Ten Questions for Steve Wasserman
“Never let the pursuit of perfection be the enemy of the good.” —Steve Wasserman, author of Tell Me Something, Tell Me Anything, Even If It’s a Lie: A Memoir in Essays
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Genre: Creative Nonfiction
The New Nonfiction 2024 Virtual Reading
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In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González introduces the five debut authors featured in “The New Nonfiction 2024” in the September/October issue: David Martinez, author of Bones Worth Breaking (MCD, 2024); Wei Tchou, author of Little Seed (A Strange Object, 2024); Zara Chowdhary, author of The Lucky Ones (Crown, 2024); Lydia Paar, author of The Exit Is the Entrance: Essays on Escape (University of Georgia Press, 2024); and Neesha Powell-Ingabire, author of Come by Here: A Memoir in Essays From Georgia’s Geechee Coast (Hub City Press, 2024).
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Showing Up
In the 2022 film Showing Up directed and cowritten by Kelly Reichardt, a sculptor who works as an administrative assistant at her alma mater art school in Oregon prepares for her art show opening while contending with troubles and complications of varying degrees involving her landlord neighbor, and artist rival, as well as her mother, father, brother, pet cat, and a feral pigeon. When asked about the meaning of the film’s title in an interview published in Slant Magazine, Reichardt prefers to leave it up to interpretation, but mentions it can mean, “showing up to work. Showing up for your friends, your family. It’s all the ways.” Write a personal essay that revisits different examples from your past of “showing up.” How have you shown up for others and how have others shown up for you? In what ways do you show up for your own creative work?
Dionne Brand: Salvage
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“It’s an ongoing interrogation of how we think about narrative. It’s my ongoing interrogation of history.” In this Toronto Public Library event, poet and novelist Dionne Brand speaks about how her new nonfiction book, Salvage: Readings From the Wreck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), wrestles with the ways novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries sustain and reproduce colonialism in a conversation with David Chariandy.
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Hanif Abdurraqib on Intimacy and Connection
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“My writing is intimate and personal, but it’s also attempting to broaden the scope of what intimacy can be.” In this short video, Hanif Abdurraqib, a recipient of the 2024 Windham Campbell Prize in nonfiction, speaks about how writing about the things he loves has guided his work.
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Ten Questions for Aaron Robertson
“Trust yourself enough to know that you don’t need to do backflips for your readers on the page. Just walk straight ahead.” —Aaron Robertson, author of The Black Utopians: Searching for Paradise and the Promised Land in America
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An Evening With the Institute of American Indian Arts
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In this Brooklyn Book Festival Bookend Event at Books Are Magic, the Institute of American Indian Arts presents readings by students, alumni, and faculty of the program, including program director Deborah Jackson Taffa, m.s. RedCherries, Lily Philpott, and Julianne Warren.
Hybrid Writing and the Nonlinear Story
The author of The Body Alone: A Lyrical Articulation of Chronic Pain contemplates how hybrid writing can capture the nonlinear chronology of pain.
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Banned Books Week: Ana DuVernay
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In this virtual event, Banned Books Week honorary chair and award-winning filmmaker Ava DuVernay joins youth honorary chair Julia Garnett, a student activist who fought book bans in her home state of Tennessee, for a conversation about advocacy and fighting censorship.
Physical Pleasures
Vinyl records, audiocassette tapes, videocassettes, CDs, DVDs, hard-copy books, print editions of newspapers and magazines. Whether these tangible forms of media conjure up personal memories or seem like vintage vestiges from a time before you were born, there’s no denying that physical media undergoes continual waves of resurgence among both serious collectors and pop culture trend followers. Write an essay that revolves around your experiences with physical media, including encounters or stories from older family members or friends. Reflect on the differences in using various types of media and ideas about convenience, possession, and preservation.
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