Poets & Writers Theater

“The best writing advice I ever got was, don’t give up and you can be a writer, if you work really hard and don’t stop writing.” In this Audible interview, New Yorker staff writer and author Ariel Levy speaks about finding her voice, writing about women’s lives, her experience with maternal grief, and her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House, 2017).

“Scientists say the average human/ life gets three months longer every year. / By this math, death will be optional,” reads Nicole Sealey from her poem “The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born,” which appears in her collection Ordinary Beast (Ecco, 2017), in this reading with Morgan Parker, author of Magical Negro (Tin House Books, 2019), at Scripps College.

“What persuades in poetry, what moves, what transforms—and what is memorable—starts with music.” Jorie Graham talks about the importance of musicality and the influences of American modernist and English romantic poetry on her writing in this Big Think video. Graham’s collection Fast (Ecco, 2017) is featured in Page One in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Knopf video, Kazuo Ishiguro, who was awarded the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature, speaks about what he calls “double-cross metaphors” and how “tilting the reality of the world just a little bit” in his stories provides inspiration. For more Ishiguro, read “Never Let Me Go: A Profile of Kazuo Ishiguro” by John Freeman from the May/June 2005 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I should share with you that I did not intend to be a fiction writer, I did not intend to write a historical novel…I did intend to always, however, tell the truth,” says Min Jin Lee about writing her novel Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017), which has been adapted into a television series, in this 2018 reading and conversation with Claire Messud at Harvard University.

“If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” In this TED Talk, Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books, 1995), shares twelve truths she’s learned from life and her writing.

“What you can do is tell your best story, at that moment.” Camille T. Dungy, whose first essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, offers writers advice on how to overcome roadblocks in this Austin Community College video.

Based on the best-selling historical novel by Min Jin Lee, Pachinko is an eight-episode series that follows a Korean immigrant family across four generations. The highly anticipated Apple TV+ series stars Yuh-Jung Youn, Lee Minho, Jin Ha, and Minha Kim and will be told in three languages—Korean, Japanese, and English.

In this 2017 event, poet and novelist Fanny Howe reads from her rewritten novel, The Wages (Pressed Wafer Press, 2018), and poet and fiction writer John Keene reads from his story collection, Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), for the Woodberry Poetry Room’s Vocarium reading series at Harvard University.

“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).

“Here is another reason to write a memoir: to utter what must not be erased.” In this 2017 PBS NewsHour video, Richard Ford speaks about his reasons for writing, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Ecco, 2017), a memoir about his parents. “I wrote about my parents because, decades after their deaths and when I was no longer young, I realized that I plainly missed them.”

“‘Sometimes it’s a relief,’ he said lugubriously, ‘to see a face you recognize in an unfamiliar place. Other times you think, oh no, not him again,’” reads Rachel Cusk from her novel Transit (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), the second volume in her Outline trilogy, in this 2017 reading at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In this 2017 craft talk for Hugo House, Terrance Hayes reads from his book American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin (Penguin Books, 2018) and discusses the work and writing strategies of the late poet Lynda Hull.

“A poem is an utterly free space for language,” says Kathleen Ossip in this 2017 lecture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. “That is what makes it indispensable to me, and also what makes it political.” Ossip’s fourth poetry collection, July (Sarabande Books, 2021), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“since I couldn't say my name / I opened // as if preparing for a throat / culture...” In this video for Colby College, visiting professor of English Adam Giannelli reads his poem “Stutter” from his award-winning debut collection, From Tremulous Hinge (University of Iowa Press, 2017).

“Don’t be afraid— / Someone has walked this way before / All the world’s music in her hands.” Patricia Spears Jones reads “Discovering America Again” by Lorenzo Thomas, her own poem “The Birth of Rhythm and Blues,” and talks about what it means to be a literary citizen. This video, part of the P.O.P. series, was shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. Spears Jones is the eleventh winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize.

“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.

“My father was raised in Calcutta, in the neighborhood where all of these Bengali films were shot,” says Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri about growing up surrounded by Bengali cinema and how it influenced her second novel, The Lowland (Knopf, 2013), in this 2017 interview for Criterion Collection.

“Not the wealth of the thousand / Not the segregated place / Not the segregated classroom, the segregated desk,” reads Rodney Gomez from his poem “Rio Grande Valley Litany” at this 2017 reading for the Poets Against Border Walls Collective in Hidalgo, Texas. Gomez’s poetry collection Arsenal With Praise Song (Orison Books, 2021) 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.