Poets & Writers Theater

“I try my hand at remembering. An origin story is what you make of it. It can be a culture, a treasured heirloom, or a history, reduced.” In this Center for Fiction event, Hafizah Augustus Geter reads from her book The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin (Random House, 2022) and speaks with New York Times Magazine staff writer and author J Wortham. For more from Geter, read “Twelve Ways to Create Space to Write No Matter Where You Are” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Watch the trailer for the film adaptation of Spoiler Alert: The Hero Dies: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Other Four-Letter Words (Atria Books, 2017) by Michael Ausiello, starring Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, and Sally Field with a screenplay by David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage.

In this Books Are Magic event, Ada Calhoun reads from her memoir Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me (Grove Press, 2022) and discusses her writing process, New York City, and parenting with Emma Straub.

In this virtual Books & Books event, Emma Bolden reads from and speaks about her debut memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull, 2022), with author Chantel Acevedo. Bolden’s memoir is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Akwaeke Emezi talks about their love of romance novels, exploring stories of grief, and writing seven books in four years, including Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir (Riverhead Books, 2021) and You Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty (Atria Books, 2022), in this interview for The Daily Show With Trevor Noah. For more from Emezi, read their installment of our Ten Questions series.

“In 1993, when I boarded my first international flight, I sat at the window seat watching my country slowly dim into a whiff of clouds in the dark.” In this Warwick’s Books video, Madhushree Ghosh reads from her debut book, Khabaar: An Immigrant Journey of Food, Memory, and Family (University of Iowa Press, 2022), and speaks with author Adrienne Brodeur. Ghosh is featured in “5 Over 50: 2022” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Everything happens fast. Handcuffs on Chino. Uniforms do the same to the others who didn’t run fast enough.” In this video, Javier Zamora speaks with Today Show’s Jenna Bush about his three-thousand-mile journey alone as a nine-year-old from El Salvador to the United States which he recounts in his memoir, Solito (Hogarth, 2022).

“You were not always just a You. I was whole—a symbiotic relationship between my best and worst parts—and then, in one sense of the definition, I was cleaved.” In this reading at the Kelly Writers House in 2020, Carmen Maria Machado reads from her debut memoir, In the Dream House (Graywolf Press, 2019).

Putsata Reang speaks about her life as the daughter of a Cambodian refugee family and her debut memoir, Ma and Me (MCD Books, 2022), in this interview with NAACP president and Spokesman-Review columnist Kiantha Duncan for the Northwest Passages Book Club in Spokane. Reang is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud discusses his debut memoir, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces (Ballantine Books, 2022), with writer Sarah Hagi in this video for Toronto Reference Library’s Appel Salon series. Abdelmahmoud is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The best writing advice I ever got was, don’t give up and you can be a writer, if you work really hard and don’t stop writing.” In this Audible interview, New Yorker staff writer and author Ariel Levy speaks about finding her voice, writing about women’s lives, her experience with maternal grief, and her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply (Random House, 2017).

“The experience of being disabled in the world is an experience of feeling always kept on the sidelines of real life.” In this short video, Chloé Cooper Jones, a 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, speaks about her debut memoir, Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press, 2022). Cooper Jones is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Knowing your true origins connects you to history, it tells you where you are in time, in the world,” says Carmen Rita Wong about discovering family secrets and facing the revelations as she wrote her memoir, Why Didn’t You Tell Me? (Crown, 2022), in this video for Penguin Random House’s Inside the Book series.

“For a long time, I worked day jobs that were different from the one I have now.” In this Books Are Magic recorded event, Jami Attenberg reads from her memoir, I Came All This Way to Meet You: Writing Myself Home (Ecco, 2022), and speaks about her writing process with author Kristen Arnett. For more Attenberg, read “1000 Words of Summer: How an Accountability Project Opened Up My Writing Life” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Suddenly I wasn’t thinking about my mom losing her hair, or my mom losing weight, I was thinking about us in Korea eating patbingsu,” says Michelle Zauner in this CBS Sunday Morning interview about her best-selling memoir, Crying in H Mart (Knopf, 2021), and finding comfort in the Korean-owned supermarket chain after losing her mother to cancer.

“A lot of my life has been unconventional, but it has led to this point and I wouldn’t have reached this point if I’d given up.” In this Penguin Books UK video, Booker Prize–winning author Bernardine Evaristo speaks with her longtime editor Simon Prosser about her writing career and books, including her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up (Grove Press, 2022).

In this excerpt from a short film directed by Griffin Dunne, Joan Didion reads from the second chapter of her memoir Blue Nights (Knopf, 2011). Be sure to read Kevin Nance’s moving profile of Didion from the November/December 2011 issue and listen to Kimberly Farr read a passage of the audio book.

“The opening and closing of windows really meant a thin line between life and death,” says Farah Bashir, author of Rumours of Spring: A Girlhood in Kashmir (HarperCollins India, 2021), in this reading and conversation with Madhuri Vijay for Champaca Books.

“Here is another reason to write a memoir: to utter what must not be erased.” In this 2017 PBS NewsHour video, Richard Ford speaks about his reasons for writing, Between Them: Remembering My Parents (Ecco, 2017), a memoir about his parents. “I wrote about my parents because, decades after their deaths and when I was no longer young, I realized that I plainly missed them.”

“It wasn’t until I was assigned the family tree project at the age of nine, the same age as my mother when she became a refugee, that I began to understand that she had survived a war.” In this Greenlight Bookstore virtual event, Grace M. Cho reads from her memoir, Tastes Like War (Feminist Press, 2021), which is shortlisted for the 2021 National Book Award in nonfiction, and speaks with Sun Yung Shin about breaking the conventions of writing genres.