What is it about life’s big and little moments that calls for a poem? At weddings. At funerals. On greeting cards. In church. On the radio. At moments of great happiness or deep sadness. At beginnings ...

Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself ...

Happy holidays, and happy reading! All That We Ask of You Is to Always Be Happy by Bridget Bell (Cavankerry) If there has ...

CHRISTIAN WIMAN is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His most recent book of poems, Every Riven Thing, was published last fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Some existential glitch in ...

CARBONDALE — As Thunder River Theatre Company’s Valerie Haugen launched a poetry festival in memory of a close friend in 2011, the notion of encouragement kept coming to mind. “When my friend Karen ...

When Rosemarie Dombrowski stood in front of her class and shared a poem about her son, who was diagnosed with autism and three congenital heart defects, it was not just a display of vulnerability with ...