Poets & Writers Theater

“Great stones of whitewater / hammer down.” In this 2017 reading at the Bookworm, an independent bookstore in Beijing, Tracy K. Smith reads a translation of Yi Lei’s poem “Huangguoshu Waterfall,” included in My Name Will Grow Wide Like a Tree (Graywolf Press, 2020), translated from the Chinese by Changtai Bi and Smith, which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the screen, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own.” Paul Lisicky reads from his memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020) in this online reading event for Books Are Magic with Susan Choi. For more Lisicky, read his installation of Ten Questions.

“The rain will eventually come, or not. / Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds…” In this Mellon Foundation video, Natalie Diaz reads the title poem from her forthcoming collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). A Q&A with Diaz by Jacqueline Woodson appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“What streams of light might escape me and reveal / about the things I collect and hide...” This Motionpoems film directed by Tash Tung features Natalie Diaz’s poem “Cranes, Mafiosos and a Polaroid Camera,” which was first published in Spillway and will be included in her second collection, Postcolonial Love Poem, forthcoming from Graywolf Press in March 2020. 

“Soundless, it crosses a line, quiets into a seed / & then whatever makes a seed. almost like gone / but not gone. the air kept its shape.” At the 2019 Lambda Literary Retreat, Danez Smith reads “undetectable” and “say it with your whole black mouth” from their third poetry collection, Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Instead of scanning newspaper headlines, / I spend the morning reading names / of flowers and trees in the botanical garden.” Harryette Mullen reads a selection of poems from her collection Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diary (Graywolf Press, 2013) at Beyond Baroque in this Poetry.LA video.

“I love To the Lighthouse, but they never get to the lighthouse.” In this episode of Cocktails With Bright Antenna, Benjamin Percy talks about the differences between literary fiction and genre fiction, how some writers are gardeners and some are architects, and reveals the origins of his phobias. Percy’s latest book, Suicide Woods (Graywolf Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We can be unrelentingly hard to ourselves, and under such circumstances, it’s a shame to not let the world’s light stick to us when we have the chance.” Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press, 2019), speaks about the importance of prioritizing compliments over criticism in this PBS NewsHour video.

“I want to live a life of free imagination.” In this video, Binyavanga Wainaina describes his dream for Africans to tell their own stories and be set free of certain traditional systems and structures. The Kenyan author and gay rights activist, who won the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2002, died at the age of forty-eight on May 21, 2019. For more from his work, read an excerpt from his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place (Graywolf Press, 2011).

“The type moves and dances across the page—and it’s very much a book about sound on the page.” Max Porter talks about the unique typesetting in his second novel, Lanny (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, at the London Centre for Book Arts.

“The freedom an oak tree knows. / That is built at night by stars.” In this video, Linda Gregg reads “The Weight” and “Alone With the Goddess” from her poetry collection All of It Singing (Graywolf Press, 2008) at the 2006 Dodge Poetry Festival. Gregg died at the age of seventy-six on March 20, 2019.

“Let them borrow the light from the blind. / Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle. / What is silence? Something of the sky in us.” Joseph Fasano reads an excerpt from Ilya Kaminsky’s new collection, Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), for the American Poem video series. An interview with Kaminsky by Garth Greenwell appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The White Card is a play I wanted to write because it seemed to me that people had a difficult time talking about race. And I thought, ‘What would it look like?’” In this ArtsEmerson video, Claudia Rankine talks about the inspiration for her debut play, The White Card: A Play (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My frugal mouth spends the only foreign words it owns. / At present, on this sleeper train, there’s nowhere to arrive.” Jenny Xie, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads “Rootless” and “Ongoing” from her debut poetry collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018). Xie is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Esmé Weijun Wang, a 2018 Whiting Award winner, reads from her essay “On the Ward” from The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press, 2019). Wang is featured in “Portraits of Inspiration” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2015 video, Jess Row reads from his debut novel, Your Face in Mine (Riverhead Books, 2014), for the Story Hour in the Library series at the University of California in Berkeley. Row is a recipient of the 2018 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant for White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination, forthcoming from Graywolf Press.

“I’m very fascinated by people on thresholds....” Dorthe Nors talks about her writing interests, short stories versus novels, and the differences between the Danish and English languages with Rosie Goldsmith at the 2016 European Literature Festival in London. Nors’s fourth novel, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Graywolf Press, 2018), translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became / a character in the news...” Khaled Hosseini, Rita Dove, Philip Gourevitch, and Siri Hustvedt read Liu Xia’s poem “June 2nd, 1989” from Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. PEN America and Amnesty International collaborated on the video series as a call to free Liu Xia from house arrest in Beijing, where she has been held since her late husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009.

Glenn Close reads “Old Wives’ Tales on Which I Was Fed” from Jenny Xie’s debut collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), which won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Walt Whitman Award. Eye Level is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Leslie Jamison reads her essay “The Broken Heart of James Agee” from The Empathy Exams (Graywolf Press, 2014) for a reading series hosted by the Center for Documentary Studies and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. Jamison speaks about her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath (Little, Brown, 2018), in “The Infinite World” by Michele Filgate in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.