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Jimmy Santiago Baca began writing poetry while he was serving a five-year sentence in prison. His new anthology tells the story of his journey to becoming a celebrated Chicano poet.

In her memoir, A Fighting Chance, Warren reveals a childhood brush with bankruptcy and reflects on hard-won political lessons.

Before Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile or Murder on the Orient Express, she took her own, less perilous, journey around the world in 1922. Her grandson Mathew Prichard has now published a volume of her letters and photographs from the trip.

Author Leah Hager Cohen says it's time to stop faking your way through conversations. "Once you finally own up to what you don't know, then you can begin to have honest interactions with the people around you," she explains.

Claire of the Sea Light is award-winning author Edwidge Danticat's newest work of fiction. She spoke to host Rachel Martin about how experiences of her own childhood in Haiti are reflected in her young protagonist.

Author Simon Singh's new book teases out the mathematical references hidden in The Simpsons. Singh tells NPR's Scott Simon that the show's writing team includes several trained mathematicians — and that the logical bends and breaks of writing comedy can be very appealing to the mathematically minded.

Stephen King's It showed Erin Morgenstern that the demons and ghouls of childhood stories don't hit the road just because you grow up. Have you read something that both scared and enticed you? Tell us about it in the comments.

Breed offers a new and horrifying picture of New York's upper echelon, the barren rich, with full wallets and empty cribs. Desperate for a child, one couple find treatment in a sketchy fertility clinic, where they successfully become fertile — and feral.

Kim Thuy based her award-winning novel Ru on her own experiences as a refugee from war-torn Vietnam. She says the word "ru" has a poetic double meaning: In archaic French, it means a rill or stream, but in Vietnamese, it means a lullaby to soothe a child.

NPR's longest-serving reference librarian, Kee Malesky, is the author of a new book, Learn Something New Every Day: 365 Facts to Fulfill Your Life. Malesky offers facts for each day of the year, from the landing on the moon to the invention of sliced bread.