Poets & Writers Theater

In this 2007 Talks at Google event, Aimee Bender, the author of the short story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Doubleday, 1998) and Willful Creatures (Doubleday, 2005), reads from her work and discusses her writing regimen, favorite books, and her love of short stories.

“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

“I consider myself essentially a storyteller who’s chosen the genre of poetry.” Lynne Thompson, author of Start With a Small Guitar (What Books Press, 2013) and Beg No Pardon (Perugia Press, 2007), speaks about family stories and how she came to poetry after a career in law with Mariano Zaro for the Poetry.LA interview series. Thompson is the 2021 poet laureate of Los Angeles.

The Dig is a Netflix film adaptation starring Ralph Fiennes and Carey Mulligan based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, which reimagines the events of the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, England.

“These are people who are basically pulled all over the world, and they have various antecedents that are a bit everywhere.” In an interview with Parul Sehgal at the 92nd Street Y, André Aciman, whose latest novel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), is a sequel to his 2007 novel, Call Me By Your Name, talks about how his cultural background has influenced the way his characters communicate and interact with one another.

In this Waterstones video, André Aciman introduces his latest novel, Find Me (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), the sequel to his 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, and shares three books from the shelves of the bookstore that have influenced his writing.

“Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle / meaning sun. / 6 green, vertical lines, with color all from the top / meaning flowers.” In this animated short film for the TED-Ed “There’s a Poem for That” series, Aracelis Girmay reads her poem “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card” from her collection Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007).

Dublin Murders is a BBC television adaptation of the first two novels in Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad mystery series, In the Woods (Viking, 2007) and The Likeness (Viking, 2008), which follows two detectives investigating homicides in contemporary Dublin. Adapted by Sarah Phelps, the eight-episode crime show stars Moe Dunford, Sarah Greene, Killian Scott, and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor.

On Chesil Beach is a film adaptation of a 2007 novel by Ian McEwan, who also wrote the screenplay. Directed by Dominic Cooke, the movie explores the relationship of a young couple, played by Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle, on the day they are wed.

“I write with prose, but I write as a failed poet.” André Aciman speaks about the origins of his writing, working with editors, and teaching Proust with Dennis Glauque and Bing Yang for the Classic Talk series. Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) has been adapted into a feature film directed by Luca Guadagnino and starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet.

Ed Lin’s hardboiled thriller trilogy, This Is a Bust (Kaya Press, 2007), Snakes Can’t Run (Minotaur Books, 2010), and One Red Bastard (Minotaur Books, 2012), is being reissued by Witness Impulse. The mystery novels take place in the 1970s, and feature Chinese American detective and Vietnam veteran Robert Chow solving crimes in New York City’s Chinatown. 

Thirteen Reasons Why (Razorbill, 2007), Jay Asher’s best-selling young adult novel about a teenager piecing together the story and circumstances behind the suicide of a classmate, has been adapted into a television series.

Diane Ackerman’s The Zookeeper’s Wife: A War Story (Norton, 2007) recounts the true story of how keepers of the Warsaw Zoo saved hundreds of lives during the German invasion in Poland. The book has been adapted into a feature film directed by Niki Caro, and stars Jessica Chastain and Johan Heldenbergh.

“What’s usually called inspiration…where that comes from, for me, is literature. The immersion in literature.” In this video, William Giraldi, author of the new memoir, The Hero's Body (Liveright, 2016), speaks about his relationship to the classics he's read and how this informs his writing. Giraldi talks about the craft of memoir with Sven Birkerts, author of The Art of Time in Memoir: Then, Again (Graywolf, 2007), in "Pay Attention" in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.

The poet, who passed away on January 29, is seen here reading "It Was All Right, or What I Learned from Kenneth Koch" at an event sponsored by Rain Taxi Review of Books in Minneapolis in 2007.

In this clip the actor, filmmaker, and author of No One Belongs Here More Than You (Scribner, 2007) and It Chooses You (McSweeney's, 2011), among other books, offers a helpful strategy for avoiding procrastination.

Michael McClure, whose poetry Allen Ginsberg described as "a blob of protoplasmic energy," performs one of his poems as well as one by Emily Dickinson in this clip from 2007. McClure's Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems, which includes an introduction by the late Leslie Scalapino, is out this month from the University of California Press.

Ander Monson's video interpretation of one of the essays in his 2007 collection, Neck Deep and Other Predicaments (Graywolf Press). "Best watched in the dark, lights off, January in Michigan, real cold," Monson writes on his YouTube channel.