Poets & Writers Theater

“The questions that I try to answer in the book, through fiction, are questions about people I knew when I was a child…I made up the answers because I could not access the real answers.” In this Entertainment Weekly video, De’Shawn Charles Winslow, author of the debut novel, In West Mills (Bloomsbury, 2019), speaks with fellow debut authors Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Sarah M. Broom, Linda Holmes, and Lisa Taddeo about the inspiration and evolution of their books. Winslow is featured in “First Fiction 2019” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Yesterday I lost a country. / I was in a hurry, / and I didn’t notice when it fell from me...” Dunya Mikhail reads her poem “I Was in a Hurry” in Arabic and English, accompanied by the National Arab Orchestra. Her fourth poetry collection, In Her Feminine Sign (New Directions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August 2019 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My favorite form is the long short story or the novella because I think it allows you a little bit more breadth and scope in terms of what you can do.” Brian Evenson, whose eighth story collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from his work and talks about teaching, writing habits, and spirituality in this video from the 2014 Mission Creek Festival.

Emilie Pine talks about fear of failure, connecting to readers, being open about grief and loss, and the power of storytelling with Ireland Unfiltered’s Dion Fanning. Pine’s debut essay collection, Notes to Self (Dial Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Rule No. 10: Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.” Colson Whitehead, whose seventh novel, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads his 2012 New York Times piece “How to Write” at the Muldoon’s Picnic variety show in New York City in 2015.

“I think desire is at once the thing we think most about and also our most slippery secret, and I wanted to explore the nuance of that intersection.” In this Simon & Schuster interview, Lisa Taddeo discusses the intimate research done for her first book, Three Women (Avid Reader Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It was an attempt to see if language can really be a bridge, as it is often aspired to be, and ultimately that it could fail.” In this video, Ocean Vuong speaks about the letter he wrote to his illiterate mother that inspired his debut novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019). A profile of Vuong by Rigoberto González appears in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s hard to imagine the pain of another without being swallowed by it.” Dave Harris reads “Preparing a Meal” from his debut poetry collection, Patricide, which was published by Button Poetry in May.

Vita & Virginia is a film adaptation of Eileen Atkins’s 1992 play of the same name, based on love letters Virginia Woolf exchanged over the course of a decade-long affair with Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration behind Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography. Directed by Chanya Button, the biopic stars Gemma Arterton as West, Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini as Baroness Sackville.

“Beautiful, wonderful, amazing, fantastic: three-syllable hyperbole when playing the coquette. / Lovely, little, lastly likely: two-syllable hyperbole when listing features to describe the coquette.” Duy Doan reads “Love Trinkets” from his debut poetry collection, We Play a Game (Yale University Press, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry.

“Still under construction, the kiss as thunderclouds in summer sky that sometimes means lightning, as the smell of after rain.” In this Poetry.LA video, Keegan Lester reads from his debut collection, this shouldn't be beautiful but it was & it was all i had so i drew it (Slope Editions, 2017), and speaks with Lisa Grove about nostalgia, Bob Dylan, and the themes and influences behind his work.

The Goldfinch, adapted from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Donna Tartt, follows a young man who turns to the world of art forgery after the loss of his mother. Directed by John Crowley, with a screenplay by Peter Straughan, the film stars Ansel Elgort, Nicole Kidman, Sarah Paulson, and Jeffrey Wright.

“The extraordinary thing about this book is it talks of a world in transition—philosophically, politically, intellectually, socially—and that is the age that we live in now.” Bettany Hughes, chair of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and fellow judges speak about Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press, 2018) written by Jokha Alharthi and translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, which won this year’s award. Alharthi is the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, and the first author from the Arabian Gulf to win the prize.

“I’m very skeptical of the way in which books are marketed as commodities, almost like accessories which people can fill their homes with,” says Sally Rooney in this interview at the 2018 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark. Rooney’s second novel, Normal People (Hogarth, 2019), was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and will be adapted into a television series.

“Even if I were blind / I would know night by the noise it made...” In this installment of the Unamuno Poem Project, which presents pairings of poem recitations in English and Spanish, Paisley Rekdal’s poem “The Cry” is read by Joseph Fasano in English and Fernanda Martínez reads Jorge García’s translation in Spanish. A profile of Rekdal appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I want to live a life of free imagination.” In this video, Binyavanga Wainaina describes his dream for Africans to tell their own stories and be set free of certain traditional systems and structures. The Kenyan author and gay rights activist, who won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002, died at the age of forty-eight on May 21, 2019. For more from his work, read an excerpt from his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf Press, 2011).

“She is told she does not belong, to go back where she came from, as if where she came from is not where she is.” In this video, Leah Anderson reads her poem “You Ask Me What I Am So You May Know How to Fear Me” at Button Poetry Live in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

“Letter writing is a pure act of devotion, a place where, if not storytellers, we all become human again.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Willie Perdomo, the author most recently of The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Books, 2019), talks about the value of writing letters and how they are “where we attempt to tell the truth and wait.”

All Is True is a biopic depicting the last three years of William Shakespeare’s life, after the original Globe Theatre in London burned down during a performance of Henry VIII in 1613 and he returned to Stratford-upon-Avon. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, the film stars Branagh as Shakespeare, Judi Dench as his wife Anne Hathaway, and Ian McKellen as the Earl of Southampton.

“I start with a physical feeling. I start with a visual image.” On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Ann Beattie speaks about her writing process, the differences between writing a novel and a short story, and how she came up with the title for her most recent novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck (Viking, 2019).