Poets & Writers Theater
Every day we share a new clip of interest to creative writers—author readings, book trailers, publishing panels, craft talks, and more. So grab some popcorn, filter the theater tags by keyword or genre, and explore our sizable archive of literary videos.
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In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Maggie Nelson reads from her book Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth (Wave Books, 2025) and speaks about the norms around illness memoirs and her desire to confront pain head-on through writing in a conversation with Darcey Steinke. “The book ended up being about what’s beneath this kind of quest for care,” says Nelson.
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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.
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In this 2022 virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment reading series, poets Samiya Bashir, Carmen Giménez Smith, and Adrian Matejka read from their works and discuss their leadership roles in publishing and within the literary community. A Q&A with Bashir by Jonathan Vatner is included in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail, Jorie Graham curates the thirty-fifth installment of the Radical Poetry Reading series focused around the topics of illness, injustice, and truth featuring poets Jericho Brown, Victoria Chang, Forrest Gander, D. A. Powell, and Claudia Rankine.
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In this installment of the New Social Environment series for the Brooklyn Rail recorded in April, Charles Bernstein speaks with Erica Hunt about unpacking language and how writers have reimagined ways to communicate amongst each other during the pandemic. Hunt talks about her new poetry collection, Jump the Clock (Nightboat Books, 2020), in Ten Questions.
