Poets & Writers Theater

“You pick the right tool for the job, and sometimes fantasy is a way to open up a story and convey a universal truth, and sometimes realism.” Colson Whitehead speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about his writing process and the true story that inspired his latest novel, The Nickel Boys, which was published this week by Doubleday.

“We can be unrelentingly hard to ourselves, and under such circumstances, it’s a shame to not let the world’s light stick to us when we have the chance.” Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press, 2019), speaks about the importance of prioritizing compliments over criticism in this PBS NewsHour video.

In this PBS NewsHour video, NPR’s Maureen Corrigan and the Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada highlight their favorite books for summer reading, which include Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Penguin Press, 2019), Jill Ciment’s The Body in Question (Pantheon, 2019), and José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal (Haymarket Books, 2018).

“I adopted the six days for creation and a seventh for rest model. I figured, if it worked for building this world, it should work for fictional ones as well.” Novelist Nathan Englander, author of kaddish.com (Knopf, 2019), shares how his religious upbringing has influenced his writing rituals in this PBS NewsHour video.

“Letter writing is a pure act of devotion, a place where, if not storytellers, we all become human again.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Willie Perdomo, the author most recently of The Crazy Bunch (Penguin Books, 2019), talks about the value of writing letters and how they are “where we attempt to tell the truth and wait.”

“What are the ethics around documenting political crises? How much do you become a parasite of people’s suffering? What good do you do to a situation by documenting it or fictionalizing it? These are all questions that are in the novel.” Valeria Luiselli discusses the unique challenges of writing about the ongoing migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border in her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, 2019), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown. An interview with Luiselli by Lauren LeBlanc appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The other night, somebody asked, is Black poetry back? Like, we penned one verse, and it got lost at sea or slipped inside a big old crack in the big old earth, and then re-returned when everything was chaos.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Erica Dawson reads a poem about her experience while on tour for her poetry collection When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House Books, 2018).

Poet, memoirist, and teacher Reginald Dwayne Betts speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about his experience as a teen in prison and how poetry gave him a new identity. Betts is the author of Bastards of the Reagan Era (Four Way Books, 2015) and Felon, forthcoming from Norton in October, and is a recipient of the 2019 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award.

“It is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find not a room of her own, but a house of her own.” Sandra Cisneros speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about her essay collection, A House of My Own: Stories From My Life (Knopf, 2015), her path to writing, and what home means to her. Cisneros was recently named the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age.

“I love the intimacy of a novel and how it lets you get to know people.” Meg Wolitzer speaks about her writing process, the recognition of women writers, and her latest novel, The Female Persuasion (Riverhead Books, 2018), with PBS Newshour’s Jeffrey Brown. The rights for the novel were recently acquired by Amazon Studios and Nicole Kidman’s production company.

Lesley Nneka Arimah speaks about investigating “the ways in which our past traumas inform our present selves” through her writing, and answers questions from readers about her debut story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead Books, 2017), for PBS NewsHour’s Now Read This book club, a partnership with the New York Times.

“Fiction has the ability to expand people’s points of view, and also to have the contradictions...” In this video, Min Jin Lee answers questions from readers about her novel Pachinko (Grand Central Publishing, 2017) for PBS NewsHour’s Now Read This book club, a partnership with the New York Times.

“I think poetry should be part of popular culture, in the sense that poetry should be something we reach to.” Kevin Young, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, speaks about how his childhood in Topeka, Kansas influenced his new poetry collection, Brown (Knopf, 2018), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown.

“I look back, just with a little wonder. Wonder that I stuck with this thing.” In this 2004 interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS NewsHour, Philip Roth reflects on his writing career and the role of a writer. Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018.

“I wanted their lives, especially our working-class women, to be out there. People need to be seen. I wanted to show that.” Nicole Dennis-Benn talks about the working-class town she grew up in Jamaica and how her experiences inspired her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), in this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.

“Us brown girls: Brick-built: / Masters of every metaphor and every metamorphosis…” Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X (HarperTeen, 2018), reads her poem “This Is For Us” for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.

“If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle...” For PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series, Marcus Wicker talks about the influence of hip-hop in his poetry and reads his poem “Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church.”

For PBS NewsHour, U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith recommends recent poetry titles, including Look (Graywolf Press, 2016) by Solmaz Sharif, who was featured in “Shadows of Words: Our Twelfth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in Poets & Writers Magazine, and Lessons on Expulsion (Graywolf Press, 2017) by Erika L. Sanchez, who was profiled in “First” by Rigoberto González in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When you see yourself reflected in literature, it enlarges your ideas of what is possible for you.” MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Jesmyn Ward takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of her hometown in Mississippi and shares the parts of her life and community that inspire her writing. Ward is the winner of the 2017 National Book Award in fiction for Sing, Unbured, Sing (Scribner, 2017).