Poets & Writers Theater

In this video, Hafizah Geter reads “Testimony (for Eric Garner)” for the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation’s Words We Share series. Geter is featured in Literary MagNet in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, the Root Slam, an open mic and poetry slam in Oakland, hosts an all-Black Latinx virtual reading featuring Elizabeth Acevedo, Jennifer Falú, John Murillo, Julian Randall, and Nicole Sealey to celebrate the publication of The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNext (Haymarket Books, 2020).

“Every hand that once reached / for me still haunts me at the most unexpected times.” In this video, Aimee Nezhukumatathil reads a selection of poems covering her time as a high school mascot, bad reviews of the seven wonders of the world, and The Incredible Hulk for Poetry @ Tech in Atlanta. A Q&A with Nezhukumatathil by Ross Gay appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“the highest promise we could offer / was one to a land or man or idea / greater than we.” In this O, Miami video, Nate Marshall reads a poem from his new collection, Finna, out this month from One World. A Q&A with Marshall by Julian Randall appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We’d cut school like knives through butter, the three / Of us — Peter, Stephen and I — to play / Just about all the music we knew…” In this video, award–winning poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads “Boys” from his second collection of poems, Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. 

“In Spanish, our stories are slow, then fast, and we cackle constantly, even when we talk about the dead.” In this 2016 Radar Reading Series video, Ingrid Rojas Contreras reads from her memoir-in-progress about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia, and how she and her mother both experienced amnesia.

“The deal with Florida is the charlatans and lunatics and Snapchat-famous plastic surgeons. It is the Ponzi schemes, the byzantine corruption, the evangelical fervor and the consenting-adult depravity....” In this Books & Books virtual event, Kent Russell reads from his memoir, In the Land of Good Living (Knopf, 2020), and discusses Florida and his writing experience with author and sibling Karen Russell. In the Land of Good Living is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction show cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author and pulmonary and critical care specialist Daniela Lamas talks about coronavirus patients seeking recovery or end-of-life care, and poet and radiation oncologist C. Dale Young speaks about the variety of American responses to the pandemic and reads from his book The Affliction: A Novel in Stories (Four Way Books, 2018).

“This is a poem I wrote nearly fifty years ago in response to the war that the Metropolitan Police force had declared against the Black youth of my generation,” says Linton Kwesi Johnson in this video for the Geraldine Connor Foundation’s Generations Dreaming online event last month. The recent PEN Pinter Prize–winner reads his poems “All Wi Doin is Defendin,” “It Dread inna Inglan (for George Lindo),” “Mekin Histri,” and “License fi Kill.”

“When she checked her boarding pass, she was in the middle of the row. There was a man in a blue suit on the aisle, who gave her a big bleached-white smile as he stood to let her past.” In this first installment of Vintage Books’ weekly Storytime series, Booker Prize–winning author Anne Enright reads her short story “The Weight” from her home.

“To be seen and not / heard, herded, and yet, / heralded—ambidoxic / harem, primary colors-studded...” Tyrone Williams reads “Alhambra,” “taškīl,” and “The D.I.Y. Archive” from his poetry collection As iZ (Omnidawn, 2018) in this third installment of ENCLAVE, a virtual series of readings by contemporary innovative poets curated by Rae Armantrout and Jeanne Heuving.

“In those brown albums, our family at times looks like a family and at other times not.” Porochista Khakpour reads from her new book, Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity (Vintage, 2020), and talks to author Tania James in this virtual Politics and Prose Bookstore event video. 

“I acquired a copy of my great-great-grandfather’s diaries in 2013,” says Lauren Russell about the inspiration for her new book, Descent (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2020), at an event with author Megan Milks for Brown University’s Authors in the Archives series in 2019. Descent is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Larry thought it was as if the whole of the world was asking to be fuel.” Leah Hampton, whose debut book, F*ckface (Henry Holt, 2020), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her short story “Boomer” at Malvern Books in 2018. 

“He forgets his own name somewhere in the tunnel to Penn Station. He doesn’t notice, at first. Too busy with all the stuff people usually do when they’re about to reach their train stop: cleaning up the pretzel bags and plastic bottles of breakfast....” N. K. Jemisin reads from the first chapter of her new fantasy novel, The City We Became (Orbit, 2020), the first in her Great Cities trilogy, and answers audience questions for a virtual event hosted by Politics and Prose Bookstore. 

“They’ve asked that the bookstore be cleared away during the event / they say it’s no place to sell books…” As part of the Writers in Residence at-home video series for PEN America’s 2020 Digital World Voices Festival, Oksana Vasyakina reads her poem “These people didn’t know my father,” translated from the Russian by Ainsley Morse and Eugene Ostashevsky. 

“The most astonishing thing to happen in the almost 14 billion years since the birth of the cosmos is that ordinary, apparentle inert matter, has—by its self-organizing capacity (or, autopoesis)—become conscious.” Harry Dodge reads from his debut book, My Meteorite: Or, Without the Random There Can Be No New Thing (Penguin Books, 2020), and discusses its themes in a conversation with Maggie Nelson in their Los Angeles home.

“It is an ancient Mariner, / And he stoppeth one of three. / ‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, / Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?’” Jeremy Irons reads the opening lines of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” accompanied by Glenn Brown’s oil painting The Shallow End, for the “Ancient Mariner” Big Read, an online audio and visual art project curated and produced by the University of Plymouth with forty readers—including Simon Armitage, Alan Cumming, Willem Dafoe, Olivia Laing, Hilary Mantel, Iggy Pop, Ali Smith, Tilda Swinton, Neil Tennant, and Jeanette Winterson.

In this installment of the AAWW at Home series, Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of the novel Starling Days (Overlook Press, 2020), talks about how she’s been occupied during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown and reads from Alexander Chee’s essay collection, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel (Mariner Books, 2018). 

“Looking down from the window / into the bare augur sycamore tree / in the park across the street / the surprise is how full / of red-winged blackbirds it is…” In this Poets House Presents video, Ed Roberson shares new and unpublished poems still in drafts written during the coronavirus pandemic from his home in Chicago. Roberson is the recipient of the 2020 Jackson Poetry Prize, awarded annually by Poets & Writers to an American poet of exceptional talent.