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“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).
“It was September: autumn only in advertisements, cartoon-orange leaves and red backpacks lining the signs for back-to-school sales, the warmth whittling down but still keeping us in short sleeves.” In this Books Are Magic event, Kyle Lucia Wu reads from her debut novel, Win Me Something (Norton, 2021), and speaks with Crystal Hana Kim about her writing process.
James Tate Hill discusses the themes of disability and self-acceptance in his debut memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff (Norton, 2021), and speaks about process and the author-agent relationship in this Writing Workshops Dallas conversation with agent and author Eric Smith. Hill’s memoir is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“I had written two books on slavery, and writing about slavery is to be in the center of a very difficult psychic territory, and so when I started doing the research for this project, I was very hungry for beauty—and I think I discovered it here,” says Saidiya Hartman about writing her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, in this 2019 reading at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.
“I was really interested in the idea of the body as a place of imprisonment but also, the body as a place of liberation.” Olivia Laing speaks about her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton, 2021), and how she addresses the themes of illness, sexual violence, and incarceration with imagery and by including historical figures of the past century in this conversation with author Maggie Nelson for the Center for Fiction.
“Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters,” says Roxane Gay in this 92Y virtual event celebrating the publication of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (Norton, 2020), which Gay edited. Joining Gay to discuss and read Lorde’s poetry and prose are Mahogany L. Browne, Saeed Jones, and Porsha Olayiwola.
“Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. / Remember language comes from this.” In this video from the Academy of American Poets, Joy Harjo reads her poem “Remember” from her 1983 collection, She Had Some Horses. Harjo has been appointed to serve a second term as poet laureate of the United States and is the first Native American to hold the post.
In this virtual event for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, the late Randall Kenan, author of the story collection If I Had Two Wings (Norton, 2020), and Ron Rash, author of In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena (Doubleday, 2020), read from their books and discuss growing up in the South and their writing. Kenan’s If I Had Two Wings is longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.
“Yes— / I am opening myself for the black-horned galaxies / where the soul hides...” In this Poets House Presents video, Rachel Eliza Griffiths reads a selection of poems from her latest collection, Seeing the Body (Norton, 2020). For more Griffiths, read her installment of Ten Questions.
“How does the elegy believe me?” This lyric art video created by Rachel Eliza Griffiths offers a peek into her new book of poems and self-portraits, Seeing the Body (Norton, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
