Write America: A Reading for Our Country

Byrd's Books is proud to be the home of Write America!

Write America was an author series created by writer Roger Rosenblatt, featuring award-winning, nationally-renowned authors, and new and emerging writers, in readings and conversation each week about how books and art might bridge the deep divisions in our nation. Conversations were streamed Mondays on Byrd's Books' Crowdcast channel, until we moved over to zoom in the later episodes. Writers including Rita Dove, Major Jackson, Alice McDermott, Vijay Seshadri, Garry Trudeau, Francine Prose, Alan Alda, Amy Hempel, Tyehimba Jess, Natalie Diaz, Paul Auster, Juan Felipe Herrera, Billy Collins and many more came together for these virtual events.

Check each listed episode to get the YouTube link to watch. Attendance has always been free.

The series launched February 2021 and wrapped up at the end of January 2023. View the full schedule of conversations below.

Write America Mission Statement:

We are each other's
harvest:
We are each other's
business:
we are each other’s
magnitude and bond.

- “Paul Robeson” by Gwendolyn Brooks

Write America is an organization of writers concerned about the divisions in our country that have evidenced themselves and deepened over the past few years. We see a torn America these days, jeopardizing basic principles of justice, freedom, fair play, and equality.

These principles are important to writers, felt passionately if shown indirectly. They undergird our poems, novels, essays, memoirs, every form by which we attempt to reach out to our human family through grace and precision of language and the quiet power of art. A writer’s words are a tacit call for people to gather round and discover or rediscover their common thoughts and feelings and their connections to one another. Whatever its subject, writing is at heart a moral force, what Stanley Kunitz called “the testing of existence at its highest pitch.” Writing makes justice desirable, evil intelligible, grief endurable, and love possible.

In this project, then, we have come together to read our work in the interests of life's nobler values. Normally, in the course of our profession, we keep our distance. We create, publish, and say with Chaucer, 'go little book,' to a remote receiving world. With our readings for Write America we will try to bridge that distance in a gesture of bonding. The nation is injured. We hope to contribute to its healing.

- Roger Rosenblatt

************************************************************************************************************

Episodes of WRITE AMERICA

Past episodes from 2022:

41 1/3/22 Sequoia Nagamatsu, Karla Brundage and Lance Morrow YouTube link

SPECIAL EVENT: Wednesday January 5th: Al Gore in Conversation with Roger Rosenblatt YouTube link

42 1/10/22 Francine Prose, LaTanya McQueen YouTube link

43 1/17 /22 Susan Shreve and Thomas Becker YouTube link

44 SPECIAL EVENT: Monday January 24th: Garry Trudeau and Jules Feiffer- in conversation about the art of cartooning YouTube link

45 1/31/22 Miranda Beeson, Emily Bernard and Kurt Andersen YouTube link

46 2/7/22 Elizabeth Hawes Weinstock, Ursula Hegi and Vijay Seshadri YouTube link

SPECIAL EVENT Wednesday, February 9th Billy Collins and Robert Reeves honor Frank McCourt YouTube link