Poets & Writers Theater

“The loneliest people have the earth to love / And not one friend their own age.” Jericho Brown reads his poem “Labor,” which appears in his second poetry collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), in this video for the Dear Poet series, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.

In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event in Baltimore, Lydia Millet reads from her story collection Atavists (Norton, 2025) and discusses the humor in her writing in a conversation with Betsy Boyd. Atavists is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If only the sky were kind enough to lend me his blue coat.” In this video, Yuki Tanaka reads an excerpt from the title poem of his debut collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I was doing nine years in prison, and poems became my way to see the world.” In this Common Read event hosted by the Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University, Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon (Norton, 2020), answers questions from the audience and presents a lecture and reading introduced by Louisiana poet laureate Alison Pelegrin.

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist Jennifer Huang, readers include Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Roohi Choudhry, Kerry Donoghue, Lacey N. Dunham, Shasta Grant, Laura Venita Green, Benedict Nguyễn, Miranda Schmidt, and Daniel Tam-Claiborne.

In this Strand Book Store event, Torrey Peters reads from her book Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories (Random House, 2025) and talks about the experience of transitioning and how literature can broaden understandings of self beyond identity in a conversation with essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu. “A lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like the reader,” says Peters.

In this Villanova University Literary Festival event, Victoria Chang reads from her poetry collections Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and speaks about her ekphrastic poems and the power of writing in conversation with other artists and people in her life.

In this event hosted by the Palestine Festival of Literature and Mizna in Minneapolis, poets Mosab Abu Toha, Sarah Aziza, Nick Estes, Dina Omar, Sagirah Shahid, Danez Smith, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha come together for an evening of performance, music, and conversation about the meaning and power of literature.

In this Lambda Literary video, Rob Macaisa Colgate reads “History of Display,” which appears in his debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures (Tin House Books, 2025). The collection is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Poetry in the Park event in Milwaukee’s Juneau Park hosted by Juneau Park Friends and Woodland Pattern, poets Aleena Ahmed, Ajamou Butler, Steven Espada Dawson, and Margaret Rozga read a selection of poems. Dawson, author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025), is featured in Literary MagNet in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, answers questions about the journal’s mission, slush piles, and her editorial process in this virtual event with Becky Tuch for the Lit Mag News Roundup. An interview with Acker about the Common’s fifteenth anniversary is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.

In this event hosted by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Jane Wong reads “To Love a Mosquito,” a chapter from her memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), and pieces of her mother’s diary, followed by a discussion about her approaches to poetry versus creative nonfiction.

“I knew I was a god / when you could not / agree on my name // & still, none you spoke / could force me to listen / closer.” In this video, Meg Day reads “Portrait of My Gender as [Inaudible]” as part of Dear Poet, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.

In this video from the University of South Carolina Irvin Department of Rare Books & Special Collections, scholars talk about their special exhibit celebrating 100 years since F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was published with items ranging from first editions of the novel, editions owned by writers like Sylvia Plath, and ephemera from the author’s life.

In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.

In this interactive Narrative 4 writing workshop, Deborah Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024), leads participants through practical exercises on self-discovery, shares exemplary work, and discusses how a memoir can answer the question: “Who am I?” Taffa says: “We’re telling people what we’ve learned in the time that has transpired between when we were that character on the page and who we are now.”

In this Penguin Random House video, Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur (Viking, 2024), and Dan Jones, author of Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Viking, 2024), share insights into their writing and research processes.

In this episode of the Ehkili podcast, Sahar Mustafah talks to author and editor Susan Muaddi Darraj to discuss her anthology, Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing From the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press, 2024), and the significance of amplifying Palestinian literary voices.

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Roxane Gay talks about how the word feminism has been defined through the centuries, the work included in her new anthology, The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Classics, 2025), and writing a romance novel with Channing Tatum.