Poets & Writers Theater

“Black women are crafting a collective response / to centuries of being under everybody’s water / We are a rising tsunami of fury come back / to take back what was carried away/without consent....” Staceyann Chin reads “Tsunami Rising” from her debut poetry collection, Crossfire: A Litany for Survival (Haymarket Books, 2019), for the Unbound series in Brooklyn, copresented by BAM and Greenlight Bookstore.

“You’re not really thinking of speaking those words. Often you think about what the most wrong thing to say or do would be, in any given situation.” In this video, Merritt Tierce, a 2019 Whiting Award winner in fiction, reads from her short story “Distributed Denial of Service.”

“And I dreamed of our world, a spinning ball of confusion, heart-wrenching injustices…” Patti Smith reads a poem and performs a cover of Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” in this video from the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Smith’s new memoir, Year of the Monkey, is out now from Knopf.

In this Waterstones video, André Aciman introduces his latest novel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), the sequel to his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, and shares three books from the shelves of the bookstore that have influenced his writing.

In this Asian American Writers’ Workshop video, Yanyi celebrates the launch of his debut collection, The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019), with readings by poets Wo Chan, Erica Hunt, and Monica Youn. Yanyi is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“In the silence of the house with the rain falling all around me—and the sound of African rain is very unique unto itself—I did two things: I picked up a piece of paper and I drew with great detail and care what was on the mantelpiece. And I finished that, and I took another piece of paper, and I wrote a poem about the rain.” Booker Prize–winning author Ben Okri talks about the life-changing moment when he began writing poetry in this interview from the 2019 Louisiana Literature Festival in Denmark.

“The men in my family wear masculinity like war medals. From birth, deem themselves protectors, providers, kings of everything their light touches....” In this Button Poetry video, Jordan Bailey reads his poem “Men in My Family” at the 2019 Rustbelt Poetry Festival in St. Louis, Missouri.

“My great-grandfather held a brain and studied it for signs of music.” In this video, Maya C. Popa reads her poem “A Technique for Operating on the Past,” which won the 2015 Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine. Popa, the author of American Faith (Sarabande Books, 2019), is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Charles Dickens’s classic 1843 holiday novella, A Christmas Carol, has been adapted into a new BBC television drama. The three-part fantasy miniseries is directed by Nick Murphy, and stars Joe Alwyn as Bob Cratchit, Jason Flemyng as the Ghost of Christmas Future, Stephen Graham as Jacob Marley, Guy Pearce as Ebenezer Scrooge, Charlotte Riley as Lottie (the Ghost of Christmas Present), and Andy Serkis as the Ghost of Christmas Past.

In this PBS Books interview at the 2019 AWP Conference & Book Fair, Keith S. Wilson speaks about his love of video games, Affrilachian poetry, and his debut collection, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). Wilson is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“if you ask me where i come from i have to converse with broken wings.” Marwa Helal reads two poems from her debut poetry collection, Invasive species (Nightboat Books, 2019), at the Bronx Museum of the Arts for the Poets for Puerto Rico benefit reading series. Helal is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and translator Robert Hass reads “Okefenokee: A Story,” “Pertinent Divagations Toward an Ode to Inuit Carvers,” and other poems from his book Summer Snow (Ecco, 2020) at the 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. The book, Hass’s seventh poetry collection, is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Today, today I said I would write my own healing.” In this 2015 video, Camonghne Felix reads her poem “Presence” at the Strivers Row’s Poetic Soul live performance series. Felix is the author of Build Yourself a Boat (Haymarket Books, 2019) and is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I hope that people can take away that these racial biases, these class biases, exist harmoniously within really kind gestures and authentic love for someone.” In this video, Kiley Reid talks about the characters in her debut novel, Such a Fun Age (Putnam, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Soundless, it crosses a line, quiets into a seed / & then whatever makes a seed. almost like gone / but not gone. the air kept its shape.” At the 2019 Lambda Literary Retreat, Danez Smith reads “undetectable” and “say it with your whole black mouth” from their third poetry collection, Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the January/February 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.

“Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle / meaning sun. / 6 green, vertical lines, with color all from the top / meaning flowers.” In this animated short film for the TED-Ed “There’s a Poem for That” series, Aracelis Girmay reads her poem “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card” from her collection Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007).

“I got into the habit of writing very, very, very quickly,” says Rachel Cusk, author of the Outline trilogy and the essay collection, Coventry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), about taking long breaks from writing to live a normal life and the experience of being a mother to young children without the time to make notes. “I had to hold things and then find an opportunity to express them.”

“Child, we move through graves / like eels, delicious with our heads first, our mouths / agape.” In this Ours Poetica video, Jane Wong reads her poem “After Preparing the Altar, the Ghosts Feast Feverishly” published in the November 2018 issue of Poetry magazine. Wong’s second poetry collection, How to Not Be Afraid of Everything, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in 2021.

The Earthquake Bird (Picador, 2001), the debut mystery novel by British author Susanna Jones, has been adapted into a feature film directed by Wash Westmoreland. The psychological thriller follows a young expat in 1989 Tokyo who is accused of murder when her friend goes missing and stars Riley Keough, Naoki Kobayashi, Kenichi Masuda, Kiki Sukezane, and Alicia Vikander.