Poets & Writers Theater

“One of the women greeted me. / I love you, she said. She didn’t / Know me, but I believed her, / And a terrible new ache / Rolled over in my chest,” reads Tracy K. Smith from her poem “Wade in the Water” in this 2018 Library of Congress event with Ron Charles, book critic of the Washington Post. Smith is featured in a profile by Renée H. Shea in the March/April 2015 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“One of the things that I think I can say now with a great deal of confidence about writing is that usually, the things that you are most ashamed of are actually what you should be trying to describe,” says Alexander Chee in this 2018 lecture titled “The Writer and Life,” part of Brown University’s public lecture series devoted to various forms of nonfiction writing. For more Chee, read “Which Story Will You Tell? A Q&A with Alexander Chee” by Amy Gall.

In this 2018 video, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor reads a collaborative poem about her son Malik Taylor with South Carolina’s first poet laureate Marcus Amaker at the Free Verse poetry festival in Charleston. Boyce-Taylor’s fifth poetry collection, Mama Phife Represents (Haymarket Books, 2021), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Looking for a prescription of poetry? In this Intelligence Squared video, William Sieghart, author of The Poetry Pharmacy: Tried-and-True Prescriptions for the Heart, Mind and Soul (Penguin Books, 2017), and Jeanette Winterson, author of Frankissstein: A Love Story (Grove Press, 2019), introduce poems that have changed their lives as a cast of actors—including Tom Burke, Helena Bonham Carter, Jason Isaacs, and Sue Perkins—recite them.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction show cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author and pulmonary and critical care specialist Daniela Lamas talks about coronavirus patients seeking recovery or end-of-life care, and poet and radiation oncologist C. Dale Young speaks about the variety of American responses to the pandemic and reads from his book The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018).

“Larry thought it was as if the whole of the world was asking to be fuel.” Leah Hampton, whose debut book, F*ckface (Henry Holt, 2020), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her short story “Boomer” at Malvern Books in 2018. 

“I orchestrate brutality but I never wanted to compose this symphony. We batons fell into the role masterfully though as the blue Beethovens adorned in badges used us to keep the beat on black notes....” In this video, Kofi Dadzie reads his poem “Baton” at Button Poetry Live in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 2018.

“It always feels to me…all the way through writing a project, that the characters are actually real people and my job is to do justice to them,” says Sally Rooney about writing and adapting the characters of her novel Normal People (Faber & Faber, 2018) to the screen for the BBC/Hulu television series in this Waterstones interview with director Lenny Abrahamson and actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.

In this installment of the AAWW at Home series, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of the novel Starling Days (Overlook Press, 2020), talks about how she’s been occupied during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and reads from Alexander Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018). 

In the Doing Stuff With Writers video series, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, author of Heads of the Colored People (37 Ink, 2018), spends time engaging in non-literary activities with writers and discusses how these interests overlap with writing in unexpected ways. In this episode, Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me (William Morrow, 2018), teaches Thompson-Spires the art of throwing a ceramic bowl on a pottery wheel.

“A detail in a pool of blood / the body gathered in an awkward kink / I dress myself in easy anything…” In this Ours Poetica video, Chase Berggrun reads “Chapter XXI” from R E D (Birds, LLC, 2018), a book of erasures of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

In this 92nd Street Y video, Mahogany L. Browne reads poems from her books Black Girl Magic (Roaring Brook Press, 2018) and Kissing Caskets (YesYes Books, 2017). Her forthcoming book, Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, will be out in March from Roaring Brook Press.

“We like to think about people and nature as two separate things,” says Richard Powers speaking about his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory (Norton, 2018), in this PBS NewsHour interview. “This book is precisely a book that challenges that notion of human separatism.” For more Powers, read “A Talk in the Woods: Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers” from the November/December 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I would LOVE to imagine / being alive in five / years but I have these bones u know? / and just like that I’m writing / a poem / a poem / a poem / again.” In this 2018 video from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Tommy Pico reads an excerpt from Feed (Tin House Books, 2019), the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy of book-length poems.

“It’s a story of a young girl who comes to America in the early 1980s and, among many other things, discovers something called race,” says Sharmila Sen about her debut memoir, Not Quite Not White: Losing and Finding Race in America (Penguin Books, 2018), which won the 2019 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in nonfiction.

Julian Randall reads “On the Night I Consider Coming Out to My Parents” from his debut poetry collection, Refuse (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), in this Ours Poetica video produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly. Randall is featured in “My MFA Experience” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It wasn’t fair that fish could see color, / and whales could not, but I was okay: I loved my new body. / I don’t know what kind of whale I was. In the ocean / there were no mirrors.” Emily Jungmin Yoon’s poem “The Transformation,” which appears in her debut collection, A Cruelty Special to Our Species (Ecco, 2018), has been adapted into a Motionpoems film directed by Malin Sandberg. 

“The book clearly describes the horror, the conflict, the chaos, the death, the trauma that came from the war, and then after that, the invisible dream that I started pursuing.” Abdi Nor Iftin, author of the debut memoir, Call Me American (Knopf, 2018), talks about growing up during the civil war in Somalia and what the American dream means to him.

“I like questions, my imagination likes them too.” In this A Word on Word series video, Alexander Chee speaks about his essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018), and his writing process which involves engaging in conversation with his fictional characters.

“To deprivatize is not the same as to make public. A field is only natural or private after so much hurt.” In this short film, Jos Charles offers a preface for her poetry collection feeld (Milkweed Editions, 2018), which was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in poetry.