Poets & Writers Theater

“It always feels to me…all the way through writing a project, that the characters are actually real people and my job is to do justice to them,” says Sally Rooney about writing and adapting the characters of her novel Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) to the screen for the BBC/Hulu television series in this Waterstones interview with director Lenny Abrahamson and actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

“The most astonishing thing to happen in the almost 14 billion years since the birth of the cosmos is that ordinary, apparentle inert matter, has—by its self-organizing capacity (or, autopoesis)—become conscious.” Harry Dodge reads from his debut book, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Books, 2020), and discusses its themes in a conversation with Maggie Nelson in their Los Angeles home.

As part of a fundraising effort to help Chicago independent bookstore Volumes Bookcafe during the coronavirus pandemic shutdown, Rebecca Makkai enlisted over two dozen writers—including Kristen Arnett, Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, Andrew Sean Greer, Lauren Groff, Mira Jacob, Mitchell S. Jackson, R. O. Kwon, Victor LaValle, and Susan Orlean—to participate in a collective performance of the dance scene from John Hughes’s classic 1985 high school film, The Breakfast Club.  

“It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three. / ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’” Jeremy Irons reads the opening lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” accompanied by Glenn Brown’s oil painting The Shallow End, for the “Ancient Mariner” Big Read, an online audio and visual art project curated and produced by the University of Plymouth with forty readers—including Simon Armitage, Alan Cumming, Willem Dafoe, Olivia Laing, Hilary Mantel, Iggy Pop, Ali Smith, Tilda Swinton, Neil Tennant, and Jeanette Winterson.

“I think for art you do kind of have to wait for the inspiration to strike. You have to let all these feelings sort of simmer and build up inside you.” C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), talks about her writing process and how the characters of her novel pushed her to write their stories in this interview for Late Night With Seth Meyers.

“The more words he knew the more clearly he could share with the world what he was thinking, feeling, and dreaming.” In this video, Barack and Michelle Obama join Chicago Public Library’s “Live From the Library” storytime session, to speak about their love of libraries and read The Word Collector (Orchard Books, 2018) written and illustrated by Peter H. Reynolds.

In this installment of the AAWW at Home series, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of the novel Starling Days (Overlook Press, 2020), talks about how she’s been occupied during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and reads from Alexander Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018). 

In this PEN to Paper series video, PEN America president Jennifer Egan guides viewers through a short writing exercise involving a “word throw,” designed to help writers to free up their minds to the unconscious imagination. The series is part of PEN America’s 2020 World Voices Festival: These Truths, held digitally this year.

On The Kristen Arnett Show based at the Black Mountain Institute and presented by Literary Hub on Instagram Live, Arnett talks about launching the paperback edition of her first novel, Mostly Dead Things (Tin House Books, 2019), and discusses life during the pandemic with special guest Hanif Abdurraqib.

“We thought / Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning / Names in heat, in elements classical / Philosophers said could change us.” In this Paris Review video, Jericho Brown reads two poems from his most recent collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), for which he received the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Filmed in 2019 in the woods of Decatur, Georgia, “Poets in Space” was directed and produced by Daniel Grossman and Sean Webley in collaboration with the poet Malachi Black.

“Looking down from the window / into the bare augur sycamore tree / in the park across the street / the surprise is how full / of red-winged blackbirds it is…” In this Poets House Presents video, Ed Roberson shares new and unpublished poems still in drafts written during the coronavirus pandemic from his home in Chicago. Roberson is the recipient of the 2020 Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded annually by Poets & Writers to an American poet of exceptional talent.

“What are these memoirs? What are these journals? They’re always a list of cool stuff.” In this Saturday Night Live video, actor and writer Aidy Bryant rediscovers journals from her childhood revealing her innermost thoughts and love for such things as turtles and Rosie O’Donnell.

For the Literary Hub’s Rekindled series, ZYZZYVA magazine editor Oscar Villalon interviews illustrator and cartoonist Lisa Brown about her book Long Story Short: 100 Classic Books in Three Panels (Algonquin Books, 2020), which distills well-known works of literature—including Atonement, Beloved, Madame Bovary, Twilight, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being—to three-panel comic strips.

“A washing line strung from our house to theirs, / those neighbourly neighbours, settlers / from a lost age and a childless planet.” From his attic, Simon Armitage reads his poem “Miniatures” from his latest collection, Magnetic Field: The Marsden Poems (Faber & Faber, 2020).

“The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the screen, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own.” Paul Lisicky reads from his memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020) in this online reading event for Books Are Magic with Susan Choi. For more Lisicky, read his installation of Ten Questions.

“Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent / on your inability to describe your undoing.” Lara Mimosa Montes reads from her latest poetry collection, Thresholes (Coffee House Press, 2020), and answers questions about writing as part of the Loft Literary Center’s annual Wordplay festival, held virtually this year.

Mary Beth Keane, author of the novel Ask Again, Yes (Scribner, 2020), gives a tour of the various bookshelves in her home as part of Simon & Schuster’s Bookshelf Tour video series in which authors provide a glimpse of the books they’ve accumulated on their shelves, share details about how their books are (or aren’t) organized, and talk about the independent bookstores they support.

“The police will tell her anyone might have missed these things, and she has no reason to feel responsible. She does, nevertheless.” From his home, Stephen King reads from the title novella of his new collection, If It Bleeds (Scribner, 2020).

To celebrate the launch of The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer (Avid Reader Press, 2020), authors Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer speak with novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, literary agent Annie Hwang, publicist Michael Taeckens, and publisher and editor Jamia Wilson about the need for new voices in literature and the ins and outs of the literary world in this online event hosted by the Center for Fiction.

“It’s a novel about how grief makes people hilariously selfish, especially when the internet is involved,” says Kevin Nguyen about his debut novel, New Waves (One World, 2020), in this first episode of Literary Hub’s Sheltering video series hosted by Maris Kreizman. Nguyen also talks about how he’s been spending his time cooking and watching television during the coronavirus pandemic.