“I have always been fascinated with the accuracy and inaccuracy of memory, and how we create stories from the fog of memory, haltingly, sometimes inartfully, and always overlaid by the desire to be ...

George Moses Horton was born into slavery on a North Carolina tobacco plantation, likely in 1798. As a child, he was enslaved on a farm in Chatham County, where he taught himself to read and began ...

Everyone knows that the moon started out as a renegade fragment of the sun, a solar flare that fled that hellish furnace and congealed into a flat frozen pond suspended between the planets. But did ...

Osip Emilievich Mandelstam was born on January 15, 1891, in Warsaw and raised in the imperial capital of St. Petersburg, Russia. His father was a prominent leather merchant and his mother was a music ...

Matsuo Bashō, originally Matsuō Chuemon Munefusa, was born in Ueno, Japan, in 1644 to a family of samurai descent. Basho was introduced to poetry at a young age by Todo Yoshitada, for whom he worked ...

James Mercer Langston Hughes was born on February 1, 1901, in Joplin, Missouri. Hughes’s birth year was revised from 1902 to 1901 after new research from 2018 uncovered that he had been born a year ...

And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said: I'm lonely— I'll make me a world. And far as the eye of God could see Darkness covered everything, Blacker than a hundred midnights Down in ...

Joseph Rios was born in the San Joaquin Valley in 1987. He is a Xicano writer and the author of Shadowboxing: Poems & Impersonations (Omnidawn, 2017), winner of a 2018 American Book Award. Rios lives ...

Carl Phillips’ most recent books are Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), winner of the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and My Trade Is Mystery: Seven ...

Sleep, little Baby, sleep; The holy Angels love thee, And guard thy bed, and keep A blessed watch above thee. No spirit can come near Nor evil beast to harm thee: Sleep, Sweet, devoid of fear Where ...

Popular love poems, from classic to contemporary, to share for weddings and anniversaries, on Valentine’s Day, and year-round. These poems are perfect for to express romantic love, a lovely friendship ...

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Marked the mastodon, The dinosaur, who left dried tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their hastening ...