Poets & Writers Theater

“When you’re sick, the act of living is more act than living.” Meghan O’Rourke reads from her book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness (Riverhead Books, 2022) and discusses how the book changed as her illness changed in this virtual event with Jonathan M. Adler for the Harvard Radcliffe Institute’s Book Talks series.

“Literature is there to show us how there can be beauty in meaning, and this is what makes the literary experience so unique...and I’m hunting for this feeling all the time.” Hernan Diaz, author most recently of Trust (Riverhead Books, 2022), speaks about his relationship with reading, writing, and language in this Louisiana Channel interview with Marc-Christoph Wagner at the New York Public Library.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about their love of romance novels, exploring stories of grief, and writing seven books in four years, including Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (Riverhead Books, 2021) and You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty (Atria Books, 2022), in this interview for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. For more from Emezi, read their installment of our Ten Questions series.

“When I fell for the video girl in Omarion’s ‘Touch,’ I never thought I would come to know her name,” reads Carina del Valle Schorske from the first chapter of her debut essay collection, The Other Island, forthcoming from Riverhead Books, in this Poetry Project reading with poet Sheila Maldonado, author of that’s what you get (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2021).

“Bread pudding was the first thing that I baked after I came out to my parents,” says Bryan Washington in this New Yorker video about his personal connection to the dish. For more on Washington, read his installment of Ten Questions, in which he speaks about his debut story collection, Lot (Riverhead Books, 2019).

“I am a product of this country that I interrogate in this book,” says Albert Samaha, author of Concepcion: An Immigrant Family’s Fortunes (Riverhead Books, 2021), in this episode of Coffee & Conversations with Enrique Rosell, program manager at Florida International University’s Wolfsonian Public Humanities Lab. Samaha’s debut memoir is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Poets & Writers Live virtual event, Kristen Arnett walks through the revision process of select scenes from her latest novel, With Teeth (Riverhead Books, 2021), with Spencer Quong, the assistant editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. For more Arnett, read her contributions to our Craft Capsules series on writing humor in fiction.

“Didn’t they know, low in their bones, that as long as they moved and the land unfurled, that as long as they searched, they would forever be searchers and never quite lost?” reads C Pam Zhang from her debut novel, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (Riverhead Books, 2020), in this conversation with writer and comedian Karen Chee hosted by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

In this virtual craft talk, Patricia Lockwood reads from her debut novel, No One Is Talking About This (Riverhead Books, 2021), and talks about her writing process and how her poetry influences her prose writing with Zach Powers, novelist and director of communications at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. 

“Roberto was brown and his people lived next door so of course I went over on weekends.” Listen to Bryan Washington read an excerpt from his debut story collection, Lot (Riverhead Books, 2019), for this Penguin Random House video series, which encourages listening to audiobooks before bed to help with sleep.

“I spent the first two years reworking the first twenty pages of this novel, over and over and over again,” says R. O. Kwon about writing her debut novel, The Incendiaries (Riverhead Books, 2018), in this 2018 Asian American Writers’ Workshop event with Alexander Chee. “I realized at the end of those two years that you can’t build a foundation if you don’t know what that house will look like,” says Kwon. “Am I building an opera house? Am I building a skyscraper?”

Watch the “first, the greatest, and possibly the last” Riverhead Variety Show hosted by Traci Thomas and starring Kristen Arnett, Katie Kitamura, Chang-rae Lee, Brandon Taylor, and Joanne Tompkins, as they speak about their new books and invite viewers into their refrigerators and closets.

“Is this a voice that I can sustain throughout this novel? Will it continue to be, and also most importantly, can it sustain my curiosity?” In this AAWW virtual event, Chang-rae Lee reads from his novel My Year Abroad (Riverhead Books, 2021) and speaks with Bryan Washington about developing characters and publishing a book during a pandemic.

“Pursue it as if it were possible,” says Álvaro Enrigue about advice for young writers in this 2017 interview filmed at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. “I’m a kid from Colonia Nápoles in Mexico City…there was no way of making an equation that would start with my childhood and finish with me talking to you in Louisiana about my work, in Denmark, as a writer.” Enrigue is the author of several novels, including Sudden Death (Riverhead Books, 2016), his first to be translated into English.

In this Barnes & Noble Book Club virtual event, Brit Bennett speaks about the themes and writing inspiration behind her latest novel, The Vanishing Half (Riverhead Books, 2020), with Kiley Reid, and answers questions from readers. The novel was longlisted for the 2020 National Book Award in fiction.

“I come from a place of not belonging and perhaps I started writing in order to make a place where I belonged in the world of novels or plays.” In this AAWW video, Yu Miri answers questions about her life and writing process, and reads from her novel Tokyo Ueno Station (Riverhead Books, 2020), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles, which won the 2020 National Book Award in translated literature.

National Book Award–winning novel The Good Lord Bird (Riverhead Books, 2013) by James McBride has been adapted into a seven-episode series starring Rafael Casal as Cook, Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass, Ethan Hawke as John Brown, and Joshua Caleb Johnson as Onion. The series finale airs this Sunday on Showtime.

“All writing is really an act of translation, we’re trying to ask someone to inhabit someone else’s experience for long enough to understand some portion of it.” In this 2018 interview for Oregon Humanities Center’s UO Today, Danielle Evans reads from her debut story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self (Riverhead Books, 2010), and speaks about her writing practice and teaching. Evans is featured in “The Confounding Insistence on Innocence” by Naomi Jackson in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I can make worlds. That’s literally my job, is to make worlds,” says Awkaeke Emezi in this American Writers Museum video. “Instead of searching for other people to give me a place to belong, I just bent one into existence myself.” Emezi’s latest novel, The Death of Vivek Oji (Riverhead Books, 2020), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“What I was interested in was the idea of this character committing to whiteness as this act, and the idea that race can be performed but at the same time it has these real implications in your life.” In this Politics and Prose virtual event, Brit Bennett speaks about the topics of duality, passing, and family in her latest novel, The Vanishing Half (Riverhead Books, 2020), with New York Times Magazine editor Jazmine Hughes.