Poets & Writers Theater

Ada Limón speaks about her poetry collections Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015) and The Carrying (Milkweed Editions, 2018) with PBS Books at the 2018 AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair. Limón is interviewed by Carrie Fountain in “The Poetry of Perseverance” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Until I discovered poetry, I didn’t think I would ever be able to express my life.” In this Poetry.LA interview, Chiwan Choi, cofounder of Writ Large Press, reads poems from his collection The Yellow House (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2017) and speaks about how his experiences as an immigrant have influenced his writing.

“Is a poem a little machine? A firework? An echo?” In this animated TED-Ed lesson by Melissa Kovacs, the poetic form is analyzed through famous speeches, song lyrics, and tweets.

“Good luck implies the death of everyone who does not have it...” Jonathan Mendoza, author of the chapbook When the Crows Come (Pizza Pi Press, 2017), reads his poem “Confessions on Gratitude” in this video for Button Poetry.

“I don’t know a thing about paradise || In my house nobody ever brought / it up...” Anna Moschovakis reads from her poem “Paradise (Film Two)” from her collection They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House Press, 2016) as part of the twenty-fourth annual Poets House Showcase in 2016. Moschovakis’s forthcoming debut novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love will be released by Coffee House Press in August.

“At what cost / This wondrous creature / that becomes more precious to you / than the people that you took from…” In this video, musician Florence Welch reads her poem “Monster” from her book of lyrics and poetry, Useless Magic (Crown Archetype, 2018).

“At nine years old, I transform into things I’ve never been before...” Phil Kaye, author of the collection Date & Time, forthcoming from Button Poetry in September, reads his poem “Before the Internet.”

“Words carry weight, lots of weight. Words can drown us, and words can save us.” Jaki Shelton Green, who was recently named North Carolina’s tenth poet laureate, reads from her poem “From Whence I Enter” at Christ School in Asheville, North Carolina. Green is the state’s first African American poet laureate.

“I think poetry should be part of popular culture, in the sense that poetry should be something we reach to.” Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, speaks about how his childhood in Topeka, Kansas influenced his new poetry collection, Brown (Knopf, 2018), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown.

“People live in stations like they never had mothers or fathers...” Jennifer Hayashida reads from her debut poetry collection, A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma, 2018), in this book trailer filmed by Hayashida and Benj Gerdes.

“If there are fewer stars now / than when I was a child, / I can’t say / which are missing, / who was the last to see them.” Maggie Smith’s poem “Small Shoes” is adapted into a short film by director Kate Dolan for Motionpoems. Smith is the author of the poetry collection Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017), the title poem of which went viral on social media after it was first published online in the literary journal Waxwing.

Anne Waldman reads from the “Endtime” section of her longer poetic text at the 2017 Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word Performance Extravaganza at Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. Waldman’s poetry collection Trickster Feminism (Penguin Books, 2018) is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I lock you in an American sonnet that is part prison, / Part panic closet...” Terrance Hayes reads poems from his new collection, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018), and discusses the origin and inspiration for the book at the 2017 Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Hayes reads more poems from the collection in the twentieth episode of Ampersand: The Poets & Writers Podcast, and is interviewed by Hanif Abdurraqib for the cover profile in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2009 interview with poet Elizabeth Spires, former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall reads poems and speaks about the writing life. For more Hall, read “Turning Time Around: A Profile of Donald Hall” by contributor John Freeman from the November/December 2014 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Hall passed away on June 23, 2018 at the age of eighty-nine.

“There’s something in the lyric moment that really ruptures the taken for granted-ness of the world.” Meena Alexander discusses her writing process, artistic collaborations, and the sensory experience of being a poet in this interview for CUNY TV. Alexander is the author of Atmospheric Embroidery (TriQuarterly Books, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Perhaps the butterflies are mute because / no one would believe their terrible stories.” In this interview for the Poetry.LA series, Marcelo Hernandez Castillo speaks about late night talk shows, immigration interviews, the PechaKucha format, and reads from his debut poetry collection, Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018), which won the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize.

“Frank grew crows for hands / it was a difficult childhood...” In this video, CAConrad reads a series of poems from The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010) for a 2013 reading at the Machine Project in Los Angeles. CAConrad’s poetry collection While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award in gay poetry.

“I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became / a character in the news...” Khaled Hosseini, Rita Dove, Philip Gourevitch, and Siri Hustvedt read Liu Xia’s poem “June 2nd, 1989” from Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. PEN America and Amnesty International collaborated on the video series as a call to free Liu Xia from house arrest in Beijing, where she has been held since her late husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009.

“I think something like garage or grime or rap, hip-hop, appeals to me because they’re very metrical, rhyme-based forms.” Zambian British poet Kayo Chingonyi talks about his path to poetry, his interests and influences, and internationalism and Anglophone literature for Writers’ Centre Norwich. Chingonyi won the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut poetry collection, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017).

“My family is a group of redwoods / that sought god instead of ground...” Samoan American poet William Nu’utupu Giles reads his poem “Prescribed Fire” at the 2015 National Poetry Slam. Giles won the National Underground Poetry Individual Competition in 2015, the first Pacific Islander to win the award.