Poets & Writers Theater

In this Library of Congress National Book Festival event, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and Tiya Miles, author of Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People (Penguin Press, 2024), discuss their books in a conversation moderated by Martha S. Jones.

In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, André Aciman reads from his memoir Roman Year (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024) and talks about the loss he experienced during his adolescence in Rome and how writing has helped him come to terms with his identity in a conversation with Marie Arana. Roman Year is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s an ongoing interrogation of how we think about narrative. It’s my ongoing interrogation of history.” In this Toronto Public Library event, poet and novelist Dionne Brand speaks about how her new nonfiction book, Salvage: Readings From the Wreck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), wrestles with the ways novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries sustain and reproduce colonialism in a conversation with David Chariandy.

In this Poets & Writers event, novelist Garth Greenwell reads from his new book of fiction, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and joins frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a discussion on the book’s themes of mortality and meaning-making, and what it takes to live a full life oriented toward art. A profile of Greenwell by Gresko appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video from U.K. publisher Carcanet Press, Carl Phillips talks about the themes of memory and reflection within his seventeenth poetry collection, Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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 Intelligence Squared event, Rachel Cusk reads from her latest novel, Parade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and discusses the different kinds of violence that shape both the world and her book in a conversation with Adam Biles at Union Chapel in London.

“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.

“This year I turned my back to the world. I let language face // the front. The parting felt like a death.” In this About the Authors TV video, Victoria Chang speaks about her award-winning collection, Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), and reads a poem from her new collection, With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), which engages with the paintings and writings of Agnes Martin.

“You’ve got one idea that excites you, and all these other ideas start to kind of come out of it.” In this Sligo County Libraries event, award-winning author Paul Murray discusses the middle-class challenges of the characters in his latest novel, The Bee Sting (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), in a conversation with Colm Tóibín.

In this video, Marilynne Robinson talks about her new book, Reading Genesis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a new interpretation and analysis of the book of Genesis, in a conversation with author Ayana Mathis for the LIVE From NYPL series.

In this event for the ALOUD series at the Los Angeles Public Library, Sheila Heti reads from her new book, Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), in which she arranges ten years of her diaries from A to Z, and discusses her choice to tackle an intimate and long-term project in a conversation with author Michelle Tea.

"It’s life bleeding into stories. I feel like the longer we live, the more life bleeds into stories.” In this Books Are Magic event, Yiyun Li reads from her latest short story collection, Wednesday’s Child (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and discusses story endings, why it can take years to finish a story, and what sustains a plotless story in a conversation with David Means.

Justin Torres reads from his second novel, Blackouts (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and joins Melissa Febos for a conversation in this event hosted by the Chicago Public Library and the Women & Children First bookstore. Torres won the 2023 National Book Award in fiction for Blackouts. (This video has been removed by its host.)

“My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer / I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar / like what I remember of love when I was young.” In this video, Nobel Prize–winning author Louise Glück reads “Crossroads” from her collection A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. Glück died at the age of eighty on October 13, 2023.

Jamel Brinkley reads from his new story collection, Witness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and speaks about tone, reveals, and the themes in his stories with Garth Greenwell in this Books Are Magic event. From more from Brinkley, read his installment of our Ten Questions series.

“Speak to me; speak into me, / the wind said, when I woke this morning, Let’s see what happens.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Carl Phillips reads a selection of poems from his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022), and speaks to Jeffrey Brown about the intimacy and power of poetry. Phillips is the recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize.

Maggie Millner reads from her debut poetry collection, Couplets: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and Garth Greenwell reads from his forthcoming novel currently titled Small Rain for this reading and conversation moderated by Meghan O’Rourke at Yale University as part of the Yale Review’s Spring 2023 Literary Festival.

Catherine Lacey reads from her latest novel, Biography of X (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), and Miriam Toews reads from her latest novel, Fight Night (Bloomsbury, 2021), in this Christopher Lightfoot Walker Reading Series event at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

“All the books I’ve written in the past were books that I decided to write suddenly while I was writing something else.” In this London Review Bookshop conversation, French writer Édouard Louis speaks about his writing process and discovering the parts of his mother’s life he did not know for his new memoir, A Woman’s Battles and Transformations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), with translator and novelist Tash Aw.