Poets & Writers Theater

“I start with a physical feeling. I start with a visual image.” On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Ann Beattie speaks about her writing process, the differences between writing a novel and a short story, and how she came up with the title for her most recent novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck (Viking, 2019).

In this interview, Susan Choi talks to Paul Peppis at the University of Oregon about her fifth novel, Trust Exercise (Henry Holt, 2019), her previous four novels, which include A Person of Interest (Viking, 2008) and My Education (Viking, 2013), writing Asian American characters, and her nonfiction work.

“When I was writing, I was trying hard not to sensationalize it,” Claire Adam says of Trinidad, where she grew up and set her debut novel, Golden Child (SJP for Hogarth, 2019). On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Adam also talks about the important role education played in her life and why she wouldn’t let her siblings read the book until it was completed.

“What are the ethics around documenting political crises? How much do you become a parasite of people’s suffering? What good do you do to a situation by documenting it or fictionalizing it? These are all questions that are in the novel.” Valeria Luiselli discusses the unique challenges of writing about the ongoing migrant crisis at the U.S. southern border in her most recent novel, Lost Children Archive (Knopf, 2019), with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown. An interview with Luiselli by Lauren LeBlanc appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I would read out loud and tried to check in my own breath, in my own body how the sentence was feeling and what kind of experience it was giving me as the first reader.” Marci Vogel reads from her books At the Border of Wilshire & Nobody (Howling Bird Press, 2015) and Death and Other Holidays (Melville House, 2018) and discusses her writing process both with poetry and prose in this Poetry.LA interview with Mariano Zaro.

“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.

“In every single book of poems there are, to me, what feel like really explicit autobiographical moments and gestures.” Dawn Lundy Martin speaks about trying to find a language to express trauma, and the use of voice and narrative in her poetry in this interview with City of Asylum. Martin won the 2019 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for her collection Good Stock Strange Blood (Coffee House Press, 2017).

“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.

“In a lot of African storytelling, unlike storytelling in the West, it’s the trickster who is telling the story, so you already know you can’t quite believe it.” On Late Night With Seth Meyers, Marlon James speaks about the influences behind his new novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Riverhead Books, 2019), the first title of his Dark Star Trilogy, ranging from the television series The Affair and George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. A profile of James by Kima Jones appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“My work is a tragic form of fiction that is both European and African at the same time.” In this interview for the Louisiana Channel, Chigozie Obioma speaks about how his early influences of Shakespeare and Igbo folklore led him to write his debut novel, The Fishermen (Little, Brown, 2015). Obioma is featured in “Portraits of Inspiration” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It is a map of how this writer had to break many barriers to find not a room of her own, but a house of her own.” Sandra Cisneros speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about her essay collection, A House of My Own: Stories From My Life (Knopf, 2015), her path to writing, and what home means to her. Cisneros was recently named the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature.

“I like to have a story be just the essential.” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, author of Friday Black (Mariner Books, 2018), talks about why he enjoys the short story form, writing Black characters, and his connection with his students in this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview. 

“Not only did To the Lighthouse help me to understand my own story, but my own story helped me to better understand To the Lighthouse—there’s sort of a beautiful reciprocity there.” Katharine Smyth talks with Michelle Dunton Cronauer about how Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel led to writing her debut memoir, All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking Solace in Virginia Woolf (Crown, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Yaa Gyasi and Zadie Smith speak with Courtney Martin about representation and risks in writing, the power of fiction to invoke curiosity and transform behavior, issues of history and identity, and their current projects at the 2018 Obama Foundation Summit.

Sophie Mackintosh reads from her debut novel, The Water Cure (Doubleday, 2019), at Waterstones bookstore and talks about being influenced by Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel The Virgin Suicides, Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Dogtooth, Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock, and the recent sociopolitical climate.

“A story or a character should change. The events that happen change us.” George R. R. Martin, whose book Fire & Blood: 300 Years Before A Game of Thrones (Bantam, 2018) is a history of the Targaryen family from his fantasy novel series A Song of Fire and Ice, talks to John Hodgman about how the realness in Stan Lee’s comic books influenced him as a writer.

Josh Malerman talks about writing novels while touring with his band, incorporating performance and radio play elements into his book readings, and the inspiration behind his debut novel, Bird Box (Ecco, 2014), in this video from the 2015 Midwest Literary Walk. The novel has been adapted into a feature film directed by Susanne Bier and starring Sandra Bullock, John Malkovich, Sarah Paulson, and Trevante Rhodes.

“You’ve got to do two very contradictory things as a writer: you’ve got to enjoy spending a lot of time alone—and a lot of people don’t—and you’ve also got to go out and see about the world and immerse yourself in that world....” Irvine Welsh, whose latest novel, Dead Men’s Trousers, is forthcoming from Melville House in February, contemplates the words of wisdom and advice he would offer to young writers in this interview with Christian Lund for Louisiana Channel.

“Carson McCullers is probably the author I feel the strongest connection to, in the way of empathy and seeing the world.” Benedict Wells, whose fourth novel, The End of Loneliness (Penguin Books, 2019), translated from the German by Charlotte Collins, is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about his writing process, how he began as a writer, and some of the authors who have inspired him.