Poets & Writers Theater

“Time can but make it easier to be wise / Though now it seems impossible, and so / All that you need is patience.” In this Poetry Hour series reading from the Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, actor Jeremy Irons reads “The Folly Of Being Comforted” by W. B. Yeats.

In this 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets virtual event, fellows Kenzie Allen, Kalehua Kim, Halee Kirkwood, Mary Leauna Christensen, Erin Marie Lynch, m.s. RedCherries, and Annie Wenstrup read for their work.

In this 2023 Segue Reading Series event hosted by Artists Space, Jackie Wang reads from her book Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun: An Almanac of Extreme Girlhood (Semiotext(e), 2023) and Eileen Myles reads from their latest poetry collection, a “Working Life” (Grove Press, 2023).

“The correct line has that kind of ring of rightness to it. It’s like it’s always been there.” In this Merriam-Webster video, Celeste Ng talks about the sonic, literal, and emotional levels of words and reviews some choices made in her third novel, Our Missing Hearts (Penguin Press, 2022), with playwright Eboni Booth.

“I think the thing that you feel when you get to the right word is that you’ve found the answer to a question.” In this short video, author Gabrielle Zevin walks through parts of her novel Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (Knopf, 2022) and discusses her word choices with John Sabine, social director for Merriam-Webster.

In this 2023 event co-presented by Bellevue Literary Review at the Center for Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips reads from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Night Watch (Knopf, 2023), and discusses setting her story during the Civil War in West Virginia in a conversation with editor Danielle Ofri. “History gives us the facts, but literature tells us the story,” says Phillips. “The characters access the meaning of history for us.”

“If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story…” In this video filmed for the Palestine Festival of Literature, actor Brian Cox reads “If I Must Die” by the late Palestinian poet and English literature professor Refaat Alareer, who died after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on December 6, 2023. Alareer’s posthumous book of the same name will be published in September by OR Books.

In this video, South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon reads with her longtime translator Don Mee Choi, both sharing their work and speaking about their writing and collaboration with Susan Bernofsky, director of Literary Translation at Columbia University. Choi’s latest poetry collection, Mirror Nation (Wave Books, 2024), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Rebecca Makkai discusses her newest novel, I Have Some Questions for You (Viking, 2023), and talks about spectacles of violence in media and what makes a good mystery in a conversation with journalist Rachael Brown for this 2023 Wheeler Centre event in Melbourne, including an introductory reading by playwright and novelist Suzie Miller.

In this 2023 Charleston Literary Festival event, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Paul Harding talks to Geoffrey Harpham about his latest novel, This Other Eden (Norton, 2023), which is inspired by the true story of Malaga Island, home to one of the first racially integrated towns in the American Northeast.

In this Family Action Network event, Ross Gay reads from his latest essay collection, The Book of (More) Delights (Algonquin Books, 2023), and speaks about the practice of writing short essays and playing basketball in a conversation with poet and editor Adrian Matejka.

Ling Ma reads from her short story “Tomorrow,” which appears in her collection, Bliss Montage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), in this 2023 video from the Windham-Campbell Prizes Festival where she was awarded a prize in fiction.

In this 2023 virtual event hosted by City Lights Bookstore, Emily Luan, author of 回 / Return (Nightboat Books, 2023), and Brandon Shimoda, author of Hydra Medusa (Nightboat Books, 2023), read from their poetry collections and discuss themes of memory, mourning, and migration in their writing.

“I was really curious about how this fear of impending loss affects people.” In this 2023 LIVE From NYPL event, C Pam Zhang reads from her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead Books, 2023), and discusses grief, natural disasters, and apocalypse in a conversation with author and television host Padma Lakshmi.

“The reason I’m so terrified of what’s happening around me is because I’m so in love with the world.” In this 2023 Lost City Books virtual event, Franny Choi reads from their latest poetry collection, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On (Ecco, 2023), and discusses the futurist politics of poetry, the present need for Black and Asian solidarity, and the battle between hope and despair in a conversation with Danez Smith.

In this event celebrating Sandra Cisneros, winner of the 2023 Dayton Literary Peace Prize Foundation’s Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, the author reads from her latest poetry collection, Woman Without Shame (Knopf, 2022), and speaks about her writing career with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

In this 2023 London Review of Books event, Emily Wilson reads from and discusses her translation of The Iliad by Homer, published in September by Norton, and how she wishes to present Homer to a new generation in a conversation with classicist and historian Edith Hall. Passages from Wilson’s translation are also read by actors Tobias Menzies and Juliet Stevenson.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Rachel Heng discusses her latest novel, The Great Reclamation (Riverhead Books, 2023), and talks about writing fiction that is both historical and speculative, and how she uses notecards to organize writing her gargantuan novels.

Joshua Burton reads from his debut poetry collection, Grace Engine (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023), for this Splice Poetry Series reading at the Saturn Bar in New Orleans with poet Nikki Ummel. Burton is featured in “Performing the Future: Our Nineteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

At this Booksmith event in San Francisco, Ed Park reads from his latest novel, Same Bed Different Dreams (Random House, 2023), and discusses the complexities of twentieth-century Korean history, the research that goes into historical fiction, and the role of Korean poet Yi Sang in his book in a conversation with Natalie So.