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 DC Public Library event, Imani Perry speaks with Clint Smith about the recurrence of the color blue in her life and how it sparked an aesthetic examination of the color’s place in African and Black history for her book Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People (Ecco, 2025).
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“To make ancestors whole is to imagine, collectively, publicly, who they were and what their experiences were like.” In this New York Public Library event, former Cullman Center fellow and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Gregory Pardlo discusses the themes within his latest poetry collection, Spectral Evidence (Knopf, 2024), and talks about interrogating the present-day erasure of Black history in a conversation with Imani Perry.
Tags: Poetry | Gregory Pardlo | Spectral Evidence | Knopf | Imani Perry | New York Public Library | Cullman Center | Cullman Fellowship | conversation | 2024 -
“Books sustain us. Books inspire us. Books fortify us. Books help us become who we are,” says poet John Keene in this video featuring National Book Award–winning authors—including Tess Gunty, Megan McDowell, Imani Perry, Samanta Schweblin, and Sabaa Tahir—speaking about why they believe books matter for the National Book Foundation’s Read With NBF program.
Tags: Poetry | Fiction | Creative Nonfiction | Translation | National Book Foundation | National Book Award | Tess Gunty | John Keene | Megan McDowell | Imani Perry | Samanta Schweblin | Sabaa Tahir | reading -
“There’s so many young people, the first time they start to think seriously about class, about sexuality, about gender, about identity, about vulnerability, about spirituality is through her work,” says Princeton University professor Imani Perry about the legacy of bell hooks in this PBS NewsHour video commemorating the influential critic, author, and feminist scholar and activist who died at the age of sixty-nine on December 15, 2021.
Tags: Poetry | Creative Nonfiction | bell hooks | Imani Perry | PBS NewsHour | 2021 | in memoriam -
“I write for my people. I write because we children of the lash-scarred, rope-choked, bullet-ridden, desecrated are still here standing. I write for the field holler, the shout, the growl, the singer, the signer, and the signified. I write for the sinned-against and the sanctifying.” In this video, Imani Perry accepts the 2022 National Book Award in nonfiction for her book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation (Ecco, 2022) with a powerful and moving speech.
