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"It’s life bleeding into stories. I feel like the longer we live, the more life bleeds into stories.” In this Books Are Magic event, Yiyun Li reads from her latest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and discusses story endings, why it can take years to finish a story, and what sustains a plotless story in a conversation with David Means.
In this 2023 event hosted by the Chicago Humanities Festival, Zadie Smith reads from her latest novel, The Fraud (Penguin Press, 2023), and discusses the definition of historical fiction, the relationship between truth and emotion, and the impact of code-switching on her voice-driven writing with poet and novelist Chris Abani.
“I remember what’s important and I make up the rest. That’s what storytelling is all about.” This HBO Original documentary takes a look at the life of legendary poet and activist Nikki Giovanni. The award-winning film is directed and written by Joe Brewster and Michèle Stephenson, and includes readings by executive producer Taraji P. Henson.
In this One Book, One Chicago event, Tommy Orange discusses the importance of Native American voices, the intricate plotlines of his debut novel, There There (Knopf, 2018), and the historical roots of his forthcoming novel, Wandering Stars, in a conversation with Donna Seaman at the Chicago Public Library.
In this Pan Macmillan video, Toshikazu Kawaguchi talks about his surprise of the international popularity of his Before the Coffee Gets Cold series and the theme of awkward intimacy that runs through each book. His latest book, Before We Say Goodbye (Hanover Square Press, 2023), translated from the Japanese by Geoffrey Trousselot, concludes the series.
“Long ago, I was wounded.” Actor and playwright Eisa Davis reads Louise Glück’s poem “First Memory” in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Read By poetry film series.
In this Green Apple Books event, Alexandra Chang reads from her short story collection, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco, 2023), and discusses the various Asian and Asian American women voices in her work, experiments in form, and the feeling of writing a short story with promise in a conversation with author Shruti Swamy.
In this event hosted by the Korea Society in New York, prolific and award-winning author Yu Miri talks about her family’s history under Japanese occupation, her struggles writing for Japanese and Korean readers as a Zainichi Korean author, and the themes in her latest translated novel, The End of August (Riverhead Books, 2023), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles.
In this 2023 National Book Festival event, Joy Harjo, author of Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet Light: Fifty Poems for Fifty Years (Norton, 2022), and Camille T. Dungy, author of Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (Simon & Schuster, 2023), read from their work and discuss writing about nature in a conversation moderated by NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe. Dungy’s essay “Manifest Some Magic: Get Out of Your Own Way and Do the Darn Thing” is included in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this video for the Poets House Hard Hat Reading series, poet and professor Kwame Dawes reads “Acceptance” by his mentor and father Neville Dawes, and his own poem “Sturge Town Redux,” which will appear in his collection Sturge Town, forthcoming from Norton.
