Poets & Writers Theater

“Everything happens fast. Handcuffs on Chino. Uniforms do the same to the others who didn’t run fast enough.” In this video, Javier Zamora speaks with Today Show’s Jenna Bush about his three-thousand-mile journey alone as a nine-year-old from El Salvador to the United States which he recounts in his memoir, Solito (Hogarth, 2022).

“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved.” In this reading at the Kelly Writers House in 2020, Carmen Maria Machado reads from her debut memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019).

“That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life, its abiding metaphors, so that my story would not be determined for me.” In this 2022 video, former U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write” for the prize ceremony at Yale University.

Putsata Reang speaks about her life as the daughter of a Cambodian refugee family and her debut memoir, Ma and Me (MCD Books, 2022), in this interview with NAACP president and Spokesman-Review columnist Kiantha Duncan for the Northwest Passages Book Club in Spokane. Reang is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Maia Kobabe, who uses the gender-neutral pronouns e/em/eir, speaks about the efforts to ban eir award-winning debut graphic memoir, Gender Queer (Oni Press, 2019), from school libraries and the importance of writing LGBTQ stories in this interview with Anthony Allen Ramos for GLAAD’s Books Not Bans campaign.

“For most of American history, African American authors have not had the purchase on the American conscience that they have right now,” says Ta-Nehisi Coates about the rise of banning books with themes about race including his own memoir, Between the World and Me (One World, 2015), as well as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Antiracist (One World, 2019) and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World, 2021) by Nikole Hannah-Jones in this 2021 CBS Mornings interview. “This is really about white children now being exposed to ideas that I think were previously segregated.”

“They are not just a challenge in an individual school system or library, but legislation being introduced in statehouses that would affect the availability of books all over the state in every school and library.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel about the intensifying efforts across the United States to ban specific books related to LGBTQIA+ issues, race, and freedom of speech.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud discusses his debut memoir, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces (Ballantine Books, 2022), with writer Sarah Hagi in this video for Toronto Reference Library’s Appel Salon series. Abdelmahmoud is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Waterstones video, CJ Hauser, author of The Crane Wife: A Memoir in Essays (Doubleday, 2022), talks about the books that have inspired them as a writer, which include Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward; I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins; and Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters.

“The best writing advice I ever got was, don’t give up and you can be a writer, if you work really hard and don’t stop writing.” In this Audible interview, New Yorker staff writer and author Ariel Levy speaks about finding her voice, writing about women’s lives, her experience with maternal grief, and her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House, 2017).

“It would be a beautiful world if young people were encouraged to chart their histories in really deep and meaningful ways.” Prince Shakur talks about his debut memoir, When They Tell You to Be Good (Tin House, 2022), and the significance of writing in this genre for the Black Writer’s Studio podcast with host Khadijah Ali-Coleman, executive director of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Shakur is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The experience of being disabled in the world is an experience of feeling always kept on the sidelines of real life.” In this short video, Chloé Cooper Jones, a 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, speaks about her debut memoir, Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press, 2022). Cooper Jones is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this CBS Sunday Morning video, David Begnaud interviews Teddy Droseros, who began a project leaving journals in coffee shops and classrooms around the country for people to write down what they were grateful for and has collected entries and created a book with hundreds of messages of gratitude.

“As someone who is now a part of the next generation of Black queer writing, I pull a lot from what James Baldwin stood for,” says George M. Johnson, author of All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), in this video for GLAAD’s NEON series. Johnson, whose book has been banned from school libraries, is the 2022 honorary chair of Banned Books Week.

“Writing is my true, true joy, and that’s what makes me feel alive and nourished.” Erika L. Sánchez talks about her memoir, Crying in the Bathroom (Viking, 2022), and the process of book promotion and being a writer with Sandra Cisneros in this virtual event for Politics and Prose, produced in partnership with Books and Books and Café con Libros. Sánchez’s memoir is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Knowing your true origins connects you to history, it tells you where you are in time, in the world,” says Carmen Rita Wong about discovering family secrets and facing the revelations as she wrote her memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me? (Crown, 2022), in this video for Penguin Random House’s Inside the Book series.

“I realized as I started to write it, that it was going to be a lot more focused on my childhood than I expected it to be,” says Isaac Fitzgerald about the process of writing his first memoir, Dirtbag, Massachusetts: A Confessional (Bloomsbury, 2022), in this interview for Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast produced and hosted by Miwa Messer. Fitzgerald’s memoir is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“To me, reading becomes a lot more palatable if young people realize that the stories, the books that exist within them are as valuable as the books that exist on the outside of them.” In this CBS Sunday Morning interview, Jane Pauley speaks to Jason Reynolds, award-winning author and National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, about lifting up children through storytelling, his journey as a writer, and the importance of friendship.

“One of the necessary disciplines in my life has been to discipline myself not to fall into despair when I’m not writing,” says Geoff Dyer in this Louisiana Channel interview in which he discusses his writing process and how his new book, The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), came to be.

In this Books Are Magic event moderated by Denne Michele Norris, Rosemary Donahue reads from their essay “Thank U, Ex” and Nichole Perkins reads from her essay “Confessions of a Lonely Feminist” both published in the anthology Sex and the Single Woman: 24 Writers Reimagine Helen Gurley Brown’s Cult Classic (Harper Perennial, 2022) edited by Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson.