Poetry

Line Breaks (2009): Los Angeles Times Festival of Books

By: Robert Pinsky, Cole Swensen, Connie Voisine

Narrated by: Dana Goodyear

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books began in 1996 with a simple goal: to bring together the people who create books with the people who love to read them. The festival was an immediate success and has become the largest and most prestigious book festival in the country, attracting more than 130,000 book lovers each year.

Dana Goodyear is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Honey and Junk, her first collection of poems, was published in 2005.

Robert Pinsky's latest collection of poems is Gulf Music. His prose account of the biblical hero, The Life of David, appeared last year. As the U.S. Poet Laureate (1997-2000), Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project. He served as a judge for the Kingsley Tufts Awards.

Cole Swensen's books include Goest, Try, which won the New American Poetry Series Award, and Ours, which is a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist in Poetry. Her work as a poet and a translator has appeared in many journals and anthologies. She is a contributing editor for the American Letters & Commentary literary annual.

Connie Voisine is the director of an arts outreach organization and the author of Cathedral of the North, which received the Associated Writing Programs poetry award. Voisine's latest work, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, is a 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist for Poetry.

©2009 Los Angeles Times (P)2009 Los Angeles Times