Poets & Writers Theater

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Bryan Washington speaks about how his experiences in Tokyo and Osaka informed his latest novel, Palaver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and how third-person narratives reflect the estrangement of being in a different country.

In this 60 Minutes interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about her response to book banning, her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025), and why she says the popularity of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is “not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly the twists and turns of history.”

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Patti Smith offers advice to young artists and talks about her award-winning memoir, Just Kids, and her new memoir, Bread of Angels (Random House, 2025).

In this episode of the Fashion Neurosis podcast hosted by Bella Freud, Ocean Vuong speaks about how the Japanese concept of negative space, ma, influences his approach to the line in both prose and poetry, and why he wants to write eight books in total by the end of his career.

In this Service95 Book Club interview hosted by Dua Lipa, Margaret Atwood talks about the research she conducted in order to imagine the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) while writing the novel in Berlin during the Cold War and how the current political landscape is reflective of the themes in her book.

In this episode of the Artsy Raven Podcast hosted by JF Garrard, author Yiming Ma talks about leaving the tech and finance world to write and the process of publishing his debut novel, These Memories Do Not Belong to Us (Mariner Books, 2025). Read “Writing in the Age of AI: The Case for Collective Resistance” by Ma in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Service95 Book Club conversation hosted by Dua Lipa, Percival Everett revisits his award-winning 2021 novel, The Trees, and talks about how the murder and image of Emmett Till urged him to write the story, and how important the relationship between author and reader is to art. “People find their truth in art. It’s not complete until the reader comes to it. That’s when meaning gets made,” says Everett.

In this CBS Boston interview, R. F. Kuang talks about her latest novel, Katabasis (Harper Voyager, 2025), and its forthcoming television series adaptation, her connection to Sylvia Plath and the city of Boston, and the importance of buying from independent bookstores.

“Books became my friends, my companions, from an early age.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, novelist Elif Shafak talks about the universality of storytelling and how literature revealed other worlds to her from a young age.

In this interview from The Tamron Hall Show, the best-selling author of the romance novels Beach Read (Berkley, 2020), Book Lovers (Berkley, 2022), and Great Big Beautiful Life (Berkley, 2025) talks about her writing process, approaches to character development, and exploration of themes, such as love, loss, and self-discovery.

In this video, Margaret Atwood, recipient of the 2025 Griffin Poetry Prize Lifetime Recognition Award speaks with Pádraig Ó Tuama about her literary career, the power and the craft of poetry, and how verse captures both personal and universal experiences.

In this PBS NewsHour interview, Nicholas Boggs speaks about his new book, Baldwin: A Love Story (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), a biography which looks at the ways James Baldwin’s personal relationships shaped his life and work.

“If writing has rules, they are exactly the same as the rules of living.” In this Louisiana Channel interview, Rachel Cusk reads from her latest novel, Parade (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and talks about her approach to writing, which includes focusing on the interplay of instinct, discipline, and authenticity.

In this Poetry.LA video, Altadena co-poets laureate Lester Graves Lennon and Sehba Sarwar read a selection of their poems and speak about how the Eaton Fire has affected their lives and community. Lennon and Sarwar were recently awarded a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets to launch their poetry project “After the Fires: Healing from Histories.”

“She was a short story that kind of got too big and started rolling away from me,” says Katie Yee about her debut novel, Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books, 2025), in this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, in which they discuss writing outside of your own experience and usual style.

In this Daily Show interview, author Rob Franklin speaks about the themes of race, class, and privilege in his debut novel, Great Black Hope (Summit Books, 2025), with host Josh Johnson.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers discusses the themes of Blackness, intersectionality, and diaspora in her essay collection, Misbehaving at the Crossroads (Harper, 2025), and how it serves as a companion piece to her novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021).

In this 2009 Granta interview, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o discusses his early life and his memoir Dreams in a Time of War: A Childhood Memoir (Pantheon, 2010) with Ellah Allfrey. Ngũgĩ died at the age of eighty-seven on May 28, 2025.

“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.

“Being a writer, creating stories, is my way of saying that I’m not marked by my history.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Ocean Vuong talks about the power of writing and the working-class community of Hartford that shaped his second novel, The Emperor of Gladness (Penguin Press, 2025). For more from Vuong, read “Theater of Memories: A Conversation With Ocean Vuong” by Divya Mehrish.