Poets & Writers Theater

“Poetry is the way of experiencing the world outside of the everyday commercial expectations that are made of us.” Poet and professor Roberto Tejada, author most recently of Why the Assembly Disbanded (Fordham University Press, 2022), reads from his work and discusses his teaching and writing practice in this Texas Monthly video directed by Chris Beier.

“What persuades in poetry, what moves, what transforms—and what is memorable—starts with music.” Jorie Graham talks about the importance of musicality and the influences of American modernist and English romantic poetry on her writing in this Big Think video. Graham’s collection Fast (Ecco, 2017) is featured in Page One in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Watch this recording of Greenlight Bookstore’s Poetry Salon event and book release party for Safia Elhillo’s Girls That Never Die (One World, 2022), hosted by Angel Nafis and featuring readings by Jay Deshpande, Shira Erlichman, and Ladan Osman. For more from Elhillo, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

“As I often tell students: What other people call revision, I call writing,” says poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach about writing his books The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Forever (Norton, 2021) as a writer-in-residence in this 2021 installment of James Merrill House’s video series Studio 107. Longenbach died at the age of sixty-two on July 29, 2022.

“The backend / algorithm will be coded on keyboards / by the actual hands of mothers who, / in another life, called themselves writers,” reads Ryann Stevenson from “Decision Tree,” which appears in her collection, Human Resources (Milkweed Editions, 2022), winner of the 2021 Max Ritvo Poetry Prize, in this conversation with Richie Hofmann. Human Resources is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My bones are happy / inside my skin; my fingers / are snapping.” Joyce Sutphen’s poem “Morning Walk” is featured in this Motionpoems short film directed by Zack Grant and starring Debra Magid.

“Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life / Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse / Of a sawn-down tree, I imagine them.” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, the late Seamus Heaney reads from and speaks about his final collection, Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). The Nobel Prize–winning poet died at the age of seventy-four on August 30, 2013.

“What do you want, I asked, forgetting I had / no language,” reads Ocean Vuong from his poem “The Bull,” which appears in his second poetry collection, Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this WSJ. Magazine video directed by Gioncarlo Valentine.

“To me, reading becomes a lot more palatable if young people realize that the stories, the books that exist within them are as valuable as the books that exist on the outside of them.” In this CBS Sunday Morning interview, Jane Pauley speaks to Jason Reynolds, award-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, about lifting up children through storytelling, his journey as a writer, and the importance of friendship.

“What does it mean to write something urgent right now?” Don’t Be Nice is a 2018 documentary directed by Max Powers that follows a group of poets from the Bowery Poetry Club in New York City’s East Village who grapple with the political climate punctuated by the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements as they prepare for the National Poetry Slam championship during the summer of 2016.

In this 92nd Street Y recording, Kaveh Akbar, author of Pilgrim Bell (Graywolf Press, 2021), is introduced by poet Angel Nafis, and John Murillo, author of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020), is introduced by poet Terrance Hayes before reading from a selection of their poems.

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” In this 2018 PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age. Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States today.

“One of the things we must do as poets is certainly to answer the most important question: What does it mean to be human?” says Sonia Sanchez, recipient of the 2022 Jackson Poetry Prize, in this virtual celebration with poets Mary Jo Bang, Marilyn Chin, and Claudia Rankine.

Irish poet and novelist Martina Evans reads Wisława Szymborska’s poem “Could Have,” translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh, in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Words We Share series.

“For me, poetry is a way of living in the world.” In this vintage video from the Poetry Breaks series, Lucille Clifton reflects on what poetry means to her and how it is not about answers, but rather questions. The Academy of American Poets has partnered with Leita Luchetti, who produced and directed the series in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to bring back these videos.

In this livestreamed event, poet and drag performer Wo Chan, author of Togetherness, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September, and poet CAConrad, author most recently of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), read from their works at the Poetry Project in New York City.

In this 2020 video, Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta reads a selection of their poems for the Quarantine Concert series produced by Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago. Luboviski-Acosta’s second book, La Movida (Nightboat Books, 2022), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Maybe memory is all the home / you get,” reads John Murillo from his poem “Mercy, Mercy, Me” included in his collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way Books, 2020) in this video in which he discusses his experience as a fellow at MacDowell’s artist residency program in New Hampshire.

In this 2009 video, the late Polish poet, novelist, and essayist Adam Zagajewski reads from his work and answers questions from the audience for an event at the Renaissance Society, a contemporary art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago.

This video celebrates the tenth season of the Silo City Reading Series, a poetry reading series that takes place in a complex of historic grain silos in Buffalo, New York and has “held true to the belief of what imagination can do when it acts collectively.” Upcoming events begin this weekend and feature poets Richie Hofmann, Victoria Chang, and Jericho Brown.