Poets & Writers Theater

“He wanted to send her and their unborn child halfway around the world to Perfume Bay, five-star accommodations located outside of Los Angeles.” Vanessa Hua reads from her debut novel, A River of Stars (Ballantine Books, 2018), for the ZYZZYVA reading series at Booksmith bookstore in San Francisco.

Jenna Lê talks to Paul Rogalus about her writing habits and reads her poems “Please Don’t Tell Me How This Story Ends” and “Venus Frigida.” Lê, who is featured in “Outsiders on the Inside” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, is the author of A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018).

“Jeff Park’s living room was as palatial as the entrance to a modest New York museum.” Gary Shteyngart reads an excerpt from his fourth novel, Lake Success (Random House, 2018), at the University of Washington’s Stroum Center for Jewish Studies. Lake Success is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We headed into the forest up a hill to a thicket of tall trees, their tops so lush that I felt like crying.” In this 2016 video, Lisa Locascio reads from her debut novel, Open Me (Grove Press, 2018), for Poetry Center San Jose’s Well-RED series.

“I don’t know a thing about paradise || In my house nobody ever brought / it up...” Anna Moschovakis reads from her poem “Paradise (Film Two)” from her collection They and We Will Get Into Trouble for This (Coffee House Press, 2016) as part of the twenty-fourth annual Poets House Showcase in 2016. Moschovakis’s forthcoming debut novel, Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love will be released by Coffee House Press in August.

“If I understood Marx, I thought, I could understand my mother.” At Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, Jordy Rosenberg reads from his essay “The Daddy Dialectic,” which was published in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rosenberg speaks about his debut novel, Confessions of the Fox (One World, 2018), in “The Business of Relationships” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Words carry weight, lots of weight. Words can drown us, and words can save us.” Jaki Shelton Green, who was recently named North Carolina’s tenth poet laureate, reads from her poem “From Whence I Enter” at Christ School in Asheville, North Carolina. Green is the state’s first African American poet laureate.

“I hear words spoken in the mouths of children, threaded in complex narratives.” At a 92nd Street Y event, Valeria Luiselli reads from her book Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions (Coffee House Press, 2017), which details her experience as an interpreter for undocumented Latin American children facing deportation.

Anne Waldman reads from the “Endtime” section of her longer poetic text at the 2017 Alternative New Year’s Day Spoken Word Performance Extravaganza at Nuyorican Poets Café in New York City. Waldman’s poetry collection Trickster Feminism (Penguin Books, 2018) is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2009 interview with poet Elizabeth Spires, former U.S. poet laureate Donald Hall reads poems and speaks about the writing life. For more Hall, read “Turning Time Around: A Profile of Donald Hall” by contributor John Freeman from the November/December 2014 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine. Hall passed away on June 23, 2018 at the age of eighty-nine.

“Justin used to think the trees were God. But today, right here, he thinks the ocean might be God. All that power and weakness, spread out for us to see.” Silas House reads from his fifth novel, Southernmost (Algonquin Books, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Porochista Khakpour reads from her essay “How to Write Iranian-America, or The Last Essay” and talks to Northwestern University professor Brian Edwards about her writing interests and the publishing industry. Khakpour’s debut memoir, Sick (Harper Perennial, 2018), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became / a character in the news...” Khaled Hosseini, Rita Dove, Philip Gourevitch, and Siri Hustvedt read Liu Xia’s poem “June 2nd, 1989” from Empty Chairs (Graywolf Press, 2015), translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern. PEN America and Amnesty International collaborated on the video series as a call to free Liu Xia from house arrest in Beijing, where she has been held since her late husband, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, was imprisoned in 2009.

Luljeta Lleshanaku reads from her collection Haywire: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2011) in English translation and in the original Albanian, and talks about how history, politics, and religion have informed her writing. Lleshanaku’s new collection, Negative Space (New Directions, 2018), translated from the Albanian by Ani Gjika, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Glenn Close reads “Old Wives’ Tales on Which I Was Fed” from Jenny Xie’s debut collection, Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), which won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Walt Whitman Award. Eye Level is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The next morning Less is awakened at six, as planned, introduced to a cup of coffee, and led into a black van with smoked windows....” In this video for Mercury News, Andrew Sean Greer reads from his fifth novel, Less (Lee Boudreaux Books, 2017), for which he was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

“Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done…” Actress Helen Mirren and Stephen Colbert share an emotional moment as she reads the last lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” on the Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

“‘Yes, it’s true, there’s something thrilling, addictive even, about the idea that you’re living every moment only half a step ahead of death.’” Lisa Halliday reads from her debut novel, Asymmetry (Simon & Schuster, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I am writing to you as an act of / immolation, relief…” Allison Benis White reads from her third poetry collection, Please Bury Me in This (Four Way Books, 2017), which won the 2018 University of North Texas Rilke Prize.

Ursula K. Le Guin reads from her novels The Dispossessed (Harper & Row, 1974) and Always Coming Home (Harper & Row, 1985) at Powell’s Books in 2010 in this video produced by pdxjustice Media Productions.