Poets & Writers Theater

In this Spring 2026 Book and Author Festival virtual event hosted by Penguin Random House, Library Journal, and School Library Journal, Edwidge Danticat, author of Dèy (Knopf, 2026), Andrew Sean Greer, author of Villa Coco (Doubleday, 2026), and Ruth Ozeki, author of The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions (Viking, 2026), talk about their new books with librarian Jen Jumba.

In this Green Apple Books event moderated by Brendan McHugh, Steven Pfau reads from his debut book, Say Nephew: On Boyhood, Unclehood, and Queer Mentorship (Catapult, 2026), and discusses his desire to write a book about his uncle in the style of “autotheory,” inspired by  Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies.

In this virtual interview, Griffin Poetry Prize trustee Ian Williams speaks with poet Kevin Young about how Dante’s Divine Comedy inspired his collection Night Watch (Knopf, 2025), for which he won the 2026 international Griffin Poetry Prize.

In this 2012 PBS NewsHour interview, Iranian French author Marjane Satrapi speaks about her autobiographical graphic novels and films Persepolis and Chicken With Plums, and why she feels comics are the best form for her writing. Satrapi died at the age of fifty-six on June 4, 2026.

“I was writing this book that was kind of longing for the city that I actually lived in.” In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Natalie Adler talks about the loneliness she felt in New York City during the pandemic and how it inspired her to write her debut novel, Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth, 2026), which takes place at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1984.

In this video, Lillian Li talks about her desire to write about friendships and friendship breakups, and the experience of growing up in a hypercompetitive Chinese American community in her second novel, Bad Asians (Henry Holt, 2026), for this Politics and Prose event with Angie Kim.

“I think philosophy was my first reading love. It was through philosophy that I entered literature.” In this Mahindra Humanities Center event at Harvard University, Tamil novelist and translator Anuk Arudpragasam speaks with Tara K. Menon about writing while working on his doctorate in philosophy and shares insights about his novels The Story of a Brief Marriage (Flatiron Books, 2016) and A Passage North (Hogarth Press, 2021).

“It’s the women in my life who have held a steady glow for me.” In this video, Minda Honey reads from her memoir, The Heartbreak Years (Little A, 2023), and speaks about cultural expectations of women and long-term relationships with co-hosts Christina Fisanick and Damian Dressick for this event from the Writers Association of Northern Appalachia. For more from Honey, read “The Joy of the Tortured Artist: Why We Write, Even When We Hate to Write” featured in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Louisiana Channel interview, Nobel Prize–winning author Orhan Pamuk talks about being known as a political writer and how his novel The Museum of Innocence (Knopf, 2009) led to the establishment of a real-life museum of the same name in Istanbul, Turkey, which offers a meditation on memory, objects, and storytelling.

In this installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series, Cindy Juyoung Ok reads a selection of poems from her debut collection, Ward Toward (Yale University Press, 2024), which won the 2023 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, and some newer poems inspired by her experience as a neurosurgical patient.

“There really isn’t anything quite like a book to understand the perspective of others, and translated fiction takes that even further.” In this video, singer, songwriter, and host of the Service95 Book Club podcast Dua Lipa delivers the opening speech for the tenth anniversary of the International Booker Prize about the impact and importance of translated literature.

In this Cover to Cover podcast interview hosted by Emily Y. Wu, writer and translator Lin King talks about the nuances of Taiwanese and Japanese culture, and the process of translating Yáng Shuāng-zi’s novel Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press, 2024), which won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the 2026 International Booker Prize. “I feel like the food was, in some ways, the toughest part for me to translate,” says King.

In this event at the American Library in Paris, Sasha Debevec-McKenney, author of Joy Is My Middle Name (Norton, 2025), and Oluwaseun Olayiwola, author of Strange Beach (Soft Skull Press, 2025), speak about their debut collections, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the U.K., in a conversation with writer and researcher Emma Gomis. Debevec-McKenney is the winner of the 2026 Swansea University Dylan Thomas Prize.

In this Books Are Magic event, Jimin Han reads from her novel Dreamt I Found You (Little, Brown, 2026) and talks about the book’s setting and the diversity of Korean American enclaves in New England in a conversation with Marie Myung-Ok Lee. For more from Han, read “A Win Right on Time: Contests for Older Writers” in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Free Library of Philadelphia event, M Lin reads from her debut story collection, The Memory Museum (Graywolf Press, 2026), and discusses how her background in film and art history shapes her writing in a conversation with ‘Pemi Aguda. Lin’s book is featured in Page One in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2017 interview at Claremont Graduate University, Marianne Boruch talks about her 2011 collection, The Book of Hours, for which she won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and how poetry remains a “mysterious form” and creates a space where “it’s a pleasure to be elsewhere.” Boruch is the recipient of the 2026 Jackson Poetry Prize.

In this Beyond Baroque event, poets David Quiroz and Joseph Rios join Alan Chazaro for a reading to celebrate the launch of his second collection, These Spaceships Weren’t Built for Us (Tia Chucha Press, 2026). For more from Chazaro, read the latest installment of Literary MagNet in the May/June 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Green Apple Books event, Emilie Lygren, author of Once I Was a Stone (Wayfarer Books, 2025), and Deema K. Shehabi, author of Water to Water: Gaza Renga (Interlink Books, 2025), read a selection of their poems and discuss their experiences with writing communities and creating time and space for their writing.

In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event, Jung Yun reads from her third novel, All the World Can Hold (37 INK, 2026), and talks about complicated characters and how she stays focused and motivated through writer’s block in a conversation with Jane Delury.

In this video, Diane Ackerman reads a selection of poems from the fiftieth-anniversary edition of her debut collection, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, published by Marginalian Editions, and discusses her lifelong obsession with poetics in a conversation with Maria Popova for this McNally Jackson Books event at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn.