Poets & Writers Theater

“Maybe meeting a new flavor is alchemy. Today you can’t stand it, tomorrow it’s all you can stand.” In this New Yorker video essay, Bryan Washington talks about frequenting Korean restaurants in Houston and learning how to cook soondubu, a Korean tofu stew, as a way to reconnect with his mother. Washington’s new book, Memorial (Riverhead Books, 2020), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I have written somewhere that there is only one story, but there are many stories in the one, and I like that idea.” In this video from PBS’s American Masters series, N. Scott Momaday speaks with Robert Redford about the oral tradition, hearing stories from his father, and the importance of language and story. Momaday’s second memoir, Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land (Harper, 2020), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Joanna Rakoff’s memoir My Salinger Year (Knopf, 2014) has been adapted into a feature film directed by Philippe Falardeau and starring Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver. Set in 1995, an aspiring writer and poet takes a job at a literary agency in New York City that represents the notoriously reclusive J. D. Salinger and handles his fan mail.

In this 2013 Woodberry Poetry Room video, Mary Ruefle reads twenty-eight short meditations from her essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012) with subjects including Shakespeare, Socrates, Van Morrison, the dead, hypocrisy, and loneliness. Ruefle received the 2020 Arthur Rense Poetry Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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.

“I worked on the book until I was about halfway done with it before I told anyone about it.” Adrian Tomine talks about his graphic memoir, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Drawn and Quarterly, 2020), and how he was able to revert to his childhood version of making comics for his own amusement in this virtual Politics & Prose Bookstore event with critic Jason Zinoman. For more Tomine, read his answers to our Ten Questions.

“In Spanish, our stories are slow, then fast, and we cackle constantly, even when we talk about the dead.” In this 2016 Radar Reading Series video, Ingrid Rojas Contreras reads from her memoir-in-progress about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia, and how she and her mother both experienced amnesia.

“The deal with Florida is the charlatans and lunatics and Snapchat-famous plastic surgeons. It is the Ponzi schemes, the byzantine corruption, the evangelical fervor and the consenting-adult depravity....” In this Books & Books virtual event, Kent Russell reads from his memoir, In the Land of Good Living (Knopf, 2020), and discusses Florida and his writing experience with author and sibling Karen Russell. In the Land of Good Living is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction show cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author and pulmonary and critical care specialist Daniela Lamas talks about coronavirus patients seeking recovery or end-of-life care, and poet and radiation oncologist C. Dale Young speaks about the variety of American responses to the pandemic and reads from his book The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018).

“In those brown albums, our family at times looks like a family and at other times not.” Porochista Khakpour reads from her new book, Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Vintage, 2020), and talks to author Tania James in this virtual Politics and Prose Bookstore event video. 

“This is how the past interrupts our lives, all of it entering the same doorway…” In this clip from PBS’s Articulate, former poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Natasha Trethewey reads her poem “Letter to Inmate #271847.” An interview by Joshunda Sanders with Trethewey about her new book, Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir (Ecco, 2020), is featured in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My essays are about race, place, and belonging, and about growing up Indian in non-Indian places.” In this episode of Literary Hub’s Personal Space: The Memoir Show, Sejal Shah talks about her memoir-in-essays, This Is One Way to Dance (University of Georgia Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

This behind-the-scenes short film directed by Yvonne Shirley of a 2018 T Magazine photo shoot at the Brooklyn Historical Society features Black American male poets, playwrights, and novelists—such as James Hannaham, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Ishmael Reed—speaking on identity in the publishing world and paying tribute to their favorite Black female writers.

“Books have been such an important part of my life, from The Brothers Karamazov when I was a teenager to reading Charlotte’s Web to my grandchildren,” says Hillary Clinton in this video of over one hundred book-loving authors, actors, musicians, public figures, and professional librarians sharing their favorite books in celebration of the New York Public Library’s 125th anniversary.

In this installment of the AAWW at Home series, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of the novel Starling Days (Overlook Press, 2020), talks about how she’s been occupied during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and reads from Alexander Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018). 

“What are these memoirs? What are these journals? They’re always a list of cool stuff.” In this Saturday Night Live video, actor and writer Aidy Bryant rediscovers journals from her childhood revealing her innermost thoughts and love for such things as turtles and Rosie O’Donnell.

“The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the screen, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own.” Paul Lisicky reads from his memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020) in this online reading event for Books Are Magic with Susan Choi. For more Lisicky, read his installation of Ten Questions.

To celebrate the launch of The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer (Avid Reader Press, 2020), authors Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer speak with novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, literary agent Annie Hwang, publicist Michael Taeckens, and publisher and editor Jamia Wilson about the need for new voices in literature and the ins and outs of the literary world in this online event hosted by the Center for Fiction.

“Years ago, right after I moved into my last apartment in Chicago, the one I expected to die alone in to the soundtrack of an NCIS marathon, I thought I had a ghost.” In this Loft Literary Center video, one of their recent online events from their annual Wordplay festival (held entirely virtually this year through May 9) features a reading by Samantha Irby from her fourth essay collection, Wow, No Thank You (Vintage, 2020), backdropped with video footage of rabbits.

In this Open Studio With Jared Bowen interview, playwright Kirsten Greenidge; Kerri Greenidge, historian and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019); and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016) talk about growing up together as sisters and how their work often overlaps.