Poets & Writers Theater

“I was born to tell my story and the story of my people, to make everyone aware that we exist still, that we breathe still.” In this virtual Charis Circle event, Leah Myers reads from her debut memoir, Thinning Blood: A Memoir of Family, Myth, and Identity (Norton, 2023), and discusses how Native folklore informed the structure of her book in a conversation with author Kung Li Sun. Myers is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2023” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“At one time, / I asked for everything.” Sandra Lim reads from her poetry collection The Curious Thing (Norton, 2021) for this virtual reading hosted by UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems reading series with an introduction by poet Noah Warren. Lim is the recipient of the 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize.

“Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight / To see my mama moting around / As sympathetic ash. / Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow / I’ll be soot with her.” In this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Kimiko Hahn reads her poem “A Dusting,” which appears in her collection Foreign Bodies (Norton, 2022), and speaks about the power of poetry to connect us with our loved ones.

“Last night the moon lifted itself / on one wing / over the fields.” In this 1992 recording for Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s The Writing Life, Linda Pastan reads her poem “Elegy,” which appears in her collection Imperfect Paradise (Norton, 1989). Pastan died at the age of ninety on January 30, 2023.

In this video, DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark, author of How to Communicate (Norton, 2022), performs a Protactile poem called “The Rebuttal” with Jelica Nuccio and Heather Holmes, and voiced by Halene Anderson. For more on Clark, read his installment of our Ten Questions series.

“It started with me seeing this weird article in the Lancet, which is a medical journal, about a particular femur that had been discovered in a Roman necropolis on the island of Isola Sacra.” In this virtual event hosted by the Strand Book Store, Mark Prins talks about the research process for his debut novel, The Latinist (Norton, 2022), in a conversation with author Brandon Taylor.

“What the history books neglect / is that the first astronomers / were women gazing up at depths / and wishing for a different planet.” In this video for the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, Maya C. Popa reads her poem “The Art of Stars,” which she dedicates to Maria Mitchell, the first U.S. female astronomer. Popa’s collection Wound Is the Origin of Wonder (Norton, 2022) is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“This year Amadeo Padilla is Jesus. The hermanos have been preparing in the dirt yard behind the morada,” reads Kirstin Valdez Quade from her award-winning debut novel, The Five Wounds (Norton, 2021), in this 2021 virtual reading for the James Merrill House’s Writer-in-Residence reading series.

“My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. / He says that he believes a person can love someone / and still be able to murder that person.” Marie Howe reads her poem “After the Movie,” which appears in her collection The Kingdom of Ordinary Time (Norton, 2008), in this 2014 video for the Page Meets Stage series in New York City.

“What you can do is tell your best story, at that moment.” Camille T. Dungy, whose first essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, offers writers advice on how to overcome roadblocks in this Austin Community College video.

“All lions must lean into something other than a roar,” reads Roger Reeves from his poem “Grendel” included in his new collection, Best Barbarian (Norton, 2022), in this short film directed by Osvaldo Cuevas. Reeves’s collection is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I had a body and it was good / until you gave it meaning,” reads Ari Banias, author of A Symmetry (Norton, 2021), from his poem “Tautology” in this Poetry Project reading with Silvina López Medin, author of Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press, 2021).

“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).

“It was September: autumn only in advertisements, cartoon-orange leaves and red backpacks lining the signs for back-to-school sales, the warmth whittling down but still keeping us in short sleeves.” In this Books Are Magic event, Kyle Lucia Wu reads from her debut novel, Win Me Something (Norton, 2021), and speaks with Crystal Hana Kim about her writing process.

James Tate Hill discusses the themes of disability and self-acceptance in his debut memoir, Blind Man’s Bluff (Norton, 2021), and speaks about process and the author-agent relationship in this Writing Workshops Dallas conversation with agent and author Eric Smith. Hill’s memoir is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

“I had written two books on slavery, and writing about slavery is to be in the center of a very difficult psychic territory, and so when I started doing the research for this project, I was very hungry for beauty—and I think I discovered it here,” says Saidiya Hartman about writing her book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Norton, 2019), winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, in this 2019 reading at Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

“I was really interested in the idea of the body as a place of imprisonment but also, the body as a place of liberation.” Olivia Laing speaks about her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton, 2021), and how she addresses the themes of illness, sexual violence, and incarceration with imagery and by including historical figures of the past century in this conversation with author Maggie Nelson for the Center for Fiction.

“Lorde is a towering figure in the world of letters,” says Roxane Gay in this 92Y virtual event celebrating the publication of The Selected Works of Audre Lorde (Norton, 2020), which Gay edited. Joining Gay to discuss and read Lorde’s poetry and prose are Mahogany L. Browne, Saeed Jones, and Porsha Olayiwola.

“Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. / Remember language comes from this.”​ In this video from the Academy of American Poets, Joy Harjo reads her poem “Remember” from her 1983 collection, She Had Some Horses. Harjo has been appointed to serve a second term as poet laureate of the United States and is the first Native American to hold the post.

In this virtual event for Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, North Carolina, the late Randall Kenan, author of the story collection If I Had Two Wings (Norton, 2020), and Ron Rash, author of In the Valley: Stories and a Novella Based on Serena (Doubleday, 2020), read from their books and discuss growing up in the South and their writing. Kenan’s If I Had Two Wings is longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.