Poets & Writers Theater

“Before we go any further together, me with my lanterns, you following close behind, light flickering on both of our faces, I want to be clear about something: This isn’t a tell-all.” Maggie Smith reads from her debut memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria/One Signal, 2023), and speaks to Leslie Jamison about the writing process in this Books Are Magic event held at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York.

Watch the trailer for the film adaptation of Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words (Atria Books, 2017) by Michael Ausiello, starring Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, and Sally Field with a screenplay by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about their love of romance novels, exploring stories of grief, and writing seven books in four years, including Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (Riverhead Books, 2021) and You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty (Atria Books, 2022), in this interview for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. For more from Emezi, read their installment of our Ten Questions series.

“I wrote this book for Black women who’ve been in those workspaces, but really anyone who’s been an other in these kind of spaces.” In this video, Zakiya Dalila Harris speaks about her debut novel, The Other Black Girl (Atria Books, 2021), and how her characters navigate through workplace politics with Robin Roberts for Good Morning America. Harris is featured in “First Fiction 2021” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“To me, it was really important to do justice to the complexity of the lives of queer and trans people in my community, and the lives of queer and trans people of color more broadly.” In this Simon & Schuster video, Zeyn Joukhadar speaks about the journey of the protagonist in his second novel, The Thirty Names of Night (Atria Books, 2020). For more Joukhadar, read his installment of Ten Questions.

“I write from the perspective of the suffering character in this novel but also from his wife and his closest friend,” says Brian Platzer about his second novel, The Body Politic (Atria Books, 2020), which is partially based on his own experiences with a neurological disorder. In this video, Platzer explains the premise of the book and how writing it helped him in his personal life.

“This story is not just about an immigrant girl making her way through the world, but it’s a story of a girl who is fighting hard for her American dream.” In this video, Reyna Grande discusses her memoir A Dream Called Home (Atria Books, 2018), a sequel to her best-selling memoir The Distance Between Us, and the inspiration she hopes her books will bring to young readers.

“These are human stories of life and love and loss.” Matt Gallagher, a former U.S. Army captain and a writing instructor at the nonprofit Words After War, discusses the war stories that inspired his debut novel, Youngblood (Atria Books, 2016).

"She could taste with all of her skin, including her eyelids." Author and naturalist Sy Montgomery describes her first meeting with Athena, a giant Pacific octopus, at the New England Aquarium in Boston. This encounter spurred her to write The Soul of an Octopus (Atria Books, 2015), a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

You (Emily Bestler Books/Atria, 2014), Caroline Kepnes’s psychological thriller debut about a New York bookstore manager’s obsession with an aspiring writer, has been adapted into a Lifetime television series. The series, which has been renewed for a second season, stars Penn Badgley, Zach Cherry, Nicole Kang, Elizabeth Lail, Shay Mitchell, and Luca Padovan.

In this video, Jennifer Baker, editor of the short story anthology Everyday People: The Color of Life (Atria Books, 2018), speaks with Nana Brew-Hammond about her story “Wisdom.” The anthology is a collective of work by established and emerging writers of color, including Mia Alvar, Alexander Chee, and Mitchell S. Jackson. 

Chloe Benjamin speaks about the passion, humility, and patience involved in publishing her debut novel, The Anatomy of Dreams (Atria Books, 2014), likening the long process to an elephant pregnancy.

Actor Dave Foley (The Kids in the Hall, NewsRadio) reads “Suck It,” a poem from Suzanne Weber’s To What Miserable Wretches Have I Been Born: Revenge Poems for Babies and Toddlers, forthcoming from Atria Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, in April.