Poets & Writers Theater

“It’s not as though I want to change the past. It’s really trying to understand how these things come together to bring you where you are.” Amy Tan speaks about her creative process in this video from PBS and American Masters previewing her documentary Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir directed by James Redford.

“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest,” reads Cathy Park Hong from her essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), in this Yale Review video from their two hundredth anniversary festival in 2020. 

“If we are always the threat / To whom or where do we turn for protection?” In this Litquake festival video from 2020, Pamela Sneed reads from her book Funeral Diva (City Light Books, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award’s lesbian poetry prize, and speaks with Tommy Pico about breaking apart genres and writing about pandemics.

“It’s a book about being present to the world and accepting the complexity of the world.” In this virtual event hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Larissa Pham speaks about her new book, Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy (Catapult, 2021), and the subjects addressed in her essays, including relationships and the differences of expression through visual art and writing, in a conversation with R. O. Kwon.

“There’s always going to be something to say about the push-pull that New York City exerts on its inhabitants,” says Sari Botton, editor of the revised edition of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York (Seal Press, 2021), in this Books Are Magic virtual event with author Isaac Fitzgerald and contributors to the anthology Leslie Jamison, Lisa Ko, Emily Raboteau, and Rosie Schaap.

“I had written two books on slavery, and writing about slavery is to be in the center of a very difficult psychic territory, and so when I started doing the research for this project, I was very hungry for beauty—and I think I discovered it here,” says Saidiya Hartman about writing her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, in this 2019 reading at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

“I was really interested in the idea of the body as a place of imprisonment but also, the body as a place of liberation.” Olivia Laing speaks about her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton, 2021), and how she addresses the themes of illness, sexual violence, and incarceration with imagery and by including historical figures of the past century in this conversation with author Maggie Nelson for the Center for Fiction.

In this CBS Sunday Morning video, Washington Post book critic Ron Charles gives his book report on new recommendations for the summer, including Sanjena Sathian’s debut novel, Gold Diggers (Penguin Press, 2021), Great Circle (Knopf, 2021) by Maggie Shipstead, and The Man Who Lived Underground (Library of America, 2021) by the late Richard Wright, which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Author, poet, and translator Rajiv Mohabir and scholar Kadji Amin speak on the topics of queer theory and scholarship, the process of writing creative nonfiction and poetry, and the term “Asian American” in this virtual conversation for the Radical Thinkers series hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

In this virtual reading hosted by Magers & Quinn Booksellers, authors Lilly Dancyger, Gina Frangello, and Jeannine Ouellette read from their memoirs and discuss the similarities between their writing processes. Dancyger’s Negative Space (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2021) and Frangello’s Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason (Counterpoint Press, 2021) are featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Books Are Magic video, authors Katherine Angel, Jo Ann Beard, Dantiel W. Moniz, and Jeannine Ouellette discuss the theme of desire for the Red Ink series, a quarterly series focused on women writers curated and moderated by Michele Filgate and cosponsored by Literary Hub.

“You do not separate between dancing, music, writing, painting, it’s all one, it is expression of the self,” says Nawal El Saadawi about her journey to become a writer in this 2018 interview with Athena40’s Elizabeth Filippouli. The Egyptian writer and activist died at the age of eighty-nine on March 21, 2021.

“It is so painful to be loved sometimes. Intolerable even.” In this 2020 virtual event hosted by Salve Regina University, Melissa Febos reads from her new essay collection, Girlhood (Bloomsbury, 2021), and answers questions about her writing process. A profile of Febos by Brian Gresko appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There’s nothing more riveting on the page than somebody willing to honestly tell what that life is,” says Joyce Maynard, author of the memoirs At Home in the World (Picador, 1998) and The Best of Us (Bloomsbury, 2017), about the roots of writing a memoir in this CreativeLive video.

“Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters,” says Roxane Gay in this 92Y virtual event celebrating the publication of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (Norton, 2020), which Gay edited. Joining Gay to discuss and read Lorde’s poetry and prose are Mahogany L. Browne, Saeed Jones, and Porsha Olayiwola.

“I am the blue chair island. I rock and the island rocks. I pull at a blue thread on the chair’s arm. I pull a hangnail from the third finger on my right hand.” In this Books Are Magic virtual event, Nadia Owusu reads from her debut memoir, Aftershocks (Simon & Schuster, 2021), and speaks with author Catherine E. McKinley.

“Everyone can do a paragraph.” Emily Rapp Black speaks about working with a writing partner during the pandemic in this video for the Throw Us a Line series hosted by Lighthouse Writers Workshop program director Andrea Dupree. Black’s new memoir, Sanctuary (Random House, 2021), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Directed by Academy Award winner Martin Scorsese, Pretend It’s a City features the return of sardonic writer and public speaker Fran Lebowitz in conversation with the director as she shares anecdotes about her early life and career in New York City in the 1970s. The Netflix series continues the partnership of the longtime friends, who worked together on the 2010 HBO documentary Public Speaking.

“One of the things that I think I can say now with a great deal of confidence about writing is that usually, the things that you are most ashamed of are actually what you should be trying to describe,” says Alexander Chee in this 2018 lecture titled “The Writer and Life,” part of Brown University’s public lecture series devoted to various forms of nonfiction writing. For more Chee, read “Which Story Will You Tell? A Q&A with Alexander Chee” by Amy Gall.

“That’s the moon—it’s the ghost of the sun wandering the sky at night,” says Daniel Kehlmann. In this video from Louisiana Channel, Kehlmann and fellow writers CAConrad, Georgi Gospodinov, Guadalupe Nettel, Delphine de Vigan, and Yoko Tawada discuss the moon’s mysterious presence and why writers are drawn to it as we watch visuals of the moon captured by NASA paired with Claude Debussy’s “Clair de Lune.”