Episodes follow Phillis Wheatley to colonial Boston, Gwendolyn Brooks to the South Side of Chicago, Alberto Ríos to the Sonoran Desert, and Sylvia Plath into the fungal kingdom, as they explore America’s people, cultures, history, and language.

The series offers audiences an immersive and accessible experience in reading poems that touch on many aspects of American life, past and present.

Along the way, ecologists and Supreme Court Justices, actors and political commentators, doctors and musicians, poets and pastors, and teachers and their students join the conversation to reflect on essential works of the American literary imagination.