Poets & Writers Theater

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 Books Are Magic event, Ada Calhoun talks about the themes of love and identity in her debut novel, Crush (Viking, 2025), the expectations of marriage as a Gen Xer, and the current state of women’s literature in a conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

In this Georgetown University Qatar event, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Hisham Matar discusses the origins of his latest novel, My Friends (Random House, 2024), which follows three Libyan friends living in London as exiles, in a conversation with Kamila Shamsie.

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 2017 Asian American Writers’ Workshop event, Esther Lin reads her poem “I See Her Best,” which appears in her debut collection, Cold Thief Place (Alice James Books, 2025). Lin’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Left Bank Books event, Rebe Huntman talks about her journey to Cuba following her mother’s passing, which inspired her debut memoir, My Mother in Havana: A Memoir of Magic & Miracle (Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2025). For more from Huntman, read her installation of our Ten Questions series.

For this Conduit Club event hosted by Max Porter in London, Egyptian Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad discusses his debut memoir, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025), and reflects on the “derangement of language” while reporting the War on Terror and the threats faced by journalists in Gaza today.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, book critic and editor Sarah Chihaya talks about her debut memoir, Bibliophobia (Random House, 2025), and the concept of “life ruiner” books that “not only make you want to keep reading, but make you read the world around you differently.”

In this event hosted by the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, Evie Shockley reads a selection of new poems, as well as some from her latest poetry collection, suddenly we (Wesleyan University Press, 2023), and discusses her vision for solidarity in these times in a conversation with Yona Harvey.

In this Politics and Prose Bookstore event, Lauren Francis-Sharma reads from and speaks about her third novel, Casualties of Truth (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2025), in a conversation with Kwame Alexander. The novel is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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.

For this 2024 Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters event, Arati Kumar-Rao talks about how her book, Marginlands: A Journey Into India’s Vanishing Landscapes (Milkweed Editions, 2025), is not about a specific place, but can be somewhere at “the edge of our psyche” in a conversation with Prem Panicker. Rao’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this event hosted by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, poet and translator Sawako Nakayasu reads from her books Some Girls Walk Into the Country They Are From (Wave Books, 2020) and Pink Waves (Omnidawn, 2023), and talks about the creative repetition inherent to translation and her relationship to improvisational forms in music and dance.

Watch the trailer for Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, a film adaptation of the 2013 novel of the same name by Helen Fielding. Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, and Emma Thompson reprise their roles in this fourth installment of the Bridget Jones film series, which follows the titular character navigating romance as a single mother and widow.

In this 2024 Vogue Singapore video, Amanda Lee Koe talks about some of her favorite books, exploring identity through her work, and the themes of sisterhood and autonomy in her second novel, Sister Snake (Ecco, 2024).

“Noses of bats, it’s time / To write the first poem in English / Each line the last, small / rain turning glass.” In this Poetry Book Society video, Ben Lerner reads his poem “The Pistil,” which appears in a special U.K. slipcase edition of his collection The Lights released by Granta Books and the Poetry Books Society.

“Poetry is a musical accident.” Fred Moten reads a selection of poems that appear in his collection The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2016) for this 2024 Silo City Reading series event with musician Brandon Lopez.

“All of the stories, in some way, seem to be about characters moving away from their own points of origin or states of mind.” In this Green Apple Books event, Corinna Vallianatos reads from her story collection Origin Stories (Graywolf Press, 2025) and discusses her fascination with the interiority of characters in a conversation with Colin Winnette. For more from Vallianatos, read her installation of our Ten Questions series.

Lise Goett reads from her third poetry collection, The Radiant (Tupelo Press, 2024), in this Jules’ Poetry Playhouse virtual reading with Mark Wunderlich hosted by Jules Nyquist and John Roche. The Radiant is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.