Poets & Writers Theater

“It was sad. I would rather talk to my idea of a person, a fantasy ghost-person that existed only in my imagination, than talk with my own parents.” Patty Yumi Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (McSweeney’s, 2017) and a recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction, reads from her essay “My Abyss.”

“Writing memoir is the ultimate control of my story.” Sandra Gail Lambert talks to author Michele Leavitt about her own motivations for writing memoir, and the challenges that accompany it. Lambert, author of the debut memoir, A Certain Loneliness (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), is featured in “Outsiders on the Inside” by Michele Sharpe in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness (Free Press, 2012), Susannah Cahalan’s memoir about her experience as a young journalist struggling with the diagnosis of a rare and mysterious neurological disease, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Gerard Barrett, the film stars Richard Armitage, Thomas Mann, Chloë Grace Moretz, Carrie-Anne Moss, Tyler Perry, and Jenny Slate.

In this TED Talk, Casey Gerald speaks about a poignant day in his childhood and how those events altered his thoughts on belief, faith, and doubt. Gerald is the author of the debut memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here (Riverhead Books, 2018), and is featured in “The Genre of Resistance” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Sarah Viren reads an essay for the There Will Be Words reading series in Orlando, Florida. Viren is the author of the debut essay collection, Mine (University of New Mexico Press, 2018), and is featured in “The Genre of Resistance” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, V. S. Naipaul accepts the 2001 Nobel Prize in Literature and reads his speech at the Nobel Banquet in Stockholm. Described by the Swedish Academy as “a literary circumnavigator,” the prolific author published more than a dozen novels and several nonfiction books. Naipaul died at the age of eighty-five on August 11, 2018.

Boy Erased is a film based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 coming-of-age memoir of the same name. Lucas Hedges stars as a young man who is forced by his fundamental Baptist parents, played by Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, to attend a gay conversion therapy program. The film is written and directed by Joel Edgerton, who also costars as the program’s head therapist.

Keira Knightley stars in Colette, a biopic about the early-twentieth-century French novelist who published the successful Claudine novels under her first husband’s name before making a name for herself with later novels including Chéri and Gigi. The film is directed by Wash Westmoreland and costars Denise Gough, Eleanor Tomlinson, and Dominic West.

“If I understood Marx, I thought, I could understand my mother.” At Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Jordy Rosenberg reads from his essay “The Daddy Dialectic,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rosenberg speaks about his debut novel, Confessions of the Fox (One World, 2018), in “The Business of Relationships” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Even if what you’re writing seems boring to you...you’re preparing yourself for the moment when life or something else broadsides you and you need to write.” John Freeman, editor of the essay anthology Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation (Penguin Books, 2017), shares writing advice and what his favorite authors have in common.

“I hear words spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives.” At a 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017), which details her experience as an interpreter for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.

“I wanted writing to be something that involved relationships with other people.” Rachel Cusk talks about her experience teaching creative writing at Kingston University in London. Cusk’s novel Kudos (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, is the third volume in the trilogy that began with Outline (Picador, 2016).

Porochista Khakpour reads from her essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay” and talks to Northwestern University professor Brian Edwards about her writing interests and the publishing industry. Khakpour’s debut memoir, Sick (Harper Perennial, 2018), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Bill Gates shares his annual summer reading list, which includes Walter Isaacson’s biography Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 2017) and George Saunders’s novel, Lincoln in the Bardo (Random House, 2017).

“Sometimes I’ll write for two weeks straight and not write for six months….” Sheila Heti, author of the novel Motherhood (Henry Holt, 2018), talks about her lack of a writing routine and the benefits of letting feelings, ideas, and energy build up and become more complex.

This independent documentary film directed by Oscar Corral explores Tom Wolfe’s writing life and his fourth novel, Back to Blood (Little, Brown, 2012), which is set in Miami and focuses on the subject of immigration. Wolfe died at the age of eighty-seven on May 14, 2018.

“I wanted to learn how to write English and learn how to tell a story so I could communicate the experiences that I did not see in history books....” Clemantine Wamariya talks about storytelling and her debut memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (Crown, 2018), which she cowrote with Elizabeth Weil.

Leslie Jamison reads her essay “The Broken Heart of James Agee” from The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press, 2014) for a reading series hosted by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Jamison speaks about her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (Little, Brown, 2018), in “The Infinite World” by Michele Filgate in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Gregory Pardlo talks about the difference between writing poetry and creative nonfiction, and the universality of storytelling in this interview with Rich Fahle at the 2018 AWP Annual Conference & Book Fair in Tampa. Pardlo’s debut memoir, Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America (Knopf, 2018), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

“My life is kind of like a novel in interconnected stories.” Sloane Crosley recounts the different jobs she’s had that have shaped her storytelling for Xerox’s Set the Page Free series. Her third essay collection, Look Alive Out There (MCD, 2018), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.