Poets & Writers Theater

“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).

During National Poetry Month last April, Words Without Borders asked its contributors to read their favorite poems from their archive. In this video, Valzhyna Mort reads her poem “Belarusian 1,” translated from the Belarusian by Franz Wright. Mort talks about her new poetry collection, Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020), in a recent installment of Ten Questions.

“Yes— / I am opening myself for the black-horned galaxies / where the soul hides...” In this Poets House Presents video, Rachel Eliza Griffiths reads a selection of poems from her latest collection, Seeing the Body (Norton, 2020). For more Griffiths, read her installment of Ten Questions.

“I worked on the book until I was about halfway done with it before I told anyone about it.” Adrian Tomine talks about his graphic memoir, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (Drawn and Quarterly, 2020), and how he was able to revert to his childhood version of making comics for his own amusement in this virtual Politics & Prose Bookstore event with critic Jason Zinoman. For more Tomine, read his answers to our Ten Questions.

“The theater goes dark. I’m watching characters move across the screen, but thinking more about Noah holding my hand, rotating the knuckle of my thumb with his own.” Paul Lisicky reads from his memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World (Graywolf Press, 2020) in this online reading event for Books Are Magic with Susan Choi. For more Lisicky, read his installation of Ten Questions.

“It’s a confusing time to be a teenager in America.” In this Salon interview, Gabriel Bump speaks about the main character of his debut novel, Everywhere You Don’t Belong (Algonquin Books, 2020), an average, quiet teenager growing up in Chicago tackling the social issues around him. For more from Bump, read his installment of Ten Questions. 

“I was employee number twenty, and the fourth woman.” In this video, Anna Wiener reads from and discusses her debut memoir, Uncanny Valley (MCD/FSG, 2020), with editor Laura Marsh at the Strand Book Store in New York. For more about the book, read Wiener’s installment of Ten Questions.

“The ‘need’ is many things in the book...a child’s need for milk and then also the mother’s need for the child to relieve her of the milk and the mother’s need for her children, that love going two directions.” On BRIC TV’s 112BK, Helen Phillips talks about her second novel, The Need (Simon & Schuster, 2019), different reactions to the book, her own experiences as a mother, and some of the inspiration for its themes. For more Phillips, read her answers to Ten Questions about her novel.

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.

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.