Poets & Writers Theater

In this excerpt from an interview with NBC Chicago, the late Andrea Gibson reads their poem “Love Letter From the Afterlife” to their wife Megan Falley. Gibson died at the age of forty-nine on July 14, 2025.

“Autism wants to be understood, researched, and recognized as a disability, not a disease.” In this Button Poetry video, Kay Kassirer reads their poem “Autism Speaks (after Arvind Nandakumar).”

In this episode of The Seeds podcast with Alana Hadid, poet aja monet reads from her second collection, Florida Water (Haymarket Books, 2025), and reflects on the role of faith in her artistry and activism, and the current state of movement organizing for Palestine. Florida Water is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.” In this video, Fanny Howe reads from her poetry collection Second Childhood (Graywolf Press, 2014) at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony. Howe died at the age of eighty-four on July 9, 2025.

For this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2025 Blaney Lecture, Kaveh Akbar reminisces on his childhood spent studying and reciting prayers in Arabic and discusses how sacred poetics and language allow us to sit in complexity and remain in awareness. “Such poetry is a potent antidote against a late capitalist empire that would use empty, vapid language to cudgel us into inaction,” Akbar says.

In this Live From NYPL event, Stephanie Burt discusses the work of editing Super Gay Poems: LGBTQIA+ Poetry After Stonewall (Belknap Press, 2025), an anthology of fifty-one poems with essays by Burt, in a conversation with David Groff, along with poets Marisa Crawford, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, and Jee Leong Koh reading and discussing their poems. The anthology is featured in “The LGBTQ+ Literary Resistance” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

CD Eskilson celebrates the release of their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), in this reading and conversation with poets Ashia Ajani and Preeti Vangani at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.

In this Button Poetry video filmed at SubText Books in Saint Paul, Danez Smith reads their poem “Dede was the last person i came out to,” which appears in their fourth collection, Bluff (Graywolf Press, 2024).

In this video, Heid E. Erdrich reads from her collections Verb Animate: Poetry and Prompts From Collaborative Acts (Trio House Press, 2024) and Little Big Bully (Penguin Books, 2020), and answers questions about hope, memories, and revision for this Jensen Lecture Series event hosted by Western Oregon University.

“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this 2016 video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) for a two-day event at the Lab in San Francisco cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Notley died at the age of seventy-nine on May 20, 2025.

Marilyn Chin reads from her sixth poetry collection, Sage (Norton, 2023), and answers questions about the public role of the modern poet and her references to ancient traditions and pop culture in this 2023 virtual installment of the Hugh C. Hyde Living Writers’ Series hosted by San Diego State University’s Creative Writing program.

In this Poetry Night Panel event at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., Brandel France de Bravo, author of Locomotive Cathedral (The Backwaters Press, 2025), and Julie Choffel, author of Dear Wallace (The Backwaters Press, 2024), read a selection of poems and join María Fernanda for a conversation about how literature helps one grapple with the challenges of life.

“Are those who don’t know history only doomed to resell it at a higher price?” In this short film directed by Jasmine Ogunjimi, award-winning slam poet Pages Matam reads their poem “Hope as Home.” The film was produced by Da Poetry Lounge Co. and executive produced by HOPE, Inc., an organization that provides support for those experiencing housing discrimination.

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity / we once were?” Marie Howe, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, reads her poem “Singularity” in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Read By poetry film series.

In this Books Are Magic event, Cathy Linh Che reads from her second poetry collection, Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), and talks about how her parents’ experience as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now shaped her book in a conversation with poet Wo Chan.

In this Poets & Writers Live event introduced by Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González, Douglas Kearney reads from his new poetry collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books, 2025), and joins Poets & Writers Magazine contributing editor Destiny O. Birdsong for a conversation. A profile of Kearney by Birdsong appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The loneliest people have the earth to love / And not one friend their own age.” Jericho Brown reads his poem “Labor,” which appears in his second poetry collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), in this video for the Dear Poet series, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.

“If only the sky were kind enough to lend me his blue coat.” In this video, Yuki Tanaka reads an excerpt from the title poem of his debut collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I was doing nine years in prison, and poems became my way to see the world.” In this Common Read event hosted by the Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University, Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon (Norton, 2020), answers questions from the audience and presents a lecture and reading introduced by Louisiana poet laureate Alison Pelegrin.

In this Villanova University Literary Festival event, Victoria Chang reads from her poetry collections Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and speaks about her ekphrastic poems and the power of writing in conversation with other artists and people in her life.