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 Brooklyn Book Festival virtual event, authors Hisham Matar, Rania Mamoun, and Omar Khalifah talk about the purpose and urgency of writing about history during times of crisis in a conversation moderated by writer and translator Yasmin Seale. Khalifah’s novel, Sand-Catcher (Coffee House Press, 2024), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tags: Poetry | Fiction | Translation | Brooklyn Book Festival | Hisham Matar | Rania Mamoun | Yasmin Seale | Omar Khalifah | Sand-Catcher | Coffee House Press | Page One | January/February 2025 -
In this University of Arizona Poetry Center event, Saretta Morgan discusses the importance of writing amidst global crises and reads from her debut collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), after an introduction by Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis. Morgan is featured in “The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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In this short reading hosted by the University of Illinois Chicago’s SparkTalks series, Daniel Borzutzky reads “Apparatus #519” from his poetry collection The Murmuring Grief of the Americas (Coffee House Press, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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As part of the Fictions & Forms reading series hosted by the University of Chicago’s Program in Creative Writing, Danielle Dutton discusses her intricate relationship to genre and form, and reads from her hybrid collection, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other (Coffee House Press, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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“The book itself is a meditation about growing up between an immigrant life and a queer life, between countries and between different kinds of kinship systems.” Gala Mukomolova discusses her debut collection, Without Protection (Coffee House Press, 2019), and reads her poem “X” in this installment of the Ours Poetica series, sponsored by Complexly and the Poetry Foundation.
Tags: Poetry | Gala Mukomolova | Without Protection | 2019 | Coffee House Press | Ours Poetica | Poetry Foundation -
“Working with poetry is really stimulating because it can take you to a limit of human experience, it’s using language in the way that it exists in our minds and in the psyche,” says Moheb Soliman in this TPT Originals video on exploring place, identity, and the natural world in his debut collection, HOMES (Coffee House Press, 2021). Soliman is featured in “A Freeing Space: Our Seventeenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tags: Poetry | Moheb Soliman | HOMES | Coffee House Press | 2021 | Debut Poets 2021 | January/February 2022 | TPT Originals | Twin Cities PBS | Great Lakes | nature -
“Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent / on your inability to describe your undoing.” Lara Mimosa Montes reads from her latest poetry collection, Thresholes (Coffee House Press, 2020), and answers questions about writing as part of the Loft Literary Center’s annual Wordplay festival, held virtually this year.
Tags: Poetry | Lara Mimosa Montes | reading | Thresholes | Coffee House Press | 2020 | Loft Literary Center | Wordplay -
“The shiver underneath / my ruined shirt, the worm / eating of things in the dirt / the dead and the living.” In this 2019 video taken during his residency at Further Troutbeck: The Poetry Society, Justin Phillip Reed reads “I Have Wasted My Life” from his second collection, The Malevolent Volume, out today from Coffee House Press.
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“My favorite form is the long short story or the novella because I think it allows you a little bit more breadth and scope in terms of what you can do.” Brian Evenson, whose eighth story collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from his work and talks about teaching, writing habits, and spirituality in this video from the 2014 Mission Creek Festival.
Tags: Fiction | Brian Evenson | 2014 | Mission Creek Festival | reading | interview | Page One | July/August 2019 | Coffee House Press -
Argentinean author Mariana Enriquez and Mexican author Guadalupe Nettel discuss their shared passion for dark and sordid aesthetics, writing about the body, blurred realities, and writers including Charles Baudelaire, Mircea Cărtărescu, and Philip Roth. Enriquez is the author of Things We Lost in the Fire (Hogarth, 2017), translated from the Spanish by Megan McDowell, and Nettel is the author of After the Winter (Coffee House Press, 2018), translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey.
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“In every single book of poems there are, to me, what feel like really explicit autobiographical moments and gestures.” Dawn Lundy Martin speaks about trying to find a language to express trauma, and the use of voice and narrative in her poetry in this interview with City of Asylum. Martin won the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her collection Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017).
Tags: Poetry | Dawn Lundy Martin | interview | City of Asylum | Kingsley Tufts Award | 2019 | Good Stock Strange Blood | Coffee House Press | 2017 -
“We live on the unanswerable, assert / that acknowledgment is inartistic, / history is regressive, and aggression / looks like no one we know…” Justin Phillip Reed reads from his debut poetry collection, Indecency (Coffee House Press, 2018), for which he won the 2018 National Book Award in poetry. Reed is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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“I don’t know a thing about paradise || In my house nobody ever brought / it up...” Anna Moschovakis reads from her poem “Paradise (Film Two)” from her collection They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House Press, 2016) as part of the twenty-fourth annual Poets House Showcase in 2016. Moschovakis’s forthcoming debut novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love will be released by Coffee House Press in August.
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“I hear words spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives.” At a 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017), which details her experience as an interpreter for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.
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“If you were walking down the street and you came across yourself, what would you do? Stop and talk with yourself, or make out with yourself?” Myriam Gurba, author of the debut memoir, Mean (Coffee House Press, 2017), reads several short prose pieces for the Radar Reading Series at the San Francisco Public Library.
Tags: Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Myriam Gurba | Mean | Coffee House Press | 2017 | reading | Radar Reading Series | San Francisco Public Library -
"The world is always a little bit slippery and strange, and what we think of as real is something that's always contingent in some way." Brian Evenson, author of the story collection A Collapse of Horses (Coffee House Press, 2016), talks about dreams, truth versus fiction, the strangeness of horses, and psychoanalysis before a reading at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.
Tags: interview | reading | Coffee House Press | Skylight Books | 2016 | Brian Evenson | A Collapse of Horses | Fiction -
This book trailer for Lincoln Michel's debut short story collection, Upright Beasts (Coffee House Press, 2015), presents humorously offbeat testimonials of the author's prowess as a "short story social media guru and a flash fiction consultant czar."
Tags: 2015 | Lincoln Michel | Upright Beasts | Coffee House Press | book trailer | short story | Fiction -
In this 2018 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017) and speaks with Maria Hinojosa, executive producer and founding anchor of Latino USA on NPR, about what she witnessed as a volunteer court translator for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.
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Saeed Jones recites a poem from his poetry collection, Prelude to Bruise (Coffee House Press, 2014), at the Dodge Poetry Festival in October. Jones is one of the debut poets featured in "Breaking Into the Silence" in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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The debut novelist speaks about how reading James Joyce’s Ulysses influenced her to write a book in six months, and how she struggled for years to get it published. A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing was published by Coffee House Press in September.
Tags: Fiction | 2014 | talk | Coffee House Press | James Joyce | A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing | Eimear McBride