Poets & Writers Theater

“I really was thinking like I have to work harder than any other writer in the world. I just wanted so badly to figure this out, to figure out how to write.” In this installment of the Paris Review’s “My First Time,” Sheila Heti discusses writing her first book, The Middle Stories (McSweeney’s, 2001), and how she came to write short stories after quitting theater school.

“In Kenya, we have many peoples who make up the Kenyan nation. Please note: I am not using the word tribe. I do not use the word tribe to describe anybody.” In this African Literature Festival video, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o speaks with hosts Samuel Ndogo and Mingqing Yuan about writing his first novel in verse, The Perfect Nine: The Epic of Gĩkũyũ and Mũmbi (New Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Director Barry Jenkins has released a teaser trailer for the upcoming television adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize–winning historical fiction novel, The Underground Railroad (Doubleday, 2016). The limited Amazon series stars Thuso Mbedu as Cora, a woman who escapes a plantation in Georgia and finds the Underground Railroad, an actual train system transporting runaways to the north.

Rumaan Alam reads from his third novel, Leave the World Behind (Ecco, 2020), and speaks with Laura Marsh about developing his characters in this virtual event for the New Republic salon book series. A Q&A with Alam by Joshunda Sanders is featured in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If I had been comfortable with the world in which I was living, I would never have written a word.” In this video, 2020 MacArthur fellow Cristina Rivera Garza speaks about how she came to be a writer and the ways in which she explores the tension between English and Spanish from a transnational perspective. Rivera Garza’s Grieving: Dispatches From a Wounded Country (Feminist Press, 2020) is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“All writing is really an act of translation, we’re trying to ask someone to inhabit someone else’s experience for long enough to understand some portion of it.” In this 2018 interview for Oregon Humanities Center’s UO Today, Danielle Evans reads from her debut story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books, 2010), and speaks about her writing practice and teaching. Evans is featured in “The Confounding Insistence on Innocence” by Naomi Jackson in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight’s debut novel, The Sunlit Night (Bloomsbury, 2015), has been adapted into a feature film directed by David Wnendt and starring Gillian Anderson, Zach Galifianakis, Alex Sharp, and Jenny Slate.

National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books, 2013) by James McBride has been adapted into a seven-episode series starring Rafael Casal as Cook, Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass, Ethan Hawke as John Brown, and Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion.

In this conversation for Writing Workshops Dallas, Danielle Morvan interviews Jenny Bhatt about her Desi Books podcast and debut story collection, Each of Us Killers (7.13 Books, 2020). For more Bhatt, read her Craft Capsules installment “We Are All Translators.”

In this virtual event for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, the late Randall Kenan, author of the story collection If I Had Two Wings (Norton, 2020), and Ron Rash, author of In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena (Doubleday, 2020), read from their books and discuss growing up in the South and their writing. Kenan’s If I Had Two Wings is longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.

Watch the trailer for the highly anticipated adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction novel Dune. Directed by Denis Velleneuve, the film stars Josh Brolin, Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, and Zendaya.

“As a writer, the idea of readers coming to your work is what it’s all about,” says Brandon Taylor, whose debut novel, Real Life, is shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize. In this watch party video announcing the six finalists for the prize, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation Gaby Wood introduces the 2020 judges and the nominated authors offer their reactions.

This book trailer reveals the cover for Kazuo Ishiguro’s anticipated novel Klara and the Sun, forthcoming in March from Knopf. The novel explores the world of an “Artificial Friend” named Klara who observes potential customers in the hopes that one day she will be taken home by someone.

“The story is sprawling, the scope is sprawling. It unfolds over the course of a thousand years.” Executive producer and showrunner David Goyer introduces the trailer for the upcoming Apple TV Plus series Foundation, adapted from the award-winning science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, which stars Laura Birn, Jared Harris, Leah Harvey, Lou Llobell, Terrence Mann, and Lee Pace.

“We’ve become enamored with unreality, and I wanted a work to embody that confusion and also to cut through the noise,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar in this Little, Brown video introducing his forthcoming novel, Homeland Elegies. A Q&A with Akhtar by Amy Gall appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I was also writing a story that I wanted to see and that I felt in my own life.” In this Greenlight Bookstore video, Raven Leilani celebrates the launch of her debut novel, Luster (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), and speaks about the journey to write the book in this conversation with Samantha Irby. Luster is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I can make worlds. That’s literally my job, is to make worlds,” says Awkaeke Emezi in this American Writers Museum video. “Instead of searching for other people to give me a place to belong, I just bent one into existence myself.” Emezi’s latest novel, The Death of Vivek Oji (Riverhead Books, 2020), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Center for Fiction video, Brian Gresko, host of Lit Hub’s Antibody: A Quarantine Reading Series, moderates this all-star fundraiser reading for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) featuring Jericho Brown, Carmen Maria Machado, Celese Ng, and Karen Russell.

In this Literary Hub video, Book Marks editors Dan Sheehan and Katie Yee offer a week in review of book news, including the Center for Fiction’s 2020 First Novel Prize longlist and plans for a new HBO Max series of bedtime stories read by celebrities such as Idris Elba, Lucy Liu, and Keanu Reeves.

“The Nickel Academy becomes a proving ground for people’s goodness, for their tendency towards evil, and it proves character,” says Colson Whitehead about his latest novel, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday, 2019), in this video for the Get Lit virtual book club series with host of WNYC’s All Of It Alison Stewart.