Poets & Writers Theater

“I think it’s really important for writers to understand themselves as artists.” At the 92nd Street Y, longtime friends Eileen Myles and Chris Kraus read from their work and have a conversation about their life experiences and writing processes.

This animated book trailer captures the elements of thriller, mystery, and fable present in Australian author Fiona McFarlane’s debut novel, The Night Guest (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013). McFarlane received the 2017 International Dylan Thomas Prize for her story collection, The High Places (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016).  

“If I say that I am black, what do you know about my interior?” Poet Dawn Lundy Martin delivers the Leslie Scalapino Lecture in Innovative Poetics at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

“The snake is the whole plot and then the rats are the elements. So the rats have to be fed to the snake in order to nourish the snake.” Fiction writer Annie Hartnett, author of the debut novel Rabbit Cake (Tin House, 2017), is interviewed by Bill Kenower in Seattle for the Pacific Northwest Writers Association.

“Today I will take pride in my appearance. I’ll shower, get dressed in proper clothes, and only change into yoga clothes for yoga, which, today, I will actually attend.” Maria Semple reads from and discusses her novel Today Will Be Different (Little, Brown and Company, 2016).

“I’m no moaning bluet, mountable / linnet, mumbling nun. I’m / tangible, I’m gin. Able to molt / in toto, to limn.” Paisley Rekdal, who was named the new Utah state poet laureate in May 2017, recites her poem “Self-Portrait as Mae West Anagram” for the Utah Division of Arts and Museums. 

“It had started as a family joke: Dad always orders the mixed grill in restaurants, Dad only wants to go to restaurants with mixed grill on the menu.” Patricia Lockwood, poet and author of the memoir Priestdaddy (Riverhead Books, 2017), performs a dramatic reading of a passage from Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001) for the literary nonprofit O, Miami.

“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 the poem “Remember” from her 1983 collection, She Had Some Horses. Harjo is the winner of the 2017 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and is featured in “Vote of Confidence: The Life-Changing Support of an NEA Fellowship” in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“This poem ‘Home’ is not only talking about ‘home,’ a physical place. It’s also talking about language as a home which I feel exiled from.” Safiya Sinclair, author of the debut collection Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016) and winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads from “Home” and talks about the multiple languages and places that inhabit her poems.

LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs, winner of a 2016 Whiting Award for poetry, reads “damn right it’s betta than yours” from her collection, TwERK (Belladonna, 2013), and talks about the influences of music and language on her writing. 

The Dark Tower is a film sequel to Stephen King’s eight-novel series of the same name, which was published between 1982 and 2004 and inspired by Robert Browning’s poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.” Directed by Nikolaj Arcel and starring Idris Elba, Matthew McConaughey, and Katheryn Winnick, the film will premiere in August.

“There in the sky an atomized sun.” Sally Wen Mao, winner of the 2016 Amy Award, reads her poetry at Buffalo Street Books in Ithaca, New York. Applications for the 2017 Amy Awards are now being accepted.

“He always plays with this tension between the life above and the life below.” In this short animated film, artist Ilana Simons presents a biography of Haruki Murakami and highlights moments in his life that have influenced his writing.

Allen Ginsberg’s anti-war poem “Hum Bom!” is read by Bono and then discussed by U.S. poet laureate Juan Felipe Herrera and Harvard professor Elisa New. New is the creator of Poetry in America, a multi-platform digital initiative that offers professional development classes for educational practitioners, as well as free online poetry courses.

In this video, writers and book lovers—including Rumaan Alam, Ann Patchett, Jacqueline Woodson, Neil Gaiman, Mira Jacob, Benjamin Percy, and Peter Straub—help celebrate Independent Bookstore Day and the opening of Books Are Magic. The new bookstore is run by novelist Emma Straub and her husband Michael Fusco-Straub in Brooklyn. 

“I wanted very much to write an accurate historical novel because I was so troubled about how hate can operate in our hearts.” Min Jin Lee introduces herself and talks about the impetus for her second novel, Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), a story that follows four generations of a Korean immigrant family in twentieth-century Japan.

“What persuades in poetry, what moves, what transforms—and what is memorable—starts with music.” Jorie Graham talks about the importance of musicality and the influences of American modernist and English romantic poetry on her writing. Graham’s new collection, Fast (Ecco, 2017), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“In literature you get these magical moments when you can actually feel yourself to be somebody else...and those moments I think are incredibly important for the development of a society because they’re expansive moments.” Hisham Matar, winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in autobiography for his debut memoir, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (Random House, 2016), talks about the role literature plays in creating social change.

The Circle (Knopf/McSweeney’s Books, 2013), Dave Eggers’s dystopian novel about a young woman who rises through the ranks of a powerful tech and social media company, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by James Ponsoldt, the film stars John Boyega, Tom Hanks, and Emma Watson.

“Books tend to get short shrift in the cultural world,” says Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, in this interview with James Brown. Lucas speaks about the foundation’s goal to promote a love of writing and the BookUp program, which connects young people with published authors and provides free copies of books.