Poets & Writers Theater

“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.

“Take a microscope to the face of a beautiful woman and tell me it isn’t grotesque. Poetry is such a broad genre, it covers so many ways of looking.” Kim Hyesoon talks about her newest collection, Autobiography of a Death (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Korean by Don Mee Choi, what it means to be a female poet, and why she thinks poetry is disappearing in this 2018 interview with the Literature Translation Institute of Korea.

“Look at the old house in the dawn rain / all the flowers are forms of water…” In this excerpt from the documentary Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the late W. S. Merwin reads his poem “Rain Light.” Merwin’s final collection, Garden Time (Copper Canyon Press, 2016), was featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Washington Post book critic Ron Charles takes a humorous look at Helen Oyeyemi’s sixth novel, Gingerbread (Riverhead Books, 2019), for his Totally Hip Video Book Review series. Oyeyemi answers questions about her new novel in a recent installment of our online series Ten Questions.

“Inside a novel, one has the opportunity to experience the ambiguous reality of a whole other consciousness. When you read, you are possessed by the voice of another.” In this 2017 Louisiana Channel interview, Siri Hustvedt talks about the transformative experience of reading novels. Hustvedt’s seventh novel, Memories of the Future (Simon & Schuster, 2019), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There is nothing one man will not do to another.” Carolyn Forché reads “The Visitor” and “The Colonel” from her second poetry collection, The Country Between Us (Copper Canyon Press, 1981), which bore witness to her travels in El Salvador in the late 1970s. Forché’s debut memoir, What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance (Penguin Press, 2019), documents that same period of time and is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The White Card is a play I wanted to write because it seemed to me that people had a difficult time talking about race. And I thought, ‘What would it look like?’” In this ArtsEmerson video, Claudia Rankine talks about the inspiration for her debut play, The White Card: A Play (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I started with one word and I never stopped.” Jimmy Santiago Baca talks with Megan Kamerick on New Mexico in Focus about reading the dictionary, writing poetry while incarcerated, and his experiences learning and educating others about the power of language. Baca’s poetry collection When I Walk Through That Door, I Am: An Immigrant Mother’s Quest for Freedom (Beacon Press, 2019) is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Khaled Khalifa talks with Renée Ragin at Duke University about questions of Arab and Syrian identity, the relationship between his writing and war, and themes of death and difficult journeys in his fifth novel, Death Is Hard Work (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019). The novel, translated from the Arabic by Leri Price, is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.