Thursday, August 30, 2007

Audio Podcast: Willie Perdomo

School's begun again, so I'm back to posting interviews with writers on the Writers At Cornell blog. This time around I spoke with poet Willie Perdomo, the author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime (Norton, 1996) and Smoking Lovely (Rattapallax, 2003), which won the 2004 PEN American Beyond Margins Award; he is also the author of Visiting Langston, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book for Children, and has been featured on several PBS documentaries including Words in Your Face and The United States of Poetry.

We talked about class, race, and culture; whether academic acceptance is a good thing for spoken word poetry; teaching writing to young people; and the classical origins of poetry performance. It's a quick download; give it a listen.

2 comments:

amy said...

this is a great gift for those of us who are office-bound, bored, and have already listened to - gulp - every single radio lab... thanks!

Anonymous said...

You're welcome! The next one will be with Gabrielle Calvocaressi, the poet, in a month. And later this fall, Lee Smith, Hal Crowther, and William Kennedy.