Poets & Writers Theater

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.

Award-winning author K-Ming Chang reads from her latest novel, Organ Meats (One World, 2023), and joins Amanda Mei Kim for a conversation about the sensual qualities of language and the intimate relationship between writing and the self for this event hosted by the Center for Literary Arts of San José at the Hammer Theatre.

In this National Book Festival event, George Saunders accepts the 2023 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction and speaks about his writing process, how problems in a work-in-progress contain opportunities, and the place of empathy in storytelling in a conversation moderated by Library of Congress literary director Clay Smith.

In this virtual Poets & Writers event, 2023 Jackson Poetry Prize winner Sandra Lim reads a selection of poems from her latest collection, The Curious Thing (Norton, 2021), and speaks about her writing process with poet Carl Phillips, the 2021 winner of the prize.

“I write toward what hurts. I write toward the truth, and I tell it again. I scribe the whole.” In this National Book Festival event, Jesmyn Ward, recipient of the 2022 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, speaks about how her grandmother influenced her work as a writer and joins Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in a conversation about her award-winning novels, grief writing, and cultural authenticity.

In this recorded event, Terrance Hayes, Claudia Rankine, and Ocean Vuong, acclaimed authors and professors at New York University’s Creative Writing Program, read from their work and participate in a conversation together for a packed audience at NYU Skirball. Rankine is the recipient of the 2014 Jackson Poetry Prize.

In this 2019 Politics and Prose Bookstore event, award-winning author Carmen Maria Machado reads from her memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019), and discusses her challenges writing a second-person narrative and how she delicately confronted traumatic memories in a conversation with author Jeannie Vanasco.