Poets & Writers Theater

In this Grolier Poetry Book Shop reading, Darius Atefat-Peckham reads from his debut collection, Book of Kin (Autumn House Press, 2024), and Raisa Tolchinsky reads from her debut collection, Glass Jaw (Persea Books, 2024). Atefat-Peckham is featured in “The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Brooklyn Book Festival virtual event, authors Hisham Matar, Rania Mamoun, and Omar Khalifah talk about the purpose and urgency of writing about history during times of crisis in a conversation moderated by writer and translator Yasmin Seale. Khalifah’s novel, Sand-Catcher (Coffee House Press, 2024), is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this University of Arizona Poetry Center event, Saretta Morgan discusses the importance of writing amidst global crises and reads from her debut collection, Alt-Nature (Coffee House Press, 2024), after an introduction by Marianna Ariel ColesCurtis. Morgan is featured in “The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Live From NYPL event at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library, Emily Lee Luan reads from her collection, 回 / Return (Nightboat Books, 2023), and Jimin Seo reads from his debut collection, OSSIA (Changes Press, 2024), followed by a discussion on the poetics of grief and memory. Seo is featured in “The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Kenzie Allen reads from her debut poetry collection, Cloud Missives (Tin House, 2024), and talks about the themes in the book for this Left Bank Books reading with poets Tola Sylvan and Marc-Anthony Valle. Allen is featured in “The Luminous Life: Our Twentieth Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Nikki Giovanni reads a selection of her poems and speaks about her life and career for the Wright Conversations series hosted by the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and PBS Books. Giovanni died at the age of eighty-one on December 9, 2024.

In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers features editor India Lena González introduces the 2024 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors: Suzette Mullen, author of The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024); Dorsía Smith Silva, author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press, 2024); Uchenna Awoke, author of The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult, 2024); Parul Kapur, author of Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024); and Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024).

In this Tucson Humanities Festival event held at the University of Arizona Poetry Center, scholar Jacqueline Barrios introduces Brandon Som, who reads from his Pulitzer Prize–winning poetry collection, Tripas (Georgia Review Books, 2023).

Watch the trailer for After: Poetry Destroys Silence, a cinematic performance film directed by Richard Kroehling and starring Cornelius Eady, Edward Hirsh, Melissa Leo, Géza Röhrig, and a cast of celebrated award-winning poets who respond to the Holocaust and talk about the importance and necessity for poetry in a world that still grapples with genocide.

In this 2023 Indigenous Nations Poets virtual event, fellows Kenzie Allen, Kalehua Kim, Halee Kirkwood, Mary Leauna Christensen, Erin Marie Lynch, m.s. RedCherries, and Annie Wenstrup read for their work.

“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 video, Lena Khalaf Tuffaha accepts the 2024 National Book Award in poetry for her collection Something About Living (University of Akron Press, 2024). “I’m proud to stand here today, and to accept this honor as a Palestinian American on behalf of all the deeply beautiful Palestinians that this world has lost and in honor of those miraculous ones who endure.”

In this event from the 2024 Atlantic Festival on the topic of books bans in the United States and the world, Atlantic staff writer Gal Beckerman moderates a discussion with Cindy Hohl, president of the American Library Association, and Victoria Scott-Miller, owner of Liberation Station Bookstore, as well as a discussion with Iranian American journalist and activist Masih Alinejad and author and activist Rania Mamoun.

In this event presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Kundiman, writers Hannah Bae, Jen Lue, Gina Chung, and Rajat Singh read from their work and participate in a conversation moderated by Thuy Phan, regional cochair of Kundiman Northeast.

In this 2023 event hosted by the Barnard Creative Writing program, Desiree Bailey, author of What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, author most recently of A Treatise on Stars (New Directions, 2020), read from their work on the theme of nature and spirituality and join Ken Chen in a conversation about their respective poetic practices.

In this Books Are Magic event, Albert Abonado reads from his second poetry collection, Field Guide for Accidents (Beacon Press, 2024), and discusses Asian American families and the model minority myth in a conversation with Jason Koo. Field Guide for Accidents is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this recent installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series, Sherwin Bitsui reads selected poems from his collections Flood Song (Copper Canyon Press, 2009) and Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018).

In this Poetry.LA interview, host Luivette Resto speaks with poet Amy Shimshon-Santo about her new collection, Random Experiments in Bioluminescence (FlowerSong Press, 2024), and the themes within the book which deal with how to live in a time of great suffering and disorientation, and “somehow have the experience of finding your own light.”

In this Books Are Magic event, Miller Oberman reads from his latest poetry collection, Impossible Things (Duke University Press, 2024), and is joined by poets Jason B. Crawford, Joan Kwon Glass, and I. S. Jones for a reading and Q&A. For more from Oberman, read his installation of our Ten Questions series.

“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.