Poets & Writers Theater

In this CBS Mornings interview, best-selling authors Angie Thomas and Dhonielle Clayton speak about the importance of telling stories about Black joy and love, and teaming up with authors Tiffany D. Jackson, Nic Stone, Ashley Woodfolk, and Nicola Yoon for Whiteout (Quill Tree Books, 2022), the follow-up to their young adult novel Blackout (Quill Tree Books, 2021).

“For most of American history, African American authors have not had the purchase on the American conscience that they have right now,” says Ta-Nehisi Coates about the rise of banning books with themes about race including his own memoir, Between the World and Me (One World, 2015), as well as Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be Antiracist (One World, 2019) and The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World, 2021) by Nikole Hannah-Jones in this 2021 CBS Mornings interview. “This is really about white children now being exposed to ideas that I think were previously segregated.”

“One of the reasons why I wrote Deacon King Kong is because I wanted to show a world where people actually got along.” In this video, James McBride, whose novel Deacon King Kong (Riverhead Books, 2020) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the inspiration for the novel and shows CBS This Morning host Jeff Glor around the Red Hook neighborhood in Brooklyn where he grew up.

“I wanted to center the emotions and the feelings of the actual enslaved people.” Ta-Nehisi Coates speaks about what inspired him to write his debut novel, The Water Dancer (One World, 2019), as he walks through Thomas Jefferson’s estate, Monticello, with Gayle King for CBS This Morning.

"This is a little bit of a revolution, BookShots, a reading revolution." James Patterson speaks with CBS This Morning's Anthony Mason about his latest publishing venture, a series of short novels all under a hundred-fifty pages and under five dollars, and what led him to writing and publishing. Patterson's BookShots is featured in "James Patterson's Innovative Instinct" by Jonathan Vatner in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Books tend to get short shrift in the cultural world,” says Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, in this interview with James Brown. Lucas speaks about the foundation’s goal to promote a love of writing and the BookUp program, which connects young people with published authors and provides free copies of books. 

The author appeared on CBS This Morning on Thursday to talk about the first round of grants in his million-dollar pledge to help independent booksellers across the country.