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“The White Card is a play I wanted to write because it seemed to me that people had a difficult time talking about race. And I thought, ‘What would it look like?’” In this ArtsEmerson video, Claudia Rankine talks about the inspiration for her debut play, The White Card: A Play (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns. / At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.” Jenny Xie, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads “Rootless” and “Ongoing” from her debut poetry collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Xie is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Esmé Weijun Wang, a 2018 Whiting Award winner, reads from her essay “On the Ward” from The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press, 2019). Wang is featured in “Portraits of Inspiration” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2015 video, Jess Row reads from his debut novel, Your Face in Mine (Riverhead Books, 2014), for the Story Hour in the Library series at the University of California in Berkeley. Row is a recipient of the 2018 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
“I’m very fascinated by people on thresholds....” Dorthe Nors talks about her writing interests, short stories versus novels, and the differences between the Danish and English languages with Rosie Goldsmith at the 2016 European Literature Festival in London. Nors’s fourth novel, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Graywolf Press, 2018), translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“There are so many women who are not married, and don’t have children, out there; there are so many of us but it’s still a bit provocative to write about.” In this interview for BBC News, Dorthe Nors talks about Jane Austen, writing about women, and her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Graywolf Press, 2018), with Helena Kelly, author of the biography Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (Knopf, 2017).
“I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became / a character in the news...” Khaled Hosseini, Rita Dove, Philip Gourevitch, and Siri Hustvedt read Liu Xia’s poem “June 2nd, 1989” from Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. PEN America and Amnesty International collaborated on the video series as a call to free Liu Xia from house arrest in Beijing, where she has been held since her late husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009.
Glenn Close reads “Old Wives’ Tales on Which I Was Fed” from Jenny Xie’s debut collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), which won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Walt Whitman Award. Eye Level is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Leslie Jamison reads her essay “The Broken Heart of James Agee” from The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press, 2014) for a reading series hosted by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Jamison speaks about her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (Little, Brown, 2018), in “The Infinite World” by Michele Filgate in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this video, Claudia Rankine talks about how touring for her award-winning book Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf Press, 2014) organically led to the development of her new play, The White Card. The play unfolds as an influential white couple invites an up-and-coming black artist over to their posh New York City loft for a dinner party. The world premiere is directed by Diane Paulus and produced by the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
