Poets & Writers Theater

“The tepid / American I sank with my old shoes over the jaws of the Atlantic / could never understand the hard clamor of my laugh…” Safiya Sinclair reads from her debut collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), and speaks about poetry as the “language of an impolite body” in this episode of LIT hosted by Yahdon Israel.

“We’d cut school like knives through butter, the three / Of us — Peter, Stephen and I — to play / Just about all the music we knew…” In this video, award–winning poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads “Boys” from his second collection of poems, Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. 

In this Open Studio With Jared Bowen interview, playwright Kirsten Greenidge; Kerri Greenidge, historian and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019); and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016) talk about growing up together as sisters and how their work often overlaps.

“Even a baby is / a paper cut theater, / a necklace of incisions strung together / into a country.” In this Poetry.LA video, Kenji C. Liu reads poems from his collections Map of an Onion (Inlandia Institute, 2016) and Monsters I Have Been (Alice James Books, 2019) at the Writers for Migrant Justice reading in Los Angeles.

“Our swarm, it move like a flock of birds. All these beautiful black people in motion. Moving and shifting with a kind of intelligence.” Rion Amilcar Scott reads from his debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), and speaks with Cinder Barnes and Karl Smith at Montgomery College in Maryland. Scott’s second story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Liveright, 2019), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When the water in my heart falls, I hold on to a memory…” Monica Sok reads her poem “I Am Rachana” from her chapbook, Year Zero (Poetry Society of America, 2016), at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in 2016. Sok is one of the finalists for the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

The Good Liar (HarperCollins, 2016), the debut novel by Nicholas Searle about a wealthy widow who crosses paths with a seasoned con artist, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Bill Condon, the film stars Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, and Russell Tovey.

“I believe literature should always start from zero. So, I write stories in both languages on purpose.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Yoko Tawada speaks in German, English, and Japanese about thinking and writing in two different languages and about her novel Memoirs of a Polar Bear (New Directions, 2016), translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky.

“Living in this world where everything is social media, we’ve lost the art of being completely vulnerable and honest with our thoughts and our feelings. It’s exactly what poetry is, it’s about vulnerability.” In this Poetry.LA interview, Eric Morago, author of the collection Feasting on Sky (Paper Plane Pilot Publishing, 2016), reads from his work and talks about what brought him to poetry.

“Look at the old house in the dawn rain / all the flowers are forms of water…” In this excerpt from the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the late W. S. Merwin reads his poem “Rain Light.” Merwin’s final collection, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Khaled Khalifa talks with Renée Ragin at Duke University about questions of Arab and Syrian identity, the relationship between his writing and war, and themes of death and difficult journeys in his fifth novel, Death Is Hard Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). The novel, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Yaa Gyasi and Zadie Smith speak with Courtney Martin about representation and risks in writing, the power of fiction to invoke curiosity and transform behavior, issues of history and identity, and their current projects at the 2018 Obama Foundation Summit.

“This is a great one to give—it’s the sort of thing you can keep in the loo at Christmas when you’ve eaten too much food.” Jeanette Winterson reveals some of her favorite books for the holiday season, including The Trouble With Women (Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2016) by cartoonist Jacky Fleming, Tara Westover’s Educated: A Memoir (Random House, 2018), and her own collection of winter tales and festive recipes, Christmas Days: 12 Stories and 12 Feasts for 12 Days (Grove Press, 2016).

“Be very patient, even patient with chaos,” Lydia Davis advises writers in this compilation of interviews by Louisiana Channel. Seasoned writers from around the world, including Alaa Al Aswany, Umberto Eco, Richard Ford, Patti Smith, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, also offer their thoughts on how to keep writing.

“These are human stories of life and love and loss.” Matt Gallagher, a former U.S. Army captain and a writing instructor at the nonprofit Words After War, discusses the war stories that inspired his debut novel, Youngblood (Atria Books, 2016).

“Everybody feels ashamed when they write. It’s a shameful practice.” In this 2018 interview with Louisiana Channel, Zadie Smith, author most recently of Swing Time (Penguin Press, 2016), discusses the positive aspects of shame and how it can be productive for the writing process.

“It was the first time that literature felt personal, relevant, urgent....” Laura van den Berg talks about the transformative experience of reading contemporary fiction and short stories during her first writing workshop in college. Van den Berg’s second novel, The Third Hotel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I really think these characters were with me twenty years before I wrote the book.” In this video for A Word on Words, Ron Rash speaks about the inspiration for his latest novel, The Risen (Ecco, 2016), which centers around a murder in a small North Carolina town in the 1960s.

Boy Erased is a film based on Garrard Conley’s 2016 coming-of-age memoir of the same name. Lucas Hedges stars as a young man who is forced by his fundamental Baptist parents, played by Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman, to attend a gay conversion therapy program. The film is written and directed by Joel Edgerton, who also costars as the program’s head therapist.

“We headed into the forest up a hill to a thicket of tall trees, their tops so lush that I felt like crying.” In this 2016 video, Lisa Locascio reads from her debut novel, Open Me (Grove Press, 2018), for Poetry Center San Jose’s Well-RED series.