Poets & Writers Theater

“It took Arnold six and a half seconds to fall five hundred feet. During that time, an image of his son, Paris, flashed before his eyes....” At the Lensic Performing Arts Center, Edwidge Danticat reads “Without Inspection” from her third story collection, Everything Inside (Knopf, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Jillian Weise reads her poems “Semi Semi Dash,” “Café Loop,” and “Poem for His Girl,” from her second collection, The Book of Goodbyes (BOA Editions, 2013), at the Academy of American Poets’ 2013 Poets Forum Awards Ceremony. Weise’s third collection, Cyborg Detective (BOA Editions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I can only hope that the criticism and reporting that you do write leaves little levers open psychologically for something good to happen.” Jia Tolentino speaks about the inner conflict of writing on pop culture in the current political climate in this conversation with fellow nonfiction writers Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Linda Holmes, and Emily Nussbaum. Tolentino’s debut essay collection, Trick Mirror (Random House, 2019), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“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.

This book trailer by filmmaker Diego Ongaro introduces Courtney Maum’s third novel, Costalegre (Tin House Books, 2019), which tells the story of an American heiress and art collector, her neglected teenage daughter, and the elite group of artists who escape into the Mexican jungle on the eve of World War II. For more from Maum, read her installment of Ten Questions.

“Every conversation between us then had a way of spiraling into the same abyss. Real men were impossible to understand. Real men suffered. Real men were broken.” Jaed Coffin reads from his second memoir, Roughhouse Friday (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and talks about his experiences barroom boxing in Alaska with Kathryn Miles for Portland Public Library’s Literary Lunch series.

“My favorite form is the long short story or the novella because I think it allows you a little bit more breadth and scope in terms of what you can do.” Brian Evenson, whose eighth story collection, Song for the Unraveling of the World (Coffee House Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from his work and talks about teaching, writing habits, and spirituality in this video from the 2014 Mission Creek Festival.

Emilie Pine talks about fear of failure, connecting to readers, being open about grief and loss, and the power of storytelling with Ireland Unfiltered’s Dion Fanning. Pine’s debut essay collection, Notes to Self (Dial Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Rule No. 10: Revise, revise, revise. I cannot stress this enough. Revision is when you do what you should have done the first time, but didn’t.” Colson Whitehead, whose seventh novel, The Nickel Boys (Doubleday, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads his 2012 New York Times piece “How to Write” at the Muldoon’s Picnic variety show in New York City in 2015.

“I think desire is at once the thing we think most about and also our most slippery secret, and I wanted to explore the nuance of that intersection.” In this Simon & Schuster interview, Lisa Taddeo discusses the intimate research done for her first book, Three Women (Avid Reader Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“One of the nice things about conferences like this one is you meet these other human dream incubators. They’ve got their lightning rods up. They’re also receiving these dreams.” Karen Russell speaks to Rich Fahle of PBS Books at the 2019 AWP Conference & Book Fair about the writers who have inspired her, motherhood, and her third story collection, Orange World (Knopf, 2019). Orange World is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“As a translator, you could do two thousand things right, but someone is going to notice the two things you do wrong, so it’s really an impossible art.” Krys Lee, whose translation from the Korean of Young-Ha Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019) is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the inherent difficulties of literary translation.

“The type moves and dances across the page—and it’s very much a book about sound on the page.” Max Porter talks about the unique typesetting in his second novel, Lanny (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, at the London Centre for Book Arts.

“Failure is part of the process—maybe the most important part. Street hot dogs are not your friend.” Erin Lee Carr lists twenty-nine things she learned from her father, the late journalist and author David Carr, in this book trailer for her debut memoir, All That You Leave Behind (Ballantine Books, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I think we’re all born explorers. When I look at my kids, they want to climb before they can walk,” says Erling Kagge in this interview with Santiago Rivas Camargo from the 2018 Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. Kagge’s new book, Walking: One Step at a Time (Pantheon Books, 2019), translated from the Norwegian by Becky L. Crook, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“That is what my grandfather, Glafkos, must have felt like. / Wandering the hillsides and down to the sea while his parents labored...” In Delphi 1927, a multimedia performance by Eleni Sikelianos, the poet examines her family history and her great grandparents’ efforts to revive the Delphic Festivals. Sikelianos’s collection What I Knew (Nightboat Books, 2019) is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.” Young-Ha Kim delivers a TEDx Talk about all children beginning as artists, novel writing as a process of composing one sentence after another, and the value of a world in which everyone creates art, whether in public or in private. Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019), translated from the Korean by Krys Lee, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Jan-Henry Gray talks about recipe poems and the structural parallels between poetry and cooking in this short film by Talia Sadie Feder. Gray’s debut poetry collection, Documents (BOA Editions, 2019), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Based on real events, Women Talking is the story of eight women in a remote Mennonite colony who face an agonizing decision in the aftermath of a series of unspeakable sexual crimes.” This book trailer introduces Miriam Toews’s seventh novel, Women Talking (Bloomsbury, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I begin with love, hoping to end there. / I don’t want to leave a messy corpse.” Jericho Brown reads “Duplex” from his third poetry collection, The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.