Poets & Writers Theater

“I was doing nine years in prison, and poems became my way to see the world.” In this Common Read event hosted by the Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University, Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon (Norton, 2020), answers questions from the audience and presents a lecture and reading introduced by Louisiana poet laureate Alison Pelegrin.

In this Villanova University Literary Festival event, Victoria Chang reads from her poetry collections Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and speaks about her ekphrastic poems and the power of writing in conversation with other artists and people in her life.

“These are notes on encountering the daily, the literary, the visual, violent, the arbitrary, the ordinary, and the beautiful…. They are always concerned with what I think of as the ordinary, extraordinary matter of Black life.” In this Virginia Museum of Fine Arts event, Christina Sharpe discusses her latest book, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which weaves the past, present, and future together through various mediums ranging from lyric to photography.

“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.

“It seems to me that prose, it may be lyrical, but it isn’t meant to be sung.” In this 2014 Academy of American Poets event, Edward Hirsch discusses the history and practice of poets writing prose with Toi Derricotte and Claudia Rankine.

In this 2016 lecture for the Greater Good Science Center’s conference, former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass discusses the history of awe and wonder in world literature, the root of the word “catharsis,” and the power poetry has to captivate and transform its readers.

“That’s one of the reasons I write. I’ve needed to create the narrative of my life, its abiding metaphors, so that my story would not be determined for me.” In this 2022 video, former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey delivers the annual Windham-Campbell Lecture “Why I Write” for the prize ceremony at Yale University.

“The conundrum of a writer’s life, particularly that of a poet’s, is learning to embody a paradox,” says Rita Dove, winner of the 2018 Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement, in this recording of the Denham Sutcliffe Memorial Lecture at the Kenyon Review Literary Festival. “One has to be fierce and tender at the same time. Loud and quiet. Brash and introspective.”

“With regard to war, I can’t help being suspicious of the very reasons we turn to poetry at all,” reads Paisley Rekdal from “Beyond Empathy, Beyond the Archive: Notes on Poetic Representation” for the 2022 Blaney Lecture, an annual lecture on contemporary poetry and poetics created by the Academy of American Poets. “Is our desire one of representation, political change, or emotional catharsis? And is that political change meant to happen on the page, or off it?”

“Writing has always been a pleasure. Even as a boy at school I looked forward to the class set aside for writing a story,” reads Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature, from his lecture titled “Writing,” in which he discusses his earliest memories of reading and writing, as well as how his observations of colonization and immigration influenced his desire to write.

“It is a wonderful gift to be able to swim in rivers, especially on bright, clear days like these. You step into an inverted version of the world,” says poet Alice Oswald about the connection between water and grief in this 2020 virtual lecture for the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. “The water fits around you like a velvet suit, and you float along seemingly decapitated by reflections.”

“One of the things that I think I can say now with a great deal of confidence about writing is that usually, the things that you are most ashamed of are actually what you should be trying to describe,” says Alexander Chee in this 2018 lecture titled “The Writer and Life,” part of Brown University’s public lecture series devoted to various forms of nonfiction writing. For more Chee, read “Which Story Will You Tell? A Q&A with Alexander Chee” by Amy Gall.

"Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality." James Wood, literary critic for the New Yorker and a professor of practice at Harvard University, reads from The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of essays from the Mandel Lectures in Humanities, a book series published by Brandeis University Press.

In this 2014 video for the Library of Congress, Natasha Trethewey delivers the final lecture of her second term as U.S. poet laureate speaking on the 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the major victories of the civil rights movement, as well as reflecting on how these events cross with her own personal history and laureateship.

"In 1929, three decades into what were the great years for the blue-collar town of Portsmouth, on the Ohio River, a private swimming pool opened and they called it Dreamland." Journalist Sam Quinones discusses his book Dreamland: The True Story of America's Opiate Epidemic (Bloomsbury, 2015), which was awarded the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction.

"Senatus Populusque Romanus." Cambridge historian Mary Beard gives a lecture at the 92nd Street Y based on her latest book, SPQR: A History of Rome (Liveright, 2015). Beard is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in the nonfiction category.

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet C. K. Williams delivered the Poetry Society's annual lecture at Newcastle University in the UK last summer. The seventy-five-year-old chose as his topic On Being Old, reading poems that explore his changing relationship with the great poets of history.