Poets & Writers Theater

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.

In this 2024 LBC Full Disclosure podcast interview with James O’Brien, author and playwright Hanif Kureishi talks about the life-changing fall which led him to write his memoir, Shattered (Ecco, 2025), a mix of dispatches from his hospital bed and his reassembled new life.

“This book is not about blame, it’s about understanding.” In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event in Baltimore, Lee Hawkins speaks about the history and research he encountered in the writing process of his debut memoir, I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free (Amistad, 2025). Hawkins’s memoir is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of the Keep Talking Podcast, Pico Iyer talks about losing his home in the 1990 Painted Cave fire in Santa Barbara, his experiences with silence, and his new book, Aflame: Learning From Silence (Riverhead Books, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast with host Miwa Messer, New York Times Book Review critic at large A. O. Scott talks about his journey as a journalist and book critic, reflects on “instant classics” like Percival Everett’s novel James (Doubleday, 2024), and discusses how the experience of discovering books has changed because of the internet.

In this Books Are Magic event, Lili Anolik reads from her new biography, Didion and Babitz (Scribner, 2024), and discusses how the book originated from discovering a box of Eve Babitz’s unsent letters, which included a letter to Joan Didion, in a conversation with Emma Straub.

In this Library of Congress National Book Festival event, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and Tiya Miles, author of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024), discuss their books in a conversation moderated by Martha S. Jones.