Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2009 video, the late Polish poet, novelist, and essayist Adam Zagajewski reads from his work and answers questions from the audience for an event at the Renaissance Society, a contemporary art museum located on the campus of the University of Chicago.

“At some level, I’m never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised—I make a discovery in the poem as I write it,” says former U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove in this 2009 interview for Big Think, in which she answers questions about poetry and her writing process.

“There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill / and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows…” In this 2009 video, pioneering feminist poet Adrienne Rich reads her poem “What Kind of Times Are These?” at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival. Rich died at the age of eighty-two on March 27, 2012.

“I’m always watching the moon and the moonlight. But I didn’t write about it.” Japanese poet Hiromi Itō talks about how the moon is linked to the menstrual cycle and her decision to write about menstruation, and reads from her poem “Vinegar, Oil” from Killing Kanoko (Action Books, 2009), translated from the Japanese by Jeffrey Angles, at the 2018 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark.

Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked (Riverhead Books, 2009), a novel about a couple whose relationship is altered by a reclusive singer-songwriter’s album, has been adapted into a film. Directed by Jesse Peretz, the film stars Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, and Chris O’Dowd.

“When you think about all her heroines who struggled to curb their temperament and discipline themselves, you get a sense of the writer herself.” Directed by Nancy Porter, this film biography from PBS's American Masters series, offers an intimate portrait of Louisa May Alcott and the influence her novel Little Women continues to have across cultures and generations.

Composer Luis Escareño's multimedia performance piece is based on Maggie Nelson's book Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) and was recorded live at the Center for New Music in San Francisco. Written as a series of vignettes, the performance features text and narrated monologue adapted from the book, images, and music performed by the Living Earth Show.

This clip presents one element in the making of the cover of Katie Kitamura’s debut novel, The Longshot (Free Press, 2009), which features a photo of the tattooed knuckles of the author’s brother, whose background in mixed martial arts was an inspiration for the subject of the novel. Kitamura’s latest novel, A Separation, is out now by Riverhead Books.

“Like two personalities, they didn’t want to be one. They didn't want to tell one story. I couldn’t put them together.” Following the launch of her twenty-third book, The Naked Eye (New Directions, 2009), Yoko Tawada talks about thinking and writing in both German and Japanese. Tawada’s forthcoming novel, Memoirs of a Polar Bear, is translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky and will be released in November by New Directions.

“Masons, when they start upon a building, / Are careful to test out the scaffolding...” The late Seamus Heaney reads his poem “Scaffolding” on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 2009.

"It's hard to protect a person you love from pain, because people often choose pain. I am a person who often chooses pain. An animal will never choose pain." Mary Gaitskill, whose new novel, The Mare (Pantheon Books, 2015), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her personal essay "Lost Cat" (Granta, 2009) at Baruch College.

"The way that I use syntax in my work, I think it is a direct relation from my childhood and my parents being immigrants." Poet and writer Ching-In Chen speaks about the influences that continue to inspire her to create a distinct writing style. Chen is author of the poetry collection The Heart's Traffic (Arktoi Books/Red Hen Press, 2009).

The late poet reads his poem "Something in the Way of Things (in Town)" in a 2009 performance with saxophonist Rob Brown. S O S: Poems 1961–2013, a new collection of Baraka's poetry published by Grove Press this month, is featured in Page One in the new issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The author of the novels The Time Traveler’s Wife (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004) and Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner, 2009) reads from her new graphic novel Raven Girl, featured in this issue's The Written Image, at the Royal Opera House in London.

This animated film by Vanessa Woods, with sound by Cheryl E. Leonard and Anka Draugelates, was inspired by The Mansion of Happiness, a poetry collection by Robin Ekiss published by the University of Georgia Press in 2009. Featuring original photograms and hundreds of nineteenth-century collage elements, it explores "the philosophical boundaries between myth and memory and between our inner and outer worlds."

1Q84, the eagerly anticipated tome by Haruki Murakami, will be published by Knopf next month. The image of the book at the end of this trailer doesn't do it justice: The novel is nearly 950 pages long.

• Winner of the 2009 Shirley Jackson Award for his story collection, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, Kevin Wilson discusses his new novel, The Family Fang, which will be published in August by Ecco. About the difference between writing a story and a novel, he says, "The short story is this car and you just drive it into a tree... With a novel I had to keep reminding myself to drive as far as I could, to get as many miles as I could out of it before I crashed it."