Poets & Writers Theater

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 Fall Fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist May-Zhee Lim, readers include Hillary Behrman, Denise Derya Brandt, Kim Coleman Foote, Sophia Huneycutt, Rachel León, Kat Lewis, Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, Radhika Singh, Grace Spulak, and Diana Xin.

In this Green Apple Books event, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents a night of readings featuring writers François Luong, Aimee Phan, Minnie Phan, and Thien Pham, sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library and San Francisco Arts Commission.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Bryan Washington speaks about how his experiences in Tokyo and Osaka informed his latest novel, Palaver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and how third-person narratives reflect the estrangement of being in a different country.

For the “Seriously Celebrating the New Yorker’s 100th Anniversary: Fiction” event hosted by the House of SpeakEasy at Joe’s Pub in New York, Yiyun Li weaves together stories about connecting with hairdressers in salons over the years and how real-life stories can sometimes transform into different stories through fiction writing. “People tell us stories and our stories live in their memory. And hair grows, life goes on,” says Li.

Watch the trailer for The Thing With Feathers directed by Dylan Southern and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. A film adaptation of the novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter (Graywolf Press, 2016), the film follows a grieving widow who is greeted by an unwanted house guest while struggling to raise two young sons.

In this discussion hosted by the University of Southern California, Elaine Hsieh Chou talks about playing with surrealism and absurdism in her new short story collection, Where Are You Really From (Penguin Press, 2025), and reflects on the impact of her debut novel, Disorientation (Penguin Books, 2022), in a conversation with Dr. Dorinne Kondo.

“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” In this video that originally aired in 2012, poet Joy Harjo reads her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” which appears in her collection The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Norton, 1994), for PBS NewsHour.

Watch the trailer for Hamnet, a film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film follows the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, and the impact of their young son’s tragic death on their lives.

In this 60 Minutes interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about her response to book banning, her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025), and why she says the popularity of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is “not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly the twists and turns of history.”

In this Books Are Magic event, Lana Lin reads from her book The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2025) and discusses how she uses both Gertrude Stein and Audre Lorde’s genre-bending approaches to autobiography in order to highlight Asian diasporic narratives in a conversation with Monique Truong.

In this event hosted by City Lights Bookstore, Harryette Mullen reads from her latest poetry collection, Regaining Consciousness (Graywolf Press, 2025), and talks about how her poetics remain playful even in the face of disaster in a conversation with Tonya M. Foster.

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Patti Smith offers advice to young artists and talks about her award-winning memoir, Just Kids, and her new memoir, Bread of Angels (Random House, 2025).

In this PBS NewsHour interview, director Raoul Peck speaks about his new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5, which examines the writings of George Orwell and interweaves clips, readings from the author’s diary, cinematic references, and modern-day footage to propose how prophetic his novels and work have become.

In this virtual reading and celebration, Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González introduces the 2025 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors: Princess Joy L. Perry, author of This Here Is Love (Norton, 2025); Vishwas R. Gaitonde, author of On Earth as It Is in Heaven (Orison Books, 2025); Yael Valencia Aldana, author of Black Mestiza (University Press of Kentucky, 2025); Lauren K. Watel, author of Book of Potions (Sarabande Books, 2025); and Jennifer Eli Bowen, author of The Book of Kin: On Absence, Love, and Being There (Milkweed Editions, 2025).

In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Ocean Vuong speaks about how the Japanese concept of negative space, ma, influences his approach to the line in both prose and poetry, and why he wants to write eight books in total by the end of his career.

In this event hosted by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System and the Office of Human Rights, Julian Brave NoiseCat talks about how his father’s experiences at a segregated boarding school in Canada inspired his debut book, We Survived the Night (Knopf, 2025), and about the importance of oral storytelling, family stories, and ancestral myths. NoiseCat is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2025” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Service95 Book Club interview hosted by Dua Lipa, Margaret Atwood talks about the research she conducted in order to imagine the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) while writing the novel in Berlin during the Cold War and how the current political landscape is reflective of the themes in her book.

In this New Yorker Festival event, George Saunders and Zadie Smith speak about their respective careers in writing and dissect some of their New Yorker stories in a conversation with the magazine’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Joy Harjo reflects on becoming a poet and artist in the turbulence of the seventies in America and talks about the process of writing her memoir Girl Warrior: On Coming of Age (Norton, 2025). Harjo’s book is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My maker told his tale. And I will tell you mine.” Watch the new trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz. The film is in select theaters for a limited run and will debut on Netflix on November 7.