Poets & Writers Theater

In this livestreamed event, poet and drag performer Wo Chan, author of Togetherness, forthcoming from Nightboat Books in September, and poet CAConrad, author most recently of AMANDA PARADISE: Resurrect Extinct Vibration (Wave Books, 2021), read from their works at the Poetry Project in New York City.

This video celebrates the tenth season of the Silo City Reading Series, a poetry reading series that takes place in a complex of historic grain silos in Buffalo, New York and has “held true to the belief of what imagination can do when it acts collectively.” Upcoming events begin this weekend and feature poets Richie Hofmann, Victoria Chang, and Jericho Brown.

In celebration of Walt Whitman’s bicentennial birthday on May 31 of 2019, Brooklyn residents—including Mahogany L. Browne, Jason Koo, Gregory Pardlo, Ben Purkert, and Brooklyn poet laureate Tina Chang—recite his 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” from Leaves of Grass in various neighborhoods and libraries throughout the borough. This video was produced by the Brooklyn Public Library.

“In the last year of her life, my mother Asako spoke more openly of the trauma of the war years and her incarceration at Topaz,” reads Karen Tei Yamashita for this event celebrating her work, hosted by the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. Yamashita was awarded the 2021 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation.

“I had a dream of having poetry at the intersections of New York, where all kinds of people pass through daily,” says Marie Howe, former New York State poet laureate, in this 2015 video about the inspiration for the Poetry in Motion: The Poet Is In festival. The annual National Poetry Month event is hosted by the Poetry Society of America and MTA Arts & Design, and features poems written on request by award-winning poets.

“My mother thought that if she taught me to read, I would become interested to read my books and leave her alone,” says Jamaica Kincaid about her experience reading as a child and how it influenced her as a writer in this interview from the 2021 Louisiana Literature Festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.

“Alzheimer’s patients sing every lyric to their favorite songs, / and this casual act becomes a dance with defiance.” In this video, Theresa Lola reads “Sing With Me and Do Not Die of Thirst” from her debut poetry collection, In Search of Equilibrium (Nine Arches Press, 2019), for Ours Poetica, a series produced by the Poetry Foundation in collaboration with Complexly.

In this 2015 reading at Harvard University’s Woodberry Poetry Room, poet Jackie Wang introduces Bhanu Kapil, who reads from her book Ban en Banlieue (Nightboat Books, 2015), and Fred Moten, who reads from his collection The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014).

In this video, Tom Sleigh reads “The King’s Touch,” the title poem from his new collection published by Graywolf Press this month. The video is part of a series called “Age of Wonder” directed by filmmaker Ed Robbins which features Sleigh reading selections from the book.

In this 2017 event, poet and novelist Fanny Howe reads from her rewritten novel, The Wages (Pressed Wafer Press, 2018), and poet and fiction writer John Keene reads from his story collection, Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015), for the Woodberry Poetry Room’s Vocarium reading series at Harvard University.

“The first was that I was very busy. // The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could not happen to me, not like that.” In this 2018 video for Bloodaxe Books, Marie Howe reads “Magdalene—The Seven Devils” and other poems from her fourth poetry collection, Magdalene (Norton, 2017).

“A life is not / this supple, // it is not meant / to fold, to be / drawn through // a narrow ring,” reads Monica Youn from her poem “Portrait of a Hanged Woman” in this 2018 reading and conversation with Robert Pinsky for the Twenty Summers arts center in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

In this 2018 Intelligence Squared video, a friendly and impassioned battle between nineteenth-century novelists Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy is carried out and argued by professor John Mullan and historian Simon Schama with readings by actors Zawe Ashton, Tom Hiddleston, Kit Kingsley, Julia Sawalha, and Timothy West.

In this video, poet Sarah Browning introduces an encore presentation of a 2016 reading and conversation with Sharon Olds at the Folger Shakespeare Library, part of the O. B. Harrison Poetry Series titled “Begin Again.”

“There’s always going to be something to say about the push-pull that New York City exerts on its inhabitants,” says Sari Botton, editor of the revised edition of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York (Seal Press, 2021), in this Books Are Magic virtual event with author Isaac Fitzgerald and contributors to the anthology Leslie Jamison, Lisa Ko, Emily Raboteau, and Rosie Schaap.

In this reading presented by the Kenyon Review, Shira Erlichman, Ross Gay, and Saeed Jones read poetry and present interdisciplinary work, as well as discuss their inspirations and writing processes in a discussion with the magazine’s editor Nicole Terez Dutton.

“It’s in your hands: the weight of the slats. All slightly bent to one side. As someone that bends with their ear towards the other trying to hear more: what?” Silvina López Medin reads her poem “The Sound of Blinds Being Pulled Up Is the First Sound” from her book Poem That Never Ends (Essay Press, 2021) in this video for Poetry Daily.

“Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling / a frond in mist; it comes when I trip on a root, / slap a mosquito on my arm,” reads Arthur Sze from his poem "Earthshine" in this 2008 video for the Lunch Poems reading series at the University of California, Berkeley. Sze’s latest collection, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“There’s a sister who works so hard she never talks. / A sister who screams when she hears dogs bark.” Monica Sok reads “Sestina” from her debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020), for Women Warriors: A Solidarity Reading, presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, which featured over forty Asian American women writers. 

“It is so painful to be loved sometimes. Intolerable even.” In this 2020 virtual event hosted by Salve Regina University, Melissa Febos reads from her new essay collection, Girlhood (Bloomsbury, 2021), and answers questions about her writing process. A profile of Febos by Brian Gresko appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.