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Marissa Davis reads from her debut poetry collection, End of Empire (Penguin Books, 2025), in this Books Are Magic event with poets Sasha Burshteyn and A. D. Lauren-Abunassar. Davis’s book is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this 2016 video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) for a two-day event at the Lab in San Francisco cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Notley died at the age of seventy-nine on May 20, 2025.
In this event recorded at the Brooklyn Heights Public Library and hosted by Books Are Magic, Terrance Hayes discusses his new poetry collection, So to Speak (Penguin Books, 2023), and his new essay collection, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2023), with poet and memoirist Mary Karr.
“The minute I was born I was not just myself, but the memory of someone else,” reads Hilton Als from his essay collection White Girls, published in 2014 by McSweeney’s and reprinted in 2019 by Penguin Books, in this video in which he tells the story of how he got his name.
“Nowhere else does the sky do what the sky does there / where the graves are filled with dirt the color of fire.” Terrance Hayes reads his poem “Arbor for Butch,” which appears in his National Book Award–winning collection, Lighthead (Penguin Books), for this 2010 reading at the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
“Who doesn’t know how / doubt lifts the hem of its nightgown // to reveal another inch of thigh / before the face of faith?” In this video filmed at Washington University in St. Louis, Paul Tran reads their poem “Copernicus” featured in their debut collection, All the Flowers Kneeling (Penguin Books, 2022). A profile of Tran written by Rigoberto González is featured in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“Poetry is mere reality. No proof, just be here,” reads Alice Notley, author most recently of For the Ride (Penguin Books, 2020), in this reading held at the Poetry Project in New York City.
In this virtual poetry reading hosted by Annie Bloom’s Books, Teresa K. Miller reads from her new collection, Borderline Fortune (Penguin Books, 2021), and Amanda Moore reads from her debut collection, Requeening (Ecco, 2021), both winners of the 2020 National Poetry Series. Moore’s Requeening is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
In this 2017 craft talk for Hugo House, Terrance Hayes reads from his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018) and discusses the work and writing strategies of the late poet Lynda Hull.
“It was Dre who once said, / You lose something every day / Your mind on the way to the store / The floor on the way to your mind…” In this Ours Poetica video, Jacqueline Woodson reads “You Lose Something Every Day,” a poem from Willie Perdomo’s collection The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Books, 2019).
