Poets & Writers Theater

In this interview for The Thread documentary series, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his childhood experiences as a refugee and overcoming trauma, his parents’ complicated reaction to his writing career, and how storytelling and writing changed his life from an early age. Read about Nguyen’s essay collection To Save and Destroy: Writing as an Other (Belknap Press, 2025) in our Best Books series.

In this interactive Narrative 4 writing workshop, Deborah Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024), leads participants through practical exercises on self-discovery, shares exemplary work, and discusses how a memoir can answer the question: “Who am I?” Taffa says: “We’re telling people what we’ve learned in the time that has transpired between when we were that character on the page and who we are now.”

In this Penguin Random House video, Lev Grossman, author of The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur (Viking, 2024), and Dan Jones, author of Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King (Viking, 2024), share insights into their writing and research processes.

In this Off Book video for the Richland Library in South Carolina, R. F. Kuang speaks about her research process, the importance of reading literature with diverse characters, and the first time she accidentally got caught for damaging a library book. “I freaked out. I thought I was going to be banned from libraries forever,” Kuang says.

In this Green Apple Books event, Atlantic senior editor Jeremy Gordon reads from his debut novel, See Friendship (Harper Perennial, 2025), and talks about the decision to write a book of fiction amidst a career in journalism in a conversation with New Yorker staff writer and author Jay Caspian Kang.

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie discusses the process of writing Dream Count (Knopf, 2025), her first novel in ten years, and how turning to poetry and the memories of her mother inspired her. “I have always felt that poetry nurtures your language and I read it to remind me of the magic of language,” she says.

In this Louisiana Channel interview, Mohsin Hamid talks about how his writing process has changed over the years with each novel he’s written, the importance of form and structure to a reader’s understanding of narrative, and the responsibility of writers to establish and shape reality. “We talk about reality as though it is real, but we are aware that we are creating it,” he says.

In this Nobel Foundation interview, Han Kang, winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in literature, talks about her writing process and how she draws inspiration from being present in everyday life. “Reading books, and especially reading literature, enables you to enter the depths of another human,” she says. “It’s a very direct way to enter the other’s heart or soul.”

In this 2024 Writers on Writing event hosted by the Newberry Library and StoryStudio Chicago, Hanif Abdurraqib and Eve L. Ewing discuss their literary careers, the craft of writing, and how they tackle the complexities of art and activism.

In this 2023 Louisiana Channel interview, acclaimed British author Tessa Hadley offers her “wicked” advice to writers and talks about how she learned to “write truthfully” in the process of writing her first novel, Accidents in the Home (Henry Holt, 2002).

In this conversation hosted by the Korea Society, authors Gina Chung and Yun Ko-eun discuss the many possibilities of the short story form, the defining characteristics of their respective authorial voices, and the differences between writing and reading stories in English and Korean.

In this episode of Tightwires with host Hiba Tahir, poet Patrycja Humienik talks about navigating grad school and writing, identity, and her debut collection, We Contain Landscapes (Tin House, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Author and journalist Jessie Tu talks about her experience and expectations for writing her second novel, The Honeyeaters (Allen & Unwin, 2024), and the “colonial and imperialist legacies” around language in a conversation with Annabel Crabb at this Roaring Stories Bookshop event in Sydney, Australia.

In this Waterstones interview, Asako Yuzuki discusses the process of writing and publishing her novel Butter (4th Estate, 2024), translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton, and shares her thoughts on the book’s themes of food and desire. Yuzuki’s novel was selected as the Waterstones Book of the Year for 2024.

“When I began translating, I found myself crying again. I knew then that I had finally found my way back to the womb.” In this event for the Center for the Art of Translation’s annual Day of Translation, cohosted at the Center for Fiction, Don Mee Choi delivers her keynote speech about writing from the “translation womb,” her attempts to comprehend and translate the Korean War, and her definition of what it means to write in the language of translation.

In this 2023 event cohosted by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) and the Center for Fiction, Elizabeth Nunez speaks with Lauren Francis-Sharma about 5 Minutes With Elizabeth Nunez, an original BCLF short film series celebrating the author and her most revered novels. Nunez died at the age of eighty on November 11, 2024. 

“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.” Anne Carson talks about the artists and philosophers who inspire her to create and think, and how boxing has helped her in the wake of her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in a conversation with Norwegian author Linn Ullmann for this Louisiana Channel event.

In this Poetry.LA video, Lynne Thompson, author most recently of Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024), and Séamus Isaac Fey, author of the debut collection, decompose (Not a Cult, 2024), read from their work and speak about playing with poetic form and organizing poetry manuscripts.

In this virtual event, Sofia Samatar reads from and discusses her book Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life (Soft Skull Press, 2024), and the chaos and strangeness of writing with Zach Powers, novelist and artistic director at the Writer’s Center. 

In this Poets & Writers event, novelist Garth Greenwell reads from his new book of fiction, Small Rain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and joins frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a discussion on the book’s themes of mortality and meaning-making, and what it takes to live a full life oriented toward art. A profile of Greenwell by Gresko appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.