Poets & Writers Theater

“I’ll dig in, / into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.” The late Denise Levertov reads poems from her collections Evening Train (New Directions, 1992) and Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996) in this video from a 1993 event at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.

“Each book that you write, you swim a long way from the pier at a certain point. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.... If you keep going, you’ll figure out how to shape the thing.” Jeffrey Eugenides recalls his experience writing his first book, The Virgin Suicides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), for the Paris Review’s “My First Time” video series. Eugenides’s first story collection, Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

“Lift up your eyes upon / This day breaking for you. / Give birth again / To the dream,” reads Maya Angelou from her poem “On the Pulse of the Morning” for the 1993 presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton.

Scott Smith, author of A Simple Plan (Knopf, 1993) offers what might be the perfect voice-over for Peter Heller's The Dog Stars, the story of a pilot living in a world filled with loss, published this month by Knopf.

"I ended up being the one that fell through the cracks," says poet, novelist, and journalist Luis J. Rodriguez, whose memoir Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. (Curbstone Press, 1993) elevated him as a major figure in contemporary Chicano literature. In this video from Open Road Media, Rodriguez tells his story and explains how books helped him escape a dangerous life on the streets of Los Angeles.