Poets & Writers Theater

“It’s difficult to describe how I felt about the pictures I collected, how I continued to forge a link with them that I didn’t particularly understand.” Patricia Smith speaks about the photographs she collected over the course of twenty years that inspired her latest collection, Unshuttered (Northwestern University Press, 2023), for this recording of the Academy of American Poets’ 2023 Blaney Lecture. For more on Smith, read her conversation with Tyehimba Jess in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Naeem Douglas, a content producer for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, talks about the history behind the artistic friendship and collaborations between photographer Gordon Parks and author Ralph Ellison. This series of photographs shot by Parks was inspired by Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man.

“How does the elegy believe me?” This lyric art video created by Rachel Eliza Griffiths offers a peek into her new book of poems and self-portraits, Seeing the Body (Norton, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“As a photographer my looking really changed, it really did become sacred....” In this Louisiana Channel video, Teju Cole talks about and reads from his book of photography and text, Blind Spot (Random House, 2017), which was inspired by a short period of blindness in one eye that transformed his perspective on looking and attentiveness. The book is comprised of over a hundred fifty photographs interspersed with short lyrical prose pieces.

American Stanzas: 2006–2016 is a photography and mixed media arts show presenting work by poet and visual artist Rachel Eliza Griffiths. The exhibition is sponsored by Poets House and Cave Canem Foundation.

“I want to vanish from this detainment.” A. H. Jerriod Avant reads his poem “This Dull Chaos” over a series of photographs in this video from Voluble, a new channel of visual and literary art that is part of the Los Angeles Review of Books Channels Project.

This short film is one of twenty in Christos Chrissopoulos’s Look Twenty project, which each consist of twenty photographs projected at equal intervals to create a visual narrative. Chrissopoulos’s first novella, The Parthenon Bomber (Other Press, 2017), translated from the Greek by John Cullen, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.