Poets & Writers Theater

“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this 2016 video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) for a two-day event at the Lab in San Francisco cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Notley died at the age of seventy-nine on May 20, 2025.

In this 2016 New Yorker video, Robert Battle, former artistic director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, reminds all artists, whether dancers, musicians, poets, or writers, that “it’s important for us to, at this time, see beyond our circumstances.” Battle continues: “I think we can do that through the arts.”

In this Button Poetry video, Patricia Smith reads her poem “An All-Purpose Product,” which appears in her award-winning collection Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012), for the 2016 Get Lit Classic Slam in Los Angeles.

“[Los Angeles is] part of an international community. The city has allowed tremendous growth for me, in terms of its cultural outlets, from libraries, great cinema, dance, orchestra, interesting mixes of people.... I see myself as a global citizen and a global writer.” Will Alexander, winner of the 2016 Jackson Poetry Prize, talks about the influence the city of Los Angeles has had on his relationship with language and writing.

In this 2016 video, Michael Chabon presents Toni Morrison with the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts and American culture. Morrison, who received a lifetime achievement award from the PEN American Center, tells a packed audience about how she became a writer and the inspiration for her first novel, The Bluest Eye.

“Have I forgotten it – / wild conch-shell dialect, / black apostrophe curled / tight on my tongue?” In this video, Safiya Sinclair reads a selection of poems from her debut collection, Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), as well as new poems for this installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series with an introduction by poet Noah Warren.

In this 2016 lecture for the Greater Good Science Center’s conference, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass discusses the history of awe and wonder in world literature, the root of the word “catharsis,” and the power poetry has to captivate and transform its readers.

Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, director of the organization Women Who Submit, reads from her collection Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge (Sundress Publications, 2016) and speaks about writing family stories as a first-generation Chicana in this interview with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA series.

“The only time I meet a stranger is when I confront myself. Any time I meet new people, they’re not strangers.” Poet, novelist, and essayist Chris Abani tells a story about meeting strangers in the airport, learning from their kindness, and how these experiences have influenced his writing for this 2016 House of SpeakEasy event at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York.

“Our cries are heard as noise, / our suffering considered / natural. Native citizens, / we are not free / to roam,” reads the late Kamilah Aisha Moon from her poem “The Emperor’s Deer” in this 2016 Define: BLACK video.

In this video, poet Sarah Browning introduces an encore presentation of a 2016 reading and conversation with Sharon Olds at the Folger Shakespeare Library, part of the O. B. Harrison Poetry Series titled “Begin Again.”

“Pursue it as if it were possible,” says Álvaro Enrigue about advice for young writers in this 2017 interview filmed at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. “I’m a kid from Colonia Nápoles in Mexico City…there was no way of making an equation that would start with my childhood and finish with me talking to you in Louisiana about my work, in Denmark, as a writer.” Enrigue is the author of several novels, including Sudden Death (Riverhead Books, 2016), his first to be translated into English.

In this installment of ENCLAVE, a virtual reading series curated by Rae Armantrout and Jeanne Heuving, poet Peter Gizzi reads from his collections Archeophonics (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) and Now It’s Dark (Wesleyan University Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It matters what you call a thing,” reads Solmaz Sharif from her poem “Look” in this 2017 reading and conversation with Evie Shockley for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. For more Sharif, read “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” from the January/February 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“What I love about water is that it spends its whole time falling,” begins Alice Oswald as she introduces her poem “A Short Story of Falling” from her 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape, 2016). “It’s always, apparently, trying to find the lowest place possible and when it finds the lowest place possible, it lies there wide awake.”

“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.