Poets & Writers Theater

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.

“It is not what drove your body here like a stolen car. / why you abandoned it on this unreasonable ledge....” This Button Poetry video features sam sax’s poem “Gay Boys & the Bridges Who Love Them” from his second collection, Bury It (Wesleyan University Press, 2018), and is directed by Seth Moore and Cole Smothers with choreography by Matthew Bovee and Sarah Adam.

“I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind / and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.“ Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry, 2018), reads their poem “The Nutritionist” for this animated TED-Ed film directed by Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat.

Vita & Virginia is a film adaptation of Eileen Atkins’s 1992 play of the same name, based on love letters Virginia Woolf exchanged over the course of a decade-long affair with Vita Sackville-West, the inspiration behind Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography. Directed by Chanya Button, the biopic stars Gemma Arterton as West, Elizabeth Debicki as Woolf, and Isabella Rossellini as Baroness Sackville.

“Beautiful, wonderful, amazing, fantastic: three-syllable hyperbole when playing the coquette. / Lovely, little, lastly likely: two-syllable hyperbole when listing features to describe the coquette.” Duy Doan reads “Love Trinkets” from his debut poetry collection, We Play a Game (Yale University Press, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry.

“The extraordinary thing about this book is it talks of a world in transition—philosophically, politically, intellectually, socially—and that is the age that we live in now.” Bettany Hughes, chair of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, and fellow judges speak about Celestial Bodies (Sandstone Press, 2018) written by Jokha Alharthi and translated from the Arabic by Marilyn Booth, which won this year’s award. Alharthi is the first female Omani novelist to be translated into English, and the first author from the Arabian Gulf to win the prize.

“Gaudí believed in holy sound / and built a cathedral to contain it, / pulling hearing men from their knees...” Raymond Antrobus reads his poem “Echo” and discusses his debut poetry collection, The Perseverance (Penned in the Margins, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Rathbones Folio Prize.

“I went through a Philip Glass phase, but I’m out of that now. Lately I write to silence, usually.” In this Vintage Books interview, Kayo Chingonyi answers questions about his literary and pop culture influences, daily routine, and books he thinks everyone should read. Chingonyi won the 2018 International Dylan Thomas Prize for his debut poetry collection, Kumukanda (Chatto & Windus, 2017).

“As a photographer my looking really changed, it really did become sacred....” In this Louisiana Channel video, Teju Cole talks about and reads from his book of photography and text, Blind Spot (Random House, 2017), which was inspired by a short period of blindness in one eye that transformed his perspective on looking and attentiveness. The book is comprised of over a hundred fifty photographs interspersed with short lyrical prose pieces.

“I picked up languages the way some people pick up viruses. I was armed with literature.” In this video by Alma Books, Azareen van der Vliet Oloomi reads an excerpt from her novel Call Me Zebra (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), for which she won the 2019 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.