Poets & Writers Theater

In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, French Moroccan author and journalist Leïla Slimani talks about the dangers of gaining recognition as a writer, discovering the timelessness of literature through Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as a child, and what it means to dress like an intellectual.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast cohosted by Christian Barter, Jennifer Maritza McCauley, and Whitney Terrell, author Claudia Rankine discusses how current political crises inspired her new book, Triage (Graywolf Press, 2026), which is featured in Page One in the September/October 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When, under summer stars, you have built a cabin in the wilderness....” In this New Mexico in Focus interview, U.S. Poet Laureate Arthur Sze reads his poem “Anvil,” which appears in his collection Into the Hush (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), and his translation of Tao Qian’s poem “Drinking Wine,” which appears in the anthology Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry (Copper Canyon Press, 2026) edited by Sze.

In this Live Talks Los Angeles event, author and chef Eddie Huang speaks with Ottessa Moshfegh about his debut novel, Come Undone (One World, 2026), and his love for defying genres through autofiction. 

In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Colm Tóibín talks about the importance of writing physical character details in stories, how books awards can sometimes feel like “a theater of cruelty,” and shares the backstory to his 2019 London Review of Books essay about his experience of diagnosis and treatment for testicular cancer.

In this Oprah’s Book Club event, Douglas Stuart talks about his novel John of John (Grove Press, 2026), which he wrote over the course of six years after spending weeks researching the Outer Hebrides Isles on the coast of Scotland and interviewing their locals. For more from Stuart, read his installment of our Ten Questions series.

“Curiosity requires discipline. It’s an active act of throwing your mind at an object that deserves your attention and rising to its challenge.” In this interview for Vogue Australia, R. F. Kuang, author most recently of Katabasis (Harper Voyager, 2025), talks about how she cultivates curiosity, her artistic inspirations, and what it means to live a good life.

In this Spring 2026 Book and Author Festival virtual event hosted by Penguin Random House, Library Journal, and School Library Journal, Edwidge Danticat, author of Dèy (Knopf, 2026), Andrew Sean Greer, author of Villa Coco (Doubleday, 2026), and Ruth Ozeki, author of The Typing Lady: And Other Fictions (Viking, 2026), talk about their new books with librarian Jen Jumba.

In this Green Apple Books event moderated by Brendan McHugh, Steven Pfau reads from his debut book, Say Nephew: On Boyhood, Unclehood, and Queer Mentorship (Catapult, 2026), and discusses his desire to write a book about his uncle in the style of “autotheory,” inspired by  Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts and Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies.

In this virtual interview, Griffin Poetry Prize trustee Ian Williams speaks with poet Kevin Young about how Dante’s Divine Comedy inspired his collection Night Watch (Knopf, 2025), for which he won the 2026 international Griffin Poetry Prize.

“I was writing this book that was kind of longing for the city that I actually lived in.” In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Natalie Adler talks about the loneliness she felt in New York City during the pandemic and how it inspired her to write her debut novel, Waiting on a Friend (Hogarth, 2026), which takes place at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1984.

In this video, Lillian Li talks about her desire to write about friendships and friendship breakups, and the experience of growing up in a hypercompetitive Chinese American community in her second novel, Bad Asians (Henry Holt, 2026), for this Politics and Prose event with Angie Kim.

“There really isn’t anything quite like a book to understand the perspective of others, and translated fiction takes that even further.” In this video, singer, songwriter, and host of the Service95 Book Club podcast Dua Lipa delivers the opening speech for the tenth anniversary of the International Booker Prize about the impact and importance of translated literature.

In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event, Jung Yun reads from her third novel, All the World Can Hold (37 INK, 2026), and talks about complicated characters and how she stays focused and motivated through writer’s block in a conversation with Jane Delury.

In this video, Diane Ackerman reads a selection of poems from the fiftieth-anniversary edition of her debut collection, The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, published by Marginalian Editions, and discusses her lifelong obsession with poetics in a conversation with Maria Popova for this McNally Jackson Books event at St. Ann & the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn.

In this Books Are Magic event celebrating National Poetry Month, Monica Ferrell reads from her collection The Future (Four Way Books, 2026), Bianca Stone reads from her collection The Near and Distant World (Tin House, 2026), and Craig Morgan Teicher reads from his collection August, September, October (BOA Editions, 2026).

“Am I living? Do I / accept revision / as my godhead / and savior?” Wendy Xu reads her poem “Looking at My Father,” which appears in her collection The Past (Wesleyan University Press, 2021), in this video for the Dear Poet series, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.

In this event at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, Annie Wenstrup reads from her debut collection, The Museum of Unnatural Histories (Wesleyan University Press, 2025), and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha reads from her latest collection, Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024).

In this New York Public Library event celebrating Arab American Heritage Month and National Poetry Month hosted in partnership with the Radius of Arab American Writers, poets Maha Hashwi, Ghinwa Jawhari, Lawrence Joseph, and Kamelya Omayma Youssef read from their work and discuss their writing in a conversation with senior librarian Reuben Gelley Newman.

“Until you have language or history or context, you are in the dark.” In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Hilton Als talks about discovering the power of art and language at an early age, how criticism should come from a place of “critical love,” and writing about Prince in his memoir My Pinup (New Directions, 2022).