Poets & Writers Theater

William Giraldi’s 2014 novel, Hold the Dark, has been adapted into a film for Netflix. Directed by Jeremy Saulnier, the film stars Riley Keough, Alexander Skarsgård, and Jeffrey Wright. Giraldi is a frequent contributor to Poets & Writers Magazine, most recently with “The Art of Reading James Baldwin” in the November/December 2017 issue.

In this video, Peg Alford Pursell introduces the stories from her debut collection, Show Her a Flower, a Bird, a Shadow (ELJ Editions, 2017), for the Stories on Stage Davis series, which combines literature and theater. Pursell is featured in “5 Over 50” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I sit down beside it and smell its imagination with Wolfvision clarity, then back to the document I go, wiser, I think, for the digression.” In his haunting, experimental short film “Wolfvision,” poet and filmmaker Nick Twemlow meditates on technology, loss, and unexplained phenomena. Twemlow’s second book of poetry, Attributed to the Harrow Painter (University of Iowa Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

“For me personally, it’s about recovering and celebrating a language.” Daniel Alarcón talks about his work as the executive producer of NPR’s Radio Ambulante, the Spanish-language podcast that presents long-form Latin American narratives. Alarcón’s second story collection, The King Is Always Above the People (Riverhead Books, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, / the world offers itself to your imagination.” In this video poem, produced by We Are Wildness and Live Learn Evolve, Mary Oliver reads her classic poem “Wild Geese.” Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver (Penguin Press, 2017) is featured in Page One in the November/December 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Jimin Han reads from her debut novel, A Small Revolution (Little A, 2017), at the Sunday Salon reading series in New York City. Han is featured in “5 Over 50” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Each book that you write, you swim a long way from the pier at a certain point. You just don’t know what’s going to happen.... If you keep going, you’ll figure out how to shape the thing.” Jeffrey Eugenides recalls his experience writing his first book, The Virgin Suicides (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), for the Paris Review’s “My First Time” video series. Eugenides’s first story collection, Fresh Complaint (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. 

“Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws, gut-wrench guillotine your tongue.” In this TED Talk, Clint Smith speaks about the danger of silence and finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice. “The Poet at Work,” Smith’s profile of poet Kevin Young, is in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I wanted to think about how silk would inform the structure of a poem.” Jen Bervin talks about a three-year exploratory project studying and creating interdisciplinary work around silk and poetry, and reads from her collection Silk Poems (Nightboat Books, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this animated short film by Phil Borst, which was commissioned by the Washington Post, Victoria Chang reads the conclusion of her poem “The Boss Calls Us at Home.” Chang’s fourth book of poetry, Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“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.

“To me, the world of novels often doesn’t feel real, and I was certainly quite aware of writing something kind of between poetry and prose.” Megan Hunter reads from her debut novel, The End We Start From (Grove Press, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and talks with Granta editorial director Max Porter about writing speculative fiction.

“Usually it’s the worst thing you can admit about yourself that most people can relate to.” David Sedaris, whose latest book, Theft by Finding: Diaries (1922–2002) (Little, Brown, 2017), is an edited compilation of his diary entries, expresses his thoughts on working on drafts and combining laughter with sorrow in this PBS NewsHour video. David Sedaris Diaries: A Visual Compendium (Little, Brown, 2017), edited and photographed by artist Jeffrey Jenkins, is featured in “The Written Image” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.