Library staff members read a poem every day during April to mark National Poetry Month.

Martha shares "Sky--" and "Dear Bubble-That-Was" from the book Dear Acorn (Love, Oak) by Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Melissa Sweet.

Library staff members read a poem every day during April to mark National Poetry Month.

Yun-Yi shares "Patchwork Pigeons" from the book Outside Your Window by Nicola Davies and illustrated by Mark Hearld.