Poets & Writers Theater
Every day we share a new clip of interest to creative writers—author readings, book trailers, publishing panels, craft talks, and more. So grab some popcorn, filter the theater tags by keyword or genre, and explore our sizable archive of literary videos.
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“My mother doesn’t write recipes, / she just knows. // Braised pork and eggs, / rice cleaned thoroughly.” Joshua Nguyen, author of the chapbook, American Lục Bát for My Mother (Bull City Press, 2021), reads two poems in this video for the Write About Now Poetry reading series in Houston.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Joshua Nguyen | Write About Now Poetry | Houston | American Lục Bát for My Mother | Bull City Press | 2021 -
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.
Tags: Creative Nonfiction | Spoken Word | Pretend It's a City | Fran Lebowitz | Martin Scorsese | documentary | Netflix | 2021 | movie trailer -
“My poetry, never a quiet moment. You are mine, and you are content with the idea of having nowhere to go.” In this video, Marlon Lizama reads “Poetry” for the Write About Now Poetry series in Houston.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Marlon Lizama | Write About Now Poetry | reading | Houston -
“Say it. / That every day is a toast / to living. An ode to the way we / made resilience an art...” In this lecture for the Chautauqua Institution, Joshua Bennett reads a selection of his poems and meditates on his father’s life and the history of the spoken word tradition. Bennett speaks about his latest poetry collection, Owed (Penguin Poets, 2020), in an installment of Ten Questions.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Joshua Bennett | Chautauqua Institution | 2019 | Owed | Penguin Poets | 2020 -
“Sometimes I too want to be a poem. / I don’t want to be this pain, / but the language used / to unearth it.” In this Button Poetry video, Michael Lee reads “Just Yesterday” from his debut poetry collection, The Only Worlds We Know (Button Poetry, 2019).
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Michael Lee | Button Poetry | The Only Worlds We Know | 2019 -
“My mother carries three girls and a boy, like the tethered, like a reckoning.” In this Write About Now Poetry video, D. Colin reads her poem “The Girl Dream” at the unofficial Women of the World Poetry Slam cypher in Dallas.
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“I orchestrate brutality but I never wanted to compose this symphony. We batons fell into the role masterfully though as the blue Beethovens adorned in badges used us to keep the beat on black notes....” In this video, Kofi Dadzie reads his poem “Baton” at Button Poetry Live in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2018.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Kofi Dadzie | Button Poetry | 2018 | Baton | performance -
“Black women are crafting a collective response / to centuries of being under everybody’s water / We are a rising tsunami of fury come back / to take back what was carried away/without consent....” Staceyann Chin reads “Tsunami Rising” from her debut poetry collection, Crossfire: A Litany for Survival (Haymarket Books, 2019), for the Unbound series in Brooklyn, copresented by BAM and Greenlight Bookstore.
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“In 2020 I’m trying to remember joy, the same way I remember pain....” In this video, Yaw Kyeremateng performs “Ode to 2020” with fellow poets from Write About Now Poetry, a community-oriented collective in Houston.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Write About Now Poetry | Yaw Kyeremateng | Ode to 2020 | 2020 -
“The men in my family wear masculinity like war medals. From birth, deem themselves protectors, providers, kings of everything their light touches....” In this Button Poetry video, Jordan Bailey reads his poem “Men in My Family” at the 2019 Rustbelt Poetry Festival in St. Louis, Missouri.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Jordan Bailey | Men in My Family | 2019 | Button Poetry | Rustbelt Poetry Festival | performance -
“Today, today I said I would write my own healing.” In this 2015 video, Camonghne Felix reads her poem “Presence” at the Strivers Row’s Poetic Soul live performance series. Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, 2019) and is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Camonghne Felix | Build Yourself a Boat | Haymarket Books | 2019 | Debut Poets 2019 | January/February 2020 | The Strivers Row | 2015 -
“When I did not feel anything, I begged you for mercy, for myself, a form of forgiveness that always comes in muscle memory.” In this Write About Now Poetry video, Christopher Diaz performs his poem “again” at AvantGarden in Houston.
Tags: Spoken Word | Christopher Diaz | Write About Now Poetry | slam poetry -
“I wanna be / all the girls I’ve ever loved / mean girls, shy girls, loud girls, my girls, / all of us angry on our porches…” Olivia Gatwood reads poems from her debut collection, Life of the Party (Dial Press, 2019), at the Bell House in Brooklyn.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Olivia Gatwood | Life of the Party | Dial Press | Penguin Random House | 2019 | reading -
“What we can contribute is an open space that’s really excited about learning and welcoming poets and writers from across different communities of literature in New York.” In this BRIC TV video, Rachel Valinsky, the artistic director of the Brooklyn nonprofit Wendy’s Subway, talks about the organization’s history and programming, and how it functions in the community as a reading room, event space, and publisher.
Tags: Poetry | Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Spoken Word | Wendy's Subway | Rachel Valinsky | BRIC TV | nonprofit -
“My mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother / decorated with the coqui’s of el campo...” Denice Frohman reads her poem “Accents” for this animated TED-Ed short film directed by Kapwa and Robertino Zambrano.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Denice Frohman | Accents | TED-Ed | animation | short film -
“There are two types of survival, there’s a kind that eats people alive and the kind I’m lucky enough to do by default.” Mason Granger, executive director of Bowery Poetry, reads his poem “Two Types of People” at the 2019 Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam in Portland, Oregon.
Tags: Spoken Word | Mason Granger | Bowery Poetry Club | Bigfoot Regional Poetry Slam | SlamFind | 2019 -
“She is told she does not belong, to go back where she came from, as if where she came from is not where she is.” In this video, Leah Anderson reads her poem “You Ask Me What I Am So You May Know How to Fear Me” at Button Poetry Live in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Leah Anderson | Button Poetry -
“Sometimes people love us in ways we do not understand how to be loved.” In this Button Poetry video, Blythe Baird, author of the debut poetry collection, If My Body Could Speak (Button Poetry, 2019), reads her poem “An Invitation.”
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Blythe Baird | If My Body Could Speak | Button Poetry | 2019 -
“If you ask me why representation in the media is important... / I will show you a woman who learned to dance until she / felt pretty...” On NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concerts, Ashlee Haze reads her poem “For Colored Girls (The Missy Elliot Poem)” as part of Blood Orange’s performance of “By Ourselves” from the album Negro Swan.
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“I do hope one day to be free of this body’s dry wood...” In this Button Poetry video, Kaveh Akbar, author of the poetry collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Alice James Books, 2017), reads a poem that was published in Tin House’s “The Rehab Issue” in 2017.
Tags: Poetry | Spoken Word | Kaveh Akbar | Calling a Wolf a Wolf | Alice James Books | 2017 | Button Poetry | Tin House