Poets & Writers Theater

“The orchard grew excellent, // Good mass of apples assembling, one angel burned, looped / On the wire fence, in a bowl of gold most satisfactory.” Stephanie Burt reads Lucie Brock-Broido’s poem “Posthumous Seduction,” which first appeared in the Summer 2012 issue of Paris Review, for the new Poets on Couches series where poets read and discuss favorite poems that get them through during difficult times.

“The street shines with / mannequins in rhinestone. We walk / as if just friends.” In this Ours Poetica video, Oliver Baez Bendorf reads Rane Arroyo’s poem “Details as Revelations.” For more Bendorf, read his installment of Ten Questions.

“This book really is inspired by my grandfather, and a lot of it is actually true.” In this Politics and Prose video, Louise Erdrich talks about her most recent novel, The Night Watchman (Harper, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“In the morning, the one who is mostly enlightened comes in.” At this Free Library of Philadelphia author event, Jenny Offill reads from her new novel, Weather (Knopf, 2020), and speaks about her writing process and love of libraries. Weather is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It’s particularly, specifically, about what it means to be Asian American, which is a subject that I’ve always actually kind of avoided. I’ve always indirectly approached it, but I’ve never directly tackled it.” At Malvern Books, Cathy Park Hong describes her experience writing her first essay collection, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020), featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, and reads “The End of White Innocence” from the book.

“Whatever shall i do with my dead / my tombs & mausoleums / these potted plants tended by strangers...” Mahogany L. Browne reads “for my dead & loved ones” and “Blood Rhythms - Blood Currents - Black N’ Blue Stylin’” by Ntozake Shange, and her own poem “Black Girl Magic” at a tribute for Shange at New York City’s 92nd Street Y.

“Black women are crafting a collective response / to centuries of being under everybody’s water / We are a rising tsunami of fury come back / to take back what was carried away/without consent....” Staceyann Chin reads “Tsunami Rising” from her debut poetry collection, Crossfire: A Litany for Survival (Haymarket Books, 2019), for the Unbound series in Brooklyn, copresented by BAM and Greenlight Bookstore.

“You’re not really thinking of speaking those words. Often you think about what the most wrong thing to say or do would be, in any given situation.” In this video, Merritt Tierce, a 2019 Whiting Award winner in fiction, reads from her short story “Distributed Denial of Service.”

In this 92nd Street Y video, Mahogany L. Browne reads poems from her books Black Girl Magic (Roaring Brook Press, 2018) and Kissing Caskets (YesYes Books, 2017). Her forthcoming book, Woke: A Young Poet’s Call to Justice, will be out in March from Roaring Brook Press.

In this Asian American Writers’ Workshop video, Yanyi celebrates the launch of his debut collection, The Year of Blue Water (Yale University Press, 2019), with readings by poets Wo Chan, Erica Hunt, and Monica Youn. Yanyi is featured in “Poetic Lenses: Our Fifteenth Annual Look at Debut Poetry” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“That is a vapor at day’s far edge. That’s Lauren Bacall in a penny / arcade. That’s a streaming video but will not load.” At the 2012 TILTS Summer Workshop at the University of Texas in Austin, Chad Bennett reads “George Dyer” and “Other Weathers” from his first poetry collection, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era (Sarabande Books, 2020), which is currently featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and translator Robert Hass reads “Okefenokee: A Story,” “Pertinent Divagations Toward an Ode to Inuit Carvers,” and other poems from his book Summer Snow (Ecco, 2020) at the 2019 Sewanee Writers’ Conference in Tennessee. The book, Hass’s seventh poetry collection, is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Soundless, it crosses a line, quiets into a seed / & then whatever makes a seed. almost like gone / but not gone. the air kept its shape.” At the 2019 Lambda Literary Retreat, Danez Smith reads “undetectable” and “say it with your whole black mouth” from their third poetry collection, Homie (Graywolf Press, 2020), which is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I would LOVE to imagine / being alive in five / years but I have these bones u know? / and just like that I’m writing / a poem / a poem / a poem / again.” In this 2018 video from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Tommy Pico reads an excerpt from Feed (Tin House Books, 2019), the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy of book-length poems.

“Instead of scanning newspaper headlines, / I spend the morning reading names / of flowers and trees in the botanical garden.” Harryette Mullen reads a selection of poems from her collection Urban Tumbleweed: Notes From a Tanka Diary (Graywolf Press, 2013) at Beyond Baroque in this Poetry.LA video.

“Some prisons taste like / salt, copper, sludge / when you bite and crunch down / to the marrow...” In this video, Cortney Lamar Charleston reads Jevon Jackson’s poem “All of Us, In Prison” at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery for a 2019 Brooklyn Book Festival event. Jackson’s poem won PEN America’s First Prize in Poetry in the 2019 Prison Writing Contest.

“The very act of reading is an empathetic act.” In this Aspen Institute video, Adrienne Brodeur talks about her writing process and reads from her debut memoir, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019), which is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I find myself on my feet with fifteen leaves. / Everything carries its own light on the walls.” In this Poetry Society of America video, poet and translator Ricardo Alberto Maldonado reads his poem “Os doy mi corazón / I Give You My Heart” at Governor’s Island in New York. Maldonado’s debut poetry collection, The Life Assignment, is forthcoming in 2020 from Four Way Books.

“Beauty’s just a bite / away from want. / I’ve seen Fox chew / off her own limb / for one more taste / of freedom.” In this 2012 video, Tiffany Midge reads from her collection The Woman Who Married a Bear (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Midge’s debut memoir, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Bison Books, 2019), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Brainwaves video anthology installment, Reginald Dwayne Betts reads “Essay on Reentry” from his third poetry collection, Felon, out in October from Norton. A profile of Betts by Mahogany L. Browne appears in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.