Poets & Writers Theater

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.”

“What is lost is already behind the locked doors.” This mini-documentary by Made to Measure about the life of Joan Didion, outlines her early career as a research assistant at Vogue leading to her cult following in the sixties, and her literary impact as she was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2012. Didion’s essay collection Let Me Tell You What I Mean (Knopf, 2021) is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this AAWW conversation moderated by Piyali Bhattacharya, writers with debut essay collections out this year, including Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, and Sejal Shah, discuss Asian American identity, genre, gender, race, publishing, and the ways that the essay form has allowed writers to tell important stories. 

In this clip from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Julie Andrews speaks about her latest book, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years (Hachette Books, 2019), which is cowritten by her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, and exchanges personalized limericks with the host.

In this installment of the “New Social Environment” series for the Brooklyn Rail recorded in April, Charles Bernstein speaks with Erica Hunt about unpacking language and how writers have reimagined ways to communicate amongst each other during the pandemic. Hunt talks about her new poetry collection, Jump the Clock (Nightboat Books, 2020), in Ten Questions.

“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.