Poets & Writers Theater

At this Dominican University of California event, Isabel Allende talks about her latest novel, My Name Is Emilia del Valle (Ballantine Books, 2025), the importance of women characters who don’t compromise, and the class structure of Chile which informed her writing in a conversation with Matthew Félix.

In this Center for Fiction event, author and critic Andrea Long Chu reads from her essay collection Authority (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) and talks about the inherent contradictions in the way people discuss and disagree about art, and traces the political and intellectual history of literary criticism in a conversation with Arielle Angel.

In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Lidia Yuknavitch reads from her memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) and speaks to Porochista Khakpour about the process of rearranging fragments of writing.

CD Eskilson celebrates the release of their debut poetry collection, Scream / Queen (Acre Books, 2025), in this reading and conversation with poets Ashia Ajani and Preeti Vangani at Green Apple Books in San Francisco.

At this Japanese Literature Night event hosted by the Japan Society, Keiichiro Hirano delivers his keynote speech titled “The Question of Selfhood” in which he shares how his upbringing in Kitakyushu, Fukuoka during the eighties and nineties inspired his interest in literature and how he attempts to tackle questions of the individual’s place in modernity through his novels.

In this Jaipur Literature Festival event moderated by Nadini Nair, novelists David Nicholls, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Geetanjali Shree, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Andrew O’Hagan discuss their respective writing processes, as well as how the novel voice can be used to interrogate the histories established by colonial powers.

Watch the trailer for The Life of Chuck, a film adaptation of the novella of the same name by Stephen King. Written and directed by Mike Flanagan, the film stars Tom Hiddleston, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Karen Gillan, Jacob Tremblay, and Mark Hamill.

In this video, Heid E. Erdrich reads from her collections Verb Animate: Poetry and Prompts From Collaborative Acts (Trio House Press, 2024) and Little Big Bully (Penguin Books, 2020), and answers questions about hope, memories, and revision for this Jensen Lecture Series event hosted by Western Oregon University.

In this McNally Jackson Books event, Polly Barton reads from her English translation of Mai Ishizawa’s debut novel, The Place of Shells (New Directions, 2025), and talks about her experience researching the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami in order to capture the historical, emotional center of Ishizawa’s writing in a conversation with Eliza St. James.

In this Politics and Prose bookstore event, Christina Li, author of The Manor of Dreams (Avid Reader Press, 2025), talks about her decision to write a family saga with gothic sensibilities and how the Mandarin and Cantonese languages affected her writing process in a conversation with Martha Anne Toll.

Miss Austen is a four-part historical television series produced by PBS Masterpiece, an adaptation by Andrea Gibb of the novel of the same name by Gill Hornby. Directed by Aisling Walsh, the series stars Keeley Hawes as Cassandra Austen, the sister of late Jane Austen, who searches for Jane’s letters in order to protect her reputation.

Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2018), and A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven (Viking, 2012), talk about how the definition of women’s literature has evolved over time in this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer celebrating thirty years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Watch the trailer for A Pale View of Hills, a film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1982 novel of the same name. Directed by Kei Ishikawa, the film stars Suzu Hirose, Fumi Nikaido, and Yoh Yoshida, and explores a widow’s memories spanning post-war Nagasaki in the 1950s and England during the 1980s Cold War era.

“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.

“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.

In this event at the Chinese Historical Society of America Museum in San Francisco, Michael Luo talks about how a series of tweets reacting to a hate crime he experienced led to an exploration of early nineteenth-century Chinese immigration, which began the process for his debut book, Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America (Doubleday, 2025). “In order to understand this kind of present, you have to go back,” Luo says.

In this DC Public Library event, Imani Perry speaks with Clint Smith about the recurrence of the color blue in her life and how it sparked an aesthetic examination of the color’s place in African and Black history for her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025).

In this Poetry Night Panel event at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., Brandel France de Bravo, author of Locomotive Cathedral (The Backwaters Press, 2025), and Julie Choffel, author of Dear Wallace (The Backwaters Press, 2024), read a selection of poems and join María Fernanda for a conversation about how literature helps one grapple with the challenges of life.

“I wanted to write about a father and daughter in a building made of time.” Madeleine Thien talks about the genealogy of ideas and yearslong process of writing her novel The Book of Records (Norton, 2025) in this Toronto Public Library event with Elamin Abdelmahmoud. For more from Thien, read “Hopeless Hope: A Conversation With Madeleine Thien” by Renée H. Shea.

In this event hosted by Prince George’s County Memorial Library System in Maryland, Kevin Nguyen talks about how his experiences in journalism, and the histories of Japanese American incarceration and the Vietnam War, shaped his second novel, Mỹ Documents (One World, 2025), and the ways in which he sees this book as “an imagination of policy” rather than speculative fiction.