Poets & Writers Theater

In this event recorded at the Brooklyn Heights Public Library and hosted by Books Are Magic, Terrance Hayes discusses his new poetry collection, So to Speak (Penguin Books, 2023), and his new essay collection, Watch Your Language: Visual and Literary Reflections on a Century of American Poetry (Penguin Books, 2023), with poet and memoirist Mary Karr.

"Writing memoir, if it's done right I think, is like knocking yourself out with your own fist." For a reading at the 92nd Street Y moderated by Kathryn Schulz, Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir (Harper, 2015), joins Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk (Grove Press, 2015), to speak about their love of memoir and poetry.

“Our lives don’t happen chronologically in memory, and a good memoirist has to know how to structure that memoir in a way that you can see the shaping of a life....” Amy Tan, whose second memoir, Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir (Ecco, 2017), is featured in Page One of the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the genre and about Mary Karr’s memoir writing.

"What I love about memoir is that solitary voice trying to learn how to be a human being." Mary Karr, whose forthcoming book, The Art of Memoir (Harper, 2015), is featured in The Time Is Now in the current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, comments on the power of the memoir form with the help of some well-known writers.