Theater video tags: 2015

"Be sure to have at least one good Muslim character, preferably one good for each bad one. People will then say your film or book is 'balanced...'" Moustafa Bayoumi reads aloud eleven tongue-in-cheek rules for writing Muslim characters from his newest book, This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror (NYU Press 2015), at an event at the Asian American Writers' Workshop in New York City.

"They called her Sparrow, / so the Lord would be watchful of her..." Norman Dubie, Arizona State University Regents' Professor of English, reads "Sparrow" from his poetry collection The Quotations of Bone (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.

"Nothing can ever happen twice." Listen to a selection of poems by Nobel laureate Wislawa Szymborska, read by her translator Clare Cavanagh, as well as poets Charles Simic and Krystyna Dabrowska, at a celebration of her life and work hosted by the 92nd Street Y. The event also celebrated the publication of Szymborska's posthumous collection, Map: Collected and Last Poems (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015).

"Emerald, as in the leaf of the ash, / though nothing's burned, not yet..." At a celebration of the Kenyon Review hosted by the Strand Book Store, David Baker, the literary magazine's poetry editor, reads a poem by Alison Hutchkraft from a recent issue, as well as poems from his collection Scavenger Loop (Norton, 2015).