Poets & Writers Theater

“I’m very interested in taking away a lot of the traditional furniture of a novel and making it a shorter experience and a more intense experience.” In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Kevin Barry reads from his new novel, The Heart in Winter (Doubleday, 2024), and talks about Irish labor history, his time spent with Irish communities in Montana, and his experiences writing in different forms.

Travel back four hundred years for this Victoria and Albert Museum video as Elizabeth James, senior librarian at the National Art Library in London, presents the secrets behind the First Folio of Shakespeare, which was published in 1623 and includes his iconic plays Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and The Tempest.

“I like to think of subtext as almost being horizontal instead of below the surface of the text,” says award-winning playwright, poet, and essayist Sarah Ruhl in this video for Conchord Theatricals. For more from Ruhl, read her essay “Twelve Reasons You Should Keep Writing” published in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Open Studio With Jared Bowen interview, playwright Kirsten Greenidge; Kerri Greenidge, historian and author of Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter (Liveright, 2019); and Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of We Love You, Charlie Freeman (Algonquin Books, 2016) talk about growing up together as sisters and how their work often overlaps.

“The White Card is a play I wanted to write because it seemed to me that people had a difficult time talking about race. And I thought, ‘What would it look like?’” In this ArtsEmerson video, Claudia Rankine talks about the inspiration for her debut play, The White Card: A Play (Graywolf Press, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Will is a television drama about the imagined life of William Shakespeare in his early twenties in London as he struggles to get his plays onto the stage. Created by Craig Pearce, the series stars Laurie Davidson as Shakespeare and Jamie Campbell Bower as his rival Christopher Marlowe.