Poets & Writers Theater

“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.

“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.

In this event at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, Michael Luo talks about how a series of tweets reacting to a hate crime he experienced led to an exploration of early nineteenth-century Chinese immigration, which began the process for his debut book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, 2025). “In order to understand this kind of present, you have to go back,” Luo says.

In this DC Public Library event, Imani Perry speaks with Clint Smith about the recurrence of the color blue in her life and how it sparked an aesthetic examination of the color’s place in African and Black history for her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025).

In this Poetry Night Panel event at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., Brandel France de Bravo, author of Locomotive Cathedral (The Backwaters Press, 2025), and Julie Choffel, author of Dear Wallace (The Backwaters Press, 2024), read a selection of poems and join María Fernanda for a conversation about how literature helps one grapple with the challenges of life.

“I wanted to write about a father and daughter in a building made of time.” Madeleine Thien talks about the genealogy of ideas and yearslong process of writing her novel The Book of Records (Norton, 2025) in this Toronto Public Library event with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. For more from Thien, read “Hopeless Hope: A Conversation With Madeleine Thien” by Renée H. Shea.

“Are those who don’t know history only doomed to resell it at a higher price?” In this short film directed by Jasmine Ogunjimi, award-winning slam poet Pages Matam reads their poem “Hope as Home.” The film was produced by Da Poetry Lounge Co. and executive produced by HOPE, Inc., an organization that provides support for those experiencing housing discrimination.

In this event hosted by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland, Kevin Nguyen talks about how his experiences in journalism, and the histories of Japanese American incarceration and the Vietnam War, shaped his second novel, Mỹ Documents (One World, 2025), and the ways in which he sees this book as “an imagination of policy” rather than speculative fiction.

In this PBS Independent Lens documentary codirected by Dawn Logsdon, who also narrates, and Lucie Faulknor, the history of public libraries is uncovered, from the quiet revolutionaries who opened these doors to all, to today’s librarians who service the public in an age of closures and book bans. “Libraries are not just about books. They’re about people, and they’re about stories.”

“It’s an opportunity for a character, whose story could not have been told by [Mark] Twain, to have his story told.” In this short video, Percival Everett speaks about his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Everett won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James.

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity / we once were?” Marie Howe, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, reads her poem “Singularity” in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Read By poetry film series.

In this Books Are Magic event, Cathy Linh Che reads from her second poetry collection, Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), and talks about how her parents’ experience as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now shaped her book in a conversation with poet Wo Chan.

In this Poets & Writers Live event introduced by Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González, Douglas Kearney reads from his new poetry collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books, 2025), and joins Poets & Writers Magazine contributing editor Destiny O. Birdsong for a conversation. A profile of Kearney by Birdsong appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author Vauhini Vara talks about the current discourse of artificial intelligence and the ChatGPT conversation that led to writing her essay collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025).

For this Straits Times video, Korean author Baek Se-hee and translator Anton Hur reflect on the global success and universal resonance of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) and discuss the current state of mental health in East Asian countries in their first joint interview.

“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.