It has provided a showcase for established and emerging talent, a platform for literary retrospectives and a testing ground for works in progress. Its reading series is one of the oldest and most revered in the country and has attracted some of the world’s most distinguished writers over the decades. In a renewed effort to share with a contemporary audience some of the great literary moments the Poetry Center has presented across the decades, this project aims to increase the accessibility of 92NY’s literary audio archives.

With recordings from notables like E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Nadine Gordimer, W.H. Auden, Tony Kushner, Galway Kinnell, Cynthia Ozick, and many others, the collection covers poetry, literature, storytelling, criticism, biography, journalism, and scholarship.

This archive project, generously funded by the Mellon Foundation, features over 850 recordings from 1949-2021, with more to come. For access to additional search tools, please visit our research portal. For access to additional recordings please contact the archives.