Poets & Writers Theater

“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.

“One ear to the singing black boulder…” In this video, Simone White, recipient of a 2017 Whiting Award for poetry, reads her poem “Some Creek” from her collection Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem Books, 2016).

Fred Moten reads from his poetry collection The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016) at an event cosponsored by San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center and the Green Arcade bookstore. Moten received a Grant to Artist award for 2018 from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

Daniel Borzutzky, who won the 2016 National Book Award in poetry for The Performance of Becoming Human (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016), reads poems from the collection at a reading for the finalists hosted by the New School. Borzutzky’s forthcoming poetry collection, Lake Michigan (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), is a series of nineteen lyric poems.

Adrian Matejka reads “Battle Royale,” “Prize Fighter,” and other poems from his third collection, The Big Smoke (Penguin Books, 2013), which focus on the life of Jack Johnson, the first African American world heavyweight boxing champion. Matejka is the new poet laureate of Indiana, succeeding Shari Wagner.

Robin MacArthur reads a love letter to her home state of Vermont for an episode of State of the Re:Union with music scored by Red Heart the Ticker, MacArthur’s band with her husband Tyler Gibbons. MacArthur’s debut novel, Heart Spring Mountain (Ecco, 2018), is featured in Page One in the January/February 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Poems engage our imagination such that the confusion is not the end point.” Patrick Rosal, who won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his fourth collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), talks about the importance of art and reads several of his poems at the Loft Literary Center.

“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) at the Lab in San Francisco. The two-night program included a reading of the entire book-length poem and was cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.

“I still have all the keys that are of no use to me...” During the middle of his performance for NPR Music’s Tiny Desk Concert, Chance the Rapper reads a poem he was inspired to write for the occasion called “The Other Side.”

Jess Rizkallah reads her poem “tbh i’ve got more things to say about hair than i have hair” at an event for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop in New York City. Rizkallah’s debut collection, the magic my body becomes (University of Arkansas Press, 2017), is the inaugural winner of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize.

In this 2002 video, poet and essayist Mary Ruefle reads a selection of poems and prose pieces for the Lunch Poems reading series at UC Berkeley. Ruefle is the author of On Imagination (Sarabande Books, 2017), a chapbook-length essay exploring the act of writing.

“We were in love with the world / and then we weren’t...” Mathias Svalina reads an excerpt of his poem “From Thank You Terror” at the Silo City Reading Series with music by the band Cages and visual art by Mary Helena Clark. Svalina is the author of The Wine-Dark Sea (Sidebrow Books, 2016) and travels to cities in America by bicycle delivering personalized poems to subscribers of his Dream Delivery Service.

“If you were walking down the street and you came across yourself, what would you do? Stop and talk with yourself, or make out with yourself?” Myriam Gurba, author of the debut memoir, Mean (Coffee House Press, 2017), reads several short prose pieces for the Radar Reading Series at the San Francisco Public Library.

“My parents raised me in a white-sided saltbox house, the sort children draw in crayon. Years before we lived there, it had been cut in half and moved across town. We never learned why.” Jeannie Vanasco, who is featured in “The Unknown Yet Inevitable: Debut Literary Nonfiction of 2017” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, reads from her debut memoir, The Glass Eye (Tin House Books, 2017), at the University of Chicago.

“The keeper put me in the cage      with the monkeys / Because I asked to be / Put in the cage with the monkeys.” Shane McCrae, whose most recent collection, In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017), is longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in poetry, reads his poem “Panopticon” for the River Styx at the Tavern reading series.

Mike Scalise reads from his debut memoir, The Brand New Catastrophe (Sarabande Books, 2017), at the Sunday Salon series in New York City. Scalise is featured in “The Unknown Yet Inevitable: Debut Literary Nonfiction of 2017” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.