Poets & Writers Theater

“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.” Anne Carson talks about the artists and philosophers who inspire her to create and think, and how boxing has helped her in the wake of her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in a conversation with Norwegian author Linn Ullmann for this Louisiana Channel event.

In this virtual event, Banned Books Week honorary chair and award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay joins youth honorary chair Julia Garnett, a student activist who fought book bans in her home state of Tennessee, for a conversation about advocacy and fighting censorship.

In this PBS Books virtual event celebrating the release of the fortieth anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, published by Everyman’s Library, author Sandra Cisneros discusses the novel and how it has touched many lives and affected the literary landscape in a conversation with Heather-Marie Montilla.

In this Green Apple Books event, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents the Then & Now: Vietnamese American Literature reading series with opening remarks by executive director Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, followed by readings by Lan Duong, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Anastasia Le, Angie Chau, Frank Thanh Nguyen, and Carolyn Huynh with introductions by chief operating officer Kathy Nguyen.

In this 2023 Lannan Foundation event celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Copper Canyon Press, Paisley Rekdal presents her hybrid collection, West: A Translation, and Jericho Brown, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, The Tradition, reads a selection of poems, followed by a conversation with Arthur Sze and the press’s editor in chief Michael Wiegers.

In this 2023 Segue Reading Series event hosted by Artists Space, Jackie Wang reads from her book Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023) and Eileen Myles reads from their latest poetry collection, a “Working Life” (Grove Press, 2023).

“If the only thing we can give to each other is ourselves, we better do it. Now.” In this inaugural Speak Now series event hosted by Columbia University School of the Arts, Claudia Rankine reads from her work-in-progress “Triage” and discusses political censorship in higher education and the importance of literature in crises in a conversation with Sarah Cole.

For this LIVE From NYPL event, Jamaica Kincaid and illustrator Kara Walker discuss their collaborative book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and the racial, colonial history of gardening in a conversation with Hilton Als.

In this video, the University of California in Berkeley celebrates their Arts Research Center’s 2023 Poetry & the Senses program with a reading by Indigenous writers and program facilitators Beth Piatote, Natalie Diaz, and Craig Santos Perez on the theme of reclamation. Perez’s new collection, Call This Mutiny: Uncollected Poems (Omnidawn, 2024), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Hybrid writing is realized. It is the form that a story needs to take on the page.” In this 1-Week Critique interview hosted by Matthew Schmidt, author Nina Lohman discusses her approach to hybrid writing and walks through drafts of her latest book, The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain (University of Iowa Press, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this KING 5 News in Seattle interview, Frank Abe discusses The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration (Penguin Classics, 2024), a new anthology he coedited with Floyd Cheung, which includes collected letters, memoirs, poems, stories, and essays chronologically ordered to represent the full experience of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II.

In this event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Ocean Vuong talks about his journey through poetry and teaching, how his voice and understanding of genre have changed, and whether or not poetry can change the world in a conversation with Cathy Park Hong. “I’ve always been doubtful of myself, of my work, of my life. But when I’m writing, when I’m inside the poem, I rarely feel true fear,” says Vuong.

“These are notes on encountering the daily, the literary, the visual, violent, the arbitrary, the ordinary, and the beautiful…. They are always concerned with what I think of as the ordinary, extraordinary matter of Black life.” In this Virginia Museum of Fine Arts event, Christina Sharpe discusses her latest book, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which weaves the past, present, and future together through various mediums ranging from lyric to photography.

In this recent installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series, Brandon Shimoda reads a selection of poems and essays with the theme of “oranges,” which address the memory of Japanese American incarceration and war.

As part of the Fictions & Forms reading series hosted by the University of Chicago’s Program in Creative Writing, Danielle Dutton discusses her intricate relationship to genre and form, and reads from her hybrid collection, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There’s something about straight lines on a page and the ability to use punctuation in an expected and familiar way that changes the way you do honesty on the page.” Poet and essayist Camonghne Felix speaks about mental health and heartbreak, and the vulnerability she found in writing her debut memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World, 2023), for this Live From NYPL event with multi-disciplinary artist Bunny Michael.

“Sorrowful news sings the telegram / and Lincoln’s body slides from DC / to Springfield, his third son, Willie, / boxed beside him.” In this 2019 City of Asylum event, Paisley Rekdal reads from her multimedia poem “West: A Translation,” a book-length work commissioned by Utah’s Spike 150 organization to commemorate the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad. Rekdal’s hybrid collection, published in May by Copper Canyon Press, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I like to think of subtext as almost being horizontal instead of below the surface of the text,” says award-winning playwright, poet, and essayist Sarah Ruhl in this video for Conchord Theatricals. For more from Ruhl, read her essay “Twelve Reasons You Should Keep Writing” published in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, finalists for the 2022 National Book Award in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature read excerpts from their honored works. The event, hosted by writer Saraciea J. Fennell, is presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and the NYU Creative Writing Program.

Watch the video for musician Andrew Bird’s interpretation of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,” a duet with Phoebe Bridgers included in his album Inside Problems. Of the poem, Bird says, “I came across this Emily Dickinson poem and found it to be the most vivid description of an inner world I’ve ever encountered.”