Poets & Writers Theater

“Humor is humanizing and it helps us remain in a space of authenticity and lightness.” In this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Megan Fernandes offers her take on humor and humiliation in poetry and reads a poem from her collection I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023). For more from Fernandes, read her installment of our Craft Capsule series.

Author, lyricist, and former New York City youth poet laureate Ramya Ramana discusses and reads a piece about forgiveness in this video for PBS Newshour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series. “Forgiveness is a doorway. A garden of curses spill from her lips and the city inside me crumbles. I tell myself, all poison has once been poisoned too,” reads Ramana.

“Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight / To see my mama moting around / As sympathetic ash. / Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow / I’ll be soot with her.” In this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Kimiko Hahn reads her poem “A Dusting,” which appears in her collection Foreign Bodies (Norton, 2022), and speaks about the power of poetry to connect us with our loved ones.

“Us brown girls: Brick-built: / Masters of every metaphor and every metamorphosis…” Elizabeth Acevedo, author of The Poet X (HarperTeen, 2018), reads her poem “This Is For Us” for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.

“If in his image made am I, then make me a miracle...” For PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series, Marcus Wicker talks about the influence of hip-hop in his poetry and reads his poem “Conjecture on the Stained Glass Image of White Christ at Ebenezer Baptist Church.”

“They make us more empathetic. They connect us to one another. They make people who are not like us more human.” Lisa Lucas, executive director of the National Book Foundation, shares her love of books and why reading them is so important for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series.

“The things I say in my poems are things that I absolutely have to say.” Jive Poetic reads an original poem and shares his writing process for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series. 

"I want women and girls of African descent and of color to be able to not have to keep searching for stories about themselves." For PBS NewsHour's "Brief but Spectacular" series, playwright and actress Danai Gurira encourages writers to tell their stories, their heritage, directly from the source.

“When a loved one dies, you experience your life in just two days, today, when they are no longer here, and yesterday, the immense, vast yesterday, when they were here,” says Ocean Vuong, author most recently of Time Is a Mother (Penguin Press, 2022), in this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” arts and culture video series.

“To walk down the streets in the Bay Area is really to walk through a dystopia,” says San Francisco poet laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin about the rapid gentrification of his native city as he discusses how poetry serves as a tool for revolution in this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.

In this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Franny Choi reads her poem “Introduction to Quantum Theory” and discusses the importance of asking unanswerable questions and imagining alternate realities. Choi is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody Publishing, 2014) and Soft Science, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books in April.

“I wanted their lives, especially our working-class women, to be out there. People need to be seen. I wanted to show that.” Nicole Dennis-Benn talks about the working-class town she grew up in Jamaica and how her experiences inspired her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), in this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series.

Mahogany L. Browne reads her poem “Black Girl Magic” for PBS NewHour’s “Brief but Spectacular” series. Browne is a poet and author coordinating the Women of the World Poetry Slam at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

"I tell people that spoken word poetry is a type of poetry that doesn't just want to live on paper, that something about it demands to be heard out loud and witnessed in person." For the first installment of PBS NewsHour's "Brief but Spectacular" series, Sarah Kay talks about the importance of making poetry accessible and reads her poem "The Paradox."