“It’s okay to be in flux and figure it out, and take your time to figure it out.” Follow iO Tillett Wright through the streets of New York City to Joshua Tree in California leading up to the launch of his debut memoir, Darling Days (Ecco, 2016).

“I was thinking what would happen if someone was as much of a recluse as I am, maybe more, but is not a writer?” Rabih Alameddine talks about writer and artist Bruno Schultz, the idea of a necessary person, and the inspiration behind his novel An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2013). Alameddine won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for his novel The Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016).

“The Portuguese have a word for haunting desire, for an imaginary, impossible, never-to-be experienced love: whoop-de-doo.” For the Hugo Literary Series, Téa Obreht, Eduardo C. Corral, and Quenton Baker share their poems and stories meditating on the theme of theft.

Brit Bennett, author of The Mothers (Riverhead Books, 2016), speaks about her first memorable piece of writing and her experiences as a young reader and writer.

This animated book trailer captures the elements of thriller, mystery, and fable present in Australian author Fiona McFarlane’s debut novel, The Night Guest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). McFarlane received the 2017 International Dylan Thomas Prize for her story collection, The High Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).  

“This poem ‘Home’ is not only talking about ‘home,’ a physical place. It’s also talking about language as a home which I feel exiled from.” Safiya Sinclair, author of the debut collection Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads from “Home” and talks about the multiple languages and places that inhabit her poems.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads “damn right it’s betta than yours” from her collection, TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), and talks about the influences of music and language on her writing. 

“In literature you get these magical moments when you can actually feel yourself to be somebody else...and those moments I think are incredibly important for the development of a society because they’re expansive moments.” Hisham Matar, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in autobiography for his debut memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016), talks about the role literature plays in creating social change.