Poets & Writers Theater

In this Writers Speak event hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, Patricia Lockwood speaks about her second novel, Will There Ever Be Another You (Riverhead Books, 2025), and shares her experiences writing about health and illness in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic in a conversation with Tara K. Menon.

In this Creative Writing Series event at the University of Notre Dame, Kristen Arnett reads from her novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead Books, 2025) and talks about how she played with form by using different typefaces for “funny” and “not funny,” and her process to ensure that each joke lands.

In this virtual event for the Brooklyn Rail’s New Social Environment series, Lidia Yuknavitch reads from her memoir Reading the Waves (Riverhead Books, 2025) and speaks to Porochista Khakpour about the process of rearranging fragments of writing.

“I think each project requires its own form, and the story itself demands the form.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Lauren Groff talks about how her novel Matrix (Riverhead Books, 2021) began as a thought experiment around toxic masculinity, and reflects on the ways fiction can challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions.

In this episode of the Keep Talking Podcast, Pico Iyer talks about losing his home in the 1990 Painted Cave fire in Santa Barbara, his experiences with silence, and his new book, Aflame: Learning From Silence (Riverhead Books, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Rumaan Alam reads from his fourth novel, Entitlement (Riverhead Books, 2024), and discusses how writing about race, class, and age encourages readers to interrogate these identities in a conversation with Jason Reynolds. Entitlement is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Danzy Senna discusses her latest novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the ways in which she uses comedy and satire to shed light on the reality of race in America in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.

“The book is really for every woman who’s aging and has secret desires and anxieties about those desires,” says Miranda July about her second novel, All Fours (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the importance of writing and speaking about female bodies of all ages in this Daily Show interview with host Desi Lydic.

“What is it about a woman being ambitious that feels so wayward, that feels so dangerous?” In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast, R. O. Kwon talks about the themes of ambition and desire in her second novel, Exhibit (Riverhead Books, 2024), and what women of color face in the world of art with guest host Jenna Seery. A profile of Kwon by Brian Gresko appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I was really curious about how this fear of impending loss affects people.” In this 2023 LIVE From NYPL event, C Pam Zhang reads from her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead Books, 2023), and discusses grief, natural disasters, and apocalypse in a conversation with author and television host Padma Lakshmi.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Rachel Heng discusses her latest novel, The Great Reclamation (Riverhead Books, 2023), and talks about writing fiction that is both historical and speculative, and how she uses notecards to organize writing her gargantuan novels.

In this event hosted by the Korea Society in New York, prolific and award-winning author Yu Miri talks about her family’s history under Japanese occupation, her struggles writing for Japanese and Korean readers as a Zainichi Korean author, and the themes in her latest translated novel, The End of August (Riverhead Books, 2023), translated from the Japanese by Morgan Giles.

In this event hosted by the Free Library of Philadelphia, Sigrid Nunez, author of The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023), and Henry Hoke, author of Open Throat (MCD, 2023), read from their novels and discuss the writing of nontraditional lines, the appeal of literary absurdity, and current trends in literature.

Lauren Groff discusses how she unpacks the history of British colonialism in America and reckons with the frontier narrative in her new novel, The Vaster Wilds (Riverhead Books, 2023), in this conversation with Atlantic managing editor Andrea Valdez held at the 2023 Atlantic Festival.

“Don’t worry about whether you’re writing anything, worry about if you’re sitting there attempting to write something or not.” In this video, Mohsin Hamid speaks to Granta about his award-winning fourth novel, Exit West (Riverhead Books, 2017), the job of being a writer, and what he has learned from Douglas Adams.

“I don’t mind failing. Writers, most of what we do fails. And that’s the lesson that writing teaches you.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, author and musician James McBride discusses his musical, various projects, and his new novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead Books, 2023), an imagined story of his grandmother set in the 1930s.

“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).