Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2023 AWP Conference & Bookfair event, National Book Award honorees Donika Kelly and Danez Smith read from their work and discuss the power of poetry for both authors and readers in a conversation moderated by the Ruth Dickey, executive director of the National Book Foundation.

“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.

National Book Award nominees Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina (One World, 2019), and Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America (Little, Brown, 2021), discuss the convergences and divergences of rewriting shared memory across genres in this 2022 National Book Foundation event moderated by Dolen Perkins-Valdez.

In this video, finalists for the 2022 National Book Award in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature read excerpts from their honored works. The event, hosted by writer Saraciea J. Fennell, is presented in partnership with the National Book Foundation and the NYU Creative Writing Program.

“In the last year of her life, my mother Asako spoke more openly of the trauma of the war years and her incarceration at Topaz,” reads Karen Tei Yamashita for this event celebrating her work, hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Yamashita was awarded the 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

“You knew that she was motivated by the basic concept that we’re here for a short while, and we have to make sure we make it about something larger than just ourselves.” In this video from the 2020 National Book Awards Ceremony, authors and colleagues speak about the influence of Carolyn Reidy, the late president and CEO of Simon & Schuster, who was honored with the National Book Foundation’s 2020 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community. Reidy died on May 12, 2020 at the age of seventy-one.

“She wasn’t sure if we were real, but nothing about us felt false.” Akwaeke Emezi, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree nominated by Carmen Maria Machado, reads from their debut novel, Freshwater (Grove Press, 2018). The novel has been longlisted for the 2019 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction.

“I became a writer not because I was seeking community but rather because I thought it would be something I could do alone and hidden in the privacy of my own room,” says Sigrid Nunez in her acceptance speech for the 2018 National Book Award in fiction, which she won for her seventh novel, The Friend (Riverhead Books, 2018). “How lucky to have discovered that writing books made the miraculous possible: to be removed from the world and to be a part of the world at the same time.”

“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.

“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.

“What may exist between appearance, and disappearance, between sound and silence, as something that is nearly nothing…” Diana Khoi Nguyen, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award in poetry, reads from her debut poetry collection, Ghost Of (Omnidawn Publishing, 2018). Nguyen is featured in “Wilder Forms: Our Fourteenth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video from the New York Public Library, 2018 National Book Awards finalists, including Rebecca Makkai, Hanne Ørstavik, and Jeffrey C. Stewart, sit down to answer questions about their favorite books and which fictional character they’d want to hang out with.

“Then, before you’re gone, you know that all that’s ever been will still be, even if there are no tomorrows.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree nominated by Colson Whitehead, reads the last page of his story “Through the Flash” from his debut story collection, Friday Black (Mariner Books, 2018).

“Mom always went up the mountain and down the valley so I decide that’s what we’ll do too.” Lydia Kiesling, a 2018 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree, reads from her debut novel, The Golden State (MCD, 2018), for the ZYZZYVA series at Green Apple Books on the Park in San Francisco.

Weike Wang speaks with Mary Laura Philpott of A Word on Words about her debut novel, Chemistry (Knopf, 2017), and why her main character doesn’t have a name. Wang is a 2017 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a recipient of a 2018 Whiting Award in fiction.

In this 2013 video, Lucie Brock-Broido reads her poem “You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World” from her collection Stay, Illusion (Knopf, 2013), which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award in poetry. Brock-Broido died on March 6, 2018 at the age of sixty-one.

Daniel Borzutzky, who won the 2016 National Book Award in poetry for The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), reads poems from the collection at a reading for the finalists hosted by the New School. Borzutzky’s forthcoming poetry collection, Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), is a series of nineteen lyric poems.

“We will need writers who can remember freedom.” In this video, Ursula K. Le Guin accepts the National Book Foundation’s 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Le Guin’s essay collection, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Halle Butler reads her short story “The Restaurant Business” alongside her illustrations at the Brain Frame performative comics and zine series in Chicago. Butler is the author of the debut novel, Jillian (Curbside Splendor, 2015), and a 2017 National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree.

“They make us more empathetic. They connect us to one another. They make people who are not like us more human.” Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, shares her love of books and why reading them is so important for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.