Poets & Writers Theater

“I wanted their lives, especially our working-class women, to be out there. People need to be seen. I wanted to show that.” Nicole Dennis-Benn talks about the working-class town she grew up in Jamaica and how her experiences inspired her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), in this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.

Sweetbitter (Knopf, 2016), Stephanie Danler’s debut novel about a young woman’s coming-of-age experience working at an exclusive restaurant in New York City, has been adapted into a television series. The series stars Daniyar, Eden Epstein, Caitlin FitzGerald, Evan Jonigkeit, and Ella Purnell.

Brenda Shaughnessy reads her poem “I Have a Time Machine” and discusses the role that poetry can play in recovering from traumatic experiences for a TEDx event at Harvard University. Shaughnessy is the author of Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).

“That was really one of my goals when I wrote the book, to create a human experience rather than the so-called North Korean experience for readers.” Author and translator Krys Lee speaks about her debut novel, How I Became a North Korean (Viking, 2016), and what she hopes to accomplish through her writing.

“One ear to the singing black boulder…” In this video, Simone White, recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for poetry, reads her poem “Some Creek” from her collection Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem Books, 2016).

Fred Moten reads from his poetry collection The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016) at an event cosponsored by San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center and the Green Arcade bookstore. Moten received a Grant to Artist award for 2018 from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Daniel Borzutzky, who won the 2016 National Book Award in poetry for The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), reads poems from the collection at a reading for the finalists hosted by the New School. Borzutzky’s forthcoming poetry collection, Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), is a series of nineteen lyric poems.

“Poems engage our imagination such that the confusion is not the end point.” Patrick Rosal, who won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his fourth collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), talks about the importance of art and reads several of his poems at the Loft Literary Center.

“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) at the Lab in San Francisco. The two-night program included a reading of the entire book-length poem and was cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.

“Eternity opens with the dark back / of a jazz pianist hunched inside himself...” For the Poetry.LA series, Angela Peñaredondo reads and discusses poems from her debut collection, All Things Lose Thousands of Times, which was the inaugural regional winner of Inlandia Institute’s Hillary Gravendyk Prize.

“Poems ask you to...really think empathetically, compassionately, and deeply about things.” Aaron Coleman, whose chapbook, St. Trigger (Button Poetry, 2016), won the 2015 Button Poetry Prize, talks about his writing interests and the power of poetry as a tool that can shift everyday language and change perspectives.

“We were in love with the world / and then we weren’t...” Mathias Svalina reads an excerpt of his poem “From Thank You Terror” at the Silo City Reading Series with music by the band Cages and visual art by Mary Helena Clark. Svalina is the author of The Wine-Dark Sea (Sidebrow Books, 2016) and travels to cities in America by bicycle delivering personalized poems to subscribers of his Dream Delivery Service.

“This city is full / of stranger things than a man collecting foil.” This short film is an adaptation of a poem of the same title by Matthew Yeager, author of Like That (Forklift Books, 2016) and cocurator of the KGB Monday Night Poetry Series. Directed by Sean Logan, the film features a drum score by tabla player Marcus Wise.

“The way that I write fiction is to kind of go in and just wander around.” In this video, Granta magazine’s Josie Mitchell speaks to Esmé Weijun Wang about her debut novel, The Border of Paradise (Unnamed Press, 2016), and her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias, which won the 2016 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

Poet and essayist Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib reads his poem “When I Say That Loving Me Is Kind of Like Being a Chicago Bulls Fan” from his debut poetry collection, The Crown Ain’t Worth Much (Button Poetry/Exploding Pinecone Press, 2016), at the Sheen Center in New York. His debut essay collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), uses music and culture as a lens to view the world.

Megan Abbott speaks about her interest in prodigies, her novel You Will Know Me (Little, Brown, 2016), and her thoughts on the superficiality of genre distinctions for Nashville Public Television’s A Word on Words.

“It’s a notebook, it’s not a collection of poems, it’s not exactly a novel, no fiction, what is this? Nobody knows.” In this video, Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa talks about being influenced by Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Agualusa won the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award for his novel A General Theory of Oblivion (Vintage, 2016) with Daniel Hahn, who translated the book from the Portuguese. 

“I had a million wishes too, but more than that, regrets...” Debora Kuan reads her poem “Fertile” from her collection Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016) for the Brooklyn Poets Reading Series.

“Most of my works, I’m delving deeper into the stories of women because we’re so used to being silenced.” Nicole Dennis-Benn, who won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), speaks about exploring dynamics of race, money, class, culture, and gender in Jamaica in her writing.

“It’s okay to be in flux and figure it out, and take your time to figure it out.” Follow iO Tillett Wright through the streets of New York City to Joshua Tree in California leading up to the launch of his debut memoir, Darling Days (Ecco, 2016).