Poets & Writers Theater

In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Lidia Yuknavitch reads from her memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) and speaks to Porochista Khakpour about the process of rearranging fragments of writing.

In this 2009 Granta interview, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his early life and his memoir Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Pantheon, 2010) with Ellah Allfrey. Ngũgĩ died at the age of eighty-seven on May 28, 2025.

In this event at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, Michael Luo talks about how a series of tweets reacting to a hate crime he experienced led to an exploration of early nineteenth-century Chinese immigration, which began the process for his debut book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, 2025). “In order to understand this kind of present, you have to go back,” Luo says.

In this DC Public Library event, Imani Perry speaks with Clint Smith about the recurrence of the color blue in her life and how it sparked an aesthetic examination of the color’s place in African and Black history for her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025).

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author Vauhini Vara talks about the current discourse of artificial intelligence and the ChatGPT conversation that led to writing her essay collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025).

For this Straits Times video, Korean author Baek Se-hee and translator Anton Hur reflect on the global success and universal resonance of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) and discuss the current state of mental health in East Asian countries in their first joint interview.

Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, answers questions about the journal’s mission, slush piles, and her editorial process in this virtual event with Becky Tuch for the Lit Mag News Roundup. An interview with Acker about the Common’s fifteenth anniversary is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.

In this event hosted by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Jane Wong reads “To Love a Mosquito,” a chapter from her memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), and pieces of her mother’s diary, followed by a discussion about her approaches to poetry versus creative nonfiction.

In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.

In this interactive Narrative 4 writing workshop, Deborah Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024), leads participants through practical exercises on self-discovery, shares exemplary work, and discusses how a memoir can answer the question: “Who am I?” Taffa says: “We’re telling people what we’ve learned in the time that has transpired between when we were that character on the page and who we are now.”

In this episode of the Ehkili podcast, Sahar Mustafah talks to author and editor Susan Muaddi Darraj to discuss her anthology, Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing From the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press, 2024), and the significance of amplifying Palestinian literary voices.

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Roxane Gay talks about how the word feminism has been defined through the centuries, the work included in her new anthology, The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Classics, 2025), and writing a romance novel with Channing Tatum.

In this New Orleans Book Festival event hosted at Tulane University, authors Sarah M. Broom and Tracy K. Smith speak about the origins of their writing practices, the cultural impact of their respective literary works, and the power of storytelling to reach the truth in a conversation with Vann R. Newkirk II, senior editor at the Atlantic.

In this episode of NPR’s Wild Card podcast hosted by Rachel Martin, author Zadie Smith reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut novel, White Teeth (Random House, 2000), and talks about her forthcoming book of essays and her generation’s struggle with the notion of time. “I’ve always felt there wasn’t enough time. I would like to accept time and also love it,” she says.

In this 2024 Writers on Writing event hosted by the Newberry Library and StoryStudio Chicago, Hanif Abdurraqib and Eve L. Ewing discuss their literary careers, the craft of writing, and how they tackle the complexities of art and activism.

In this Left Bank Books event, Rebe Huntman talks about her journey to Cuba following her mother’s passing, which inspired her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle (Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2025). For more from Huntman, read her installation of our Ten Questions series.

For this Conduit Club event hosted by Max Porter in London, Egyptian Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad discusses his debut memoir, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025), and reflects on the “derangement of language” while reporting the War on Terror and the threats faced by journalists in Gaza today.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, book critic and editor Sarah Chihaya talks about her debut memoir, Bibliophobia (Random House, 2025), and the concept of “life ruiner” books that “not only make you want to keep reading, but make you read the world around you differently.”

For this 2024 Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters event, Arati Kumar-Rao talks about how her book, Marginlands: A Journey Into India’s Vanishing Landscapes (Milkweed Editions, 2025), is not about a specific place, but can be somewhere at “the edge of our psyche” in a conversation with Prem Panicker. Rao’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.