Poets & Writers Theater

“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved.” In this reading at the Kelly Writers House in 2020, Carmen Maria Machado reads from her debut memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019).

“I no longer want to do this thing of speaking for the voiceless, it’s about passing the microphone and allowing those people to finally speak for themselves.” In this video produced by the Guardian Labs, author and spoken word artist Pages Matam talks about the power of poetry and creating spaces where shared experiences can act as both inspiration and a catalyst for change.

“To feel signs depends on how & why / the singer’s song puckers the mouth.” Yusef Komunyakaa reads his poem “A World of Daughters,” which appears in his collection Everyday Mojo Songs of Earth: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2021 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), among other selections in this 2020 virtual reading for UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series.

“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.

“As someone who is now a part of the next generation of Black queer writing, I pull a lot from what James Baldwin stood for,” says George M. Johnson, author of All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), in this video for GLAAD’s NEON series. Johnson, whose book has been banned from school libraries, is the 2022 honorary chair of Banned Books Week.

In this video, Shane McCrae reads his poem “Jim Limber on the Gardens of the Face of God” from his collection Sometimes I Never Suffered (Corsair, 2020), which was shortlisted for the 2020 T. S. Eliot Prize.

“Instead begin with the body—itself a kind / of ending.” In this Poetry.LA video, torrin a. greathouse reads from their debut collection, Wound From the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020), and speaks to Mariano Zaro about writing through multiple identities and connecting trauma, disability, and transness.

“It was important for me to write a book in which I could try to change this country’s consciousness.” Cathy Park Hong speaks about her award-winning essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), and the urgency to write from a personal perspective in this 2021 video for TIME Magazine’s annual 100 most influential people in the world issue.

“It doesn’t interest me to know how a book will end, I have to discover that for myself.” In this video from the National Centre for Writing, Eimear McBride, who won the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction for her debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing, speaks about how character and story and the process of discovery are the keys to her writing process.

In this 2020 BookTube episode, David Sedaris speaks about his candid and confessional style of writing, his family life, and lessons learned with Joel Kim Booster, Cindy Pham, Jake Roper, and Francine Simone.

“Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents,” says Bryan Washington in this New Yorker video about his personal connection to the dish. For more on Washington, read his installment of Ten Questions, in which he speaks about his debut story collection, Lot (Riverhead Books, 2019).

“One morning, I decide to spin backwards around the sun, says Earth. / One step behind / another behind another, I watch the chipper dance / of human beings in reverse.” In this Ours Poetica video, Mike Birbiglia reads the poem “Earth (in reverse)” by J. Hope Stein from their book, The New One: Painfully True Stories From a Reluctant Dad (Grand Central Publishing, 2020).

In this virtual event from the 2020 Cúirt International Festival of Literature, Kei Miller and Carolyn Forché read their poems and discuss the exploration of place, hope, and community in their work with poet Jess Traynor. Miller’s second essay collection, Things I Have Withheld (Grove Press, 2021), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“To walk down the streets in the Bay Area is really to walk through a dystopia,” says San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin about the rapid gentrification of his native city as he discusses how poetry serves as a tool for revolution in this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.

“The next time you stop speaking, / ask yourself why you were born,” reads Naomi Shihab Nye from her poem “Separation Wall” in this episode of Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.

“It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like these. You step into an inverted version of the world,” says poet Alice Oswald about the connection between water and grief in this 2020 virtual lecture for the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. “The water fits around you like a velvet suit, and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections.”

“Is it not enough to enter ending, one self in the halving road, and the fires in us blot the coasts that reject us...” In this short film by Lior Shamriz and Chloé Griffin, poet Canisia Lubrin reads from her collection The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland and Stewart, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

“Didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?” reads C Pam Zhang from her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), in this conversation with writer and comedian Karen Chee hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“Minor feelings are also the emotions we are accused of having when we decide to be difficult—in other words, when we decide to be honest,” reads Cathy Park Hong from her essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), in this Yale Review video from their two hundredth anniversary festival in 2020. 

“If we are always the threat / To whom or where do we turn for protection?” In this Litquake festival video from 2020, Pamela Sneed reads from her book Funeral Diva (City Light Books, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award’s lesbian poetry prize, and speaks with Tommy Pico about breaking apart genres and writing about pandemics.