Poets & Writers Theater

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.

In this Books Are Magic event, Jaquira Díaz reads from her debut novel, This Is the Only Kingdom (Algonquin Books, 2025), and discusses what inspired her to write a queer coming-of-age story in a conversation with Lupita Aquino and Angie Cruz. Díaz’s novel is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this event hosted by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, poet and biologist Brandon Kilbourne talks about the relationship between scientific inquiry and poetics which manifests in his debut poetry collection, Natural History (Graywolf Press, 2025), and reads a selection of poems. Kilbourne’s collection is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Politics and Prose event, Esther Ifesinachi Okonkwo reads from her debut novel, The Tiny Things Are Heavier (Bloomsbury, 2025), and talks about how writing a coming-of-age story helped her understand her own experiences in migrating to the United States from Nigeria in a conversation with Gbenga Adesina.

“I was little and lost / the season I learned to be still...” In this Charis Circle event, Donika Kelly reads poems from her new collection, The Natural Order of Things (Graywolf Press, 2025), and speaks with Jericho Brown about family, home, and her writing process. Read a profile of Kelly by Brian Gresko in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of The Write Reasons podcast, Susan Orlean talks about how her first memoir, Joyride (Avid Reader Press, 2025), originated from her reflections of her 1992 Esquire essay, “The American Male at Age Ten,” in a conversation with Simon & Schuster CEO Jonathan Karp. Orlean’s memoir is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this CBS Mornings segment with cohost Gayle King, Oprah Winfrey announces her latest book club pick, A Guardian and a Thief (Knopf, 2025), and speaks with author Megha Majumbar about the themes of her novel and how becoming a parent changed how she viewed her characters. Read Majumbar’s installment of our Ten Questions series.

“I think I just really wanted to show a version of the city that we don’t see as often in popular culture.” In this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Jade Chang discusses the nuances of writing about Los Angeles in her latest novel, What a Time to Be Alive (Ecco, 2025). Read Chang’s installation of our Ten Questions series.

In this 2023 Harvard Radcliffe Institute event, Gabrielle Calvocoressi reads from their collection The New Economy (Copper Canyon Press, 2025) and discusses the relationship between the vessel of the body and the vessel of the poem in a conversation with Claudia Rizzini. The New Economy is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.