Poets & Writers Theater

Based on the murder mystery book series by best-selling author Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club is directed by Chris Columbus and stars Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie. In the film, four retirees spend time solving cold case murders for fun and then are plunged into a real-life murder mystery.

“Translate literature and it will teach you how to write.” In this American Library in Paris event, Jhumpa Lahiri reads from her essay collection Translating Myself and Others (Princeton University Press, 2022) and talks about her latest book, Bone Into Stone (Sylph Editions, 2024), which details her experiences translating Ovid’s Metamorphoses from the Latin in partnership with the classicist Yelena Baraz.

In this Writers Speak event hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Patricia Lockwood speaks about her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead Books, 2025), and shares her experiences writing about health and illness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in a conversation with Tara K. Menon.

In this PBS NewsHour interview, Nicholas Boggs speaks about his new book, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), a biography which looks at the ways James Baldwin’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.

In this Books Are Magic video, Amanda Hess reads from her debut memoir, Second Life: Having a Child in the Digital Age (Doubleday, 2025), and speaks with Wesley Morris about her experiences using the internet for information and support during her pregnancy. Hess is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2025” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Written and directed by Bill Condon, this movie musical is based on the Tony Award–winning musical by Terrence McNally, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, and is the second film adaptation of the 1976 novel by Argentine author Manuel Puig. The film stars Jennifer Lopez in the titular role, alongside Diego Luna and Tonatiuh.

Chloé Caldwell reads from her second memoir, Trying (Graywolf Press, 2025), in this Green Apple Books event with Ariel Gore and Mia Arias Tsang in which they speak about the meaning of failure, the nuances of writing about relationships, and the process of representing queerness on the page. Caldwell’s book is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If writing has rules, they are exactly the same as the rules of living.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Rachel Cusk reads from her latest novel, Parade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and talks about her approach to writing, which includes focusing on the interplay of instinct, discipline, and authenticity.

In this Asia Society Switzerland event, South Korean author Bora Chung reads “To Meet Her” from her second story collection, Your Utopia (Algonquin Books, 2024), translated from the Korean by Anton Hur, and discusses how activism shaped her life and writing in a conversation with Serena Jung.

The History of Sound is a historical romantic drama film written by Ben Shattuck and based on his short story of the same name. Directed by Oliver Hermanus, the film stars Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor as Lionel and David who travel together recording folk songs after the end of World War I.

In this Poetry.LA video, Altadena co-poets laureate Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar read a selection of their poems and speak about how the Eaton Fire has affected their lives and community. Lennon and Sarwar were recently awarded a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets to launch their poetry project “After the Fires: Healing from Histories.”

In this Politics and Prose event with novelist Angie Kim, Ed Park discusses the twenty-five-year process of writing his first story collection, An Oral History of Atlantis (Random House, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. For more from Park, read his installation of our Ten Questions series.

“There are names for what binds us: / strong forces, weak forces. / Look around, you can see them.” Danusha Laméris reads and talks about “For What Binds Us” by Jane Hirshfield and shares why this poem is meaningful to her for “The Poem I Wish I Had Read” series in this video from the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.

In this TEDx Talk, Aimee McNee, author of We Need Your Art: Stop Messing Around and Make Something (Penguin Life, 2025), argues that creativity is not a luxury but a vital, radical act that can heal us.

Watch the trailer for My Oxford Year, a film adaptation of the debut novel of the same name by Julia Whelan. The film stars Sofia Carson as Anna, an ambitious American student with a keen interest in poetry who sets off for Oxford University and meets Jamie, played by Corey Mylchreest, a charming local who alters her plans.

In this 2020 Wheeler Centre virtual event, Roanna Gonsalves hosts a discussion about womanhood in fiction and the power of translation with Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season (New Directions, 2020), translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes; and Mieko Kawakami, author of Breasts and Eggs (Europa Editions, 2020), translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

In this Poets House event, Garrett Hongo reads from his fourth poetry collection, Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025), and Edward Hirsch reads from his new memoir, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025), followed by a conversation between the authors about their friendship and humor.

“She was a short story that kind of got too big and started rolling away from me,” says Katie Yee about her debut novel, Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books, 2025), in this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, in which they discuss writing outside of your own experience and usual style.

In this Creative Writing Series event at the University of Notre Dame, Kristen Arnett reads from her novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead Books, 2025) and talks about how she played with form by using different typefaces for “funny” and “not funny,” and her process to ensure that each joke lands.

Directed by Ebs Burnough, this documentary explores the influence that Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road, has had on writers, actors, storytellers and artists, and follows the lives of Americans who set off on their own journeys in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.