Poets & Writers Theater

“I always start asking myself, if I really love this book, how did it get to me?” In this conversation with Politics and Prose Bookstore co-owner Bradley Graham, Paul Yamazaki talks about his book, Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale (Ode Books, 2024), and discusses his life and career as the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco.

In this virtual reading and conversation for the City Lights Live series, Douglas Kearney reads a series of poems in response to Fred Moten’s essay “Knowledge of Freedom” before introducing the poet who reads from his latest collection, Perennial Fashion Presence Falling (Wave Books, 2023).

“Every project teaches you how to be the writer you need to be,” says Ada Zhang in this virtual City Lights Live event, in which she reads from her debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others (A Public Space Books, 2023), and speaks about what inspired her stories in a conversation with author Belinda Huijuan Tang. Zhang is featured in “First Fiction 2023” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Fish have always swum me beyond my body, exploded me into some other mythic, imagined space.” Lars Horn talks about their love of research, writing about transmasculinity, and piecing together their first book, Voice of the Fish: A Lyric Essay, which won the 2020 Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, in this City Lights Live virtual event with Carolina De Robertis. Horn’s book is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It was still the last frontier when I arrived in 1951. It was a wide-open city.” In this 2015 video, Lawrence Ferlinghetti recalls his early days in San Francisco and speaks about the changing life of the city. Ferlinghetti died at the age of 101 on February 22, 2021. An interview with the legendary poet and founder of City Lights Booksellers and Publishers is featured in the March/April 2007 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There’s nobody left here now. Cows. Graves. Me. There’s not but a thousand acres of Bonaparte left between us.” In this virtual City Lights LIVE event, Ayana Mathis reads from her new novel, The Unsettled (Knopf, 2023), and speaks about finding her compass again after the success of her debut book and the need for quiet and privacy to develop characters in a conversation with author Angela Flournoy.

San Francisco's first Latino poet laureate, whose new collection, Stray Poems, was recently published by City Lights Press, reads at City Lights Bookstore and talks about poetry, language, and the changing landscape in what has been called "the city of poets."