Poets & Writers Theater

“That is what my grandfather, Glafkos, must have felt like. / Wandering the hillsides and down to the sea while his parents labored...” In Delphi 1927, a multimedia performance by Eleni Sikelianos, the poet examines her family history and her great grandparents’ efforts to revive the Delphic Festivals. Sikelianos’s collection What I Knew (Nightboat Books, 2019) is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The poetry podcast Haiku Chronicles celebrates Poem in Your Pocket Day with this video featuring poems from Yosa Buson, Akiko Yosano, Allen Ginsberg, and others.

“Forgive / yourself, they say, but / after you forgive / what you have lived, / what is left?” At San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center, Forrest Gander reads “Stepping Out of the Light” from his collection Be With (New Directions, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize award in poetry.

“The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.” Young-Ha Kim delivers a TEDx Talk about all children beginning as artists, novel writing as a process of composing one sentence after another, and the value of a world in which everyone creates art, whether in public or in private. Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019), translated from the Korean by Krys Lee, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Jan-Henry Gray talks about recipe poems and the structural parallels between poetry and cooking in this short film by Talia Sadie Feder. Gray’s debut poetry collection, Documents (BOA Editions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video from the Wigtown Book Festival in Scotland, the Bookshop Band performs “Death to the Kindle” inspired by The Diary of a Bookseller (Melville House, 2018) by Shaun Bythell. English singer-songwriters Beth Porter and Ben Please compose music based on books and writers and are featured in News and Trends in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Based on real events, Women Talking is the story of eight women in a remote Mennonite colony who face an agonizing decision in the aftermath of a series of unspeakable sexual crimes.” This book trailer introduces Miriam Toews’s seventh novel, Women Talking (Bloomsbury, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I begin with love, hoping to end there. / I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.” Jericho Brown reads “Duplex” from his third poetry collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There’s this kind of irresolvable trap that occurs when you’re too young to have any power but old enough to know that you want some.” Jenny Zhang reads from her essay “Blond Girls in Cheongsams,” which is included in the collection The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America (Little, Brown, 2019) edited by Nikesh Shukla and Chimene Suleyman.

“When I was writing, I was trying hard not to sensationalize it,” Claire Adam says of Trinidad, where she grew up and set her debut novel, Golden Child (SJP for Hogarth, 2019). On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Adam also talks about the important role education played in her life and why she wouldn’t let her siblings read the book until it was completed.

“Manuscript drafts and maps in Tolkien’s own hand show how the characters and the narrative developed,” says John McQuillen, associate curator at the Morgan Library & Museum, about the “Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth” exhibit. This is the largest collection ever assembled of J. R. R. Tolkien’s original manuscripts, drawings, and illustrated maps, which inspired and were created alongside many of his most famous works.

“I’ve always wanted to meet Stephen King—he’s like the author of all my nightmares.” In this video, Kristen Roupenian reveals some of her favorite things, dreams, secrets, and excuses. Her debut short story collection, You Know You Want This (Gallery/Scout Press, 2019), includes “Cat Person,” which was published by the New Yorker in 2017 and went viral on the Internet.

“Love was not a word that was ever said in our house. It suddenly felt like a great secret, rediscovered.” Chris Rush’s coming-of-age debut memoir, The Light Years (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), is set in the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on the author’s childhood and teen years spent exploring drugs and counterculture.

“The book looks at my experience and goes through some of the stories and the encounters that I have lived through while also looking at this larger sense that our culture right now is going through its own existential crisis.” Amber Tamblyn, author of Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution (Crown Archetype, 2019), talks about her coming-of-age memoir and her personal approach to activism.

“Take a microscope to the face of a beautiful woman and tell me it isn’t grotesque. Poetry is such a broad genre, it covers so many ways of looking.” Kim Hyesoon talks about her newest collection, Autobiography of a Death (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, what it means to be a female poet, and why she thinks poetry is disappearing in this 2018 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

His Dark Materials is a television series adaptation of Philip Pullman’s award-winning fantasy adventure trilogy of the same name, comprising of the novels The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. Directed by Tom Hooper, the series stars Tyler Howitt, Dafne Keen, James McAvoy, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Ruth Wilson, and follows the coming-of-age story of two children discovering their identities and destinies while journeying through parallel universes.

“I have to wait a long time / for the softer voice of his own / to come through.” In this 2012 reading, the late Mary Oliver reads a selection of poems from her book A Thousand Mornings (Penguin Press, 2012) at the 92nd Street Y.

“Sometimes people love us in ways we do not understand how to be loved.” In this Button Poetry video, Blythe Baird, author of the debut poetry collection, If My Body Could Speak (Button Poetry, 2019), reads her poem “An Invitation.”

“I was thinking about a whole load of names, the likes of Hamsun, Dostoevsky, Kafka...authors whose writing would be completely unfamiliar to us if it weren’t for the transformative, transcendental power of translation.” Martin Aitken—who has translated numerous Scandinavian authors including Helle Helle, Josefine Klougart, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Dorthe Nors—accepts the 2019 PEN Translation Prize for his translation from the Norwegian of Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Love (Archipelago Books, 2018).

“What are the ethics around documenting political crises? How much do you become a parasite of people’s suffering? What good do you do to a situation by documenting it or fictionalizing it? These are all questions that are in the novel.” Valeria Luiselli discusses the unique challenges of writing about the ongoing migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border in her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, 2019), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown. An interview with Luiselli by Lauren LeBlanc appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.