Poets & Writers Theater

“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 2023 event cohosted by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) and the Center for Fiction, Elizabeth Nunez speaks with Lauren Francis-Sharma about 5 Minutes With Elizabeth Nunez, an original BCLF short film series celebrating the author and her most revered novels. Nunez died at the age of eighty on November 11, 2024. 

In this Center for Fiction event, Padma Viswanathan, author of Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime (7.13 Books, 2024), and Tracy O’Neill, author of Woman of Interest (HarperOne, 2024), discuss their memoirs and how they broke genre conventions to craft their stories.

In this 2023 event co-presented by Bellevue Literary Review at the Center for Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips reads from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Night Watch (Knopf, 2023), and discusses setting her story during the Civil War in West Virginia in a conversation with editor Danielle Ofri. “History gives us the facts, but literature tells us the story,” says Phillips. “The characters access the meaning of history for us.”

In this installment of the Creative Writing and Critical Thought series, novelist Katie Kitamura, author of Intimacies (Riverhead, 2021), speaks with professor Emily Apter, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (Verso Books, 2013), about the complexity and consequences of translation and the paradoxes and power of language. The series is cosponsored by New Literary History and the Center for Fiction.

“I try my hand at remembering. An origin story is what you make of it. It can be a culture, a treasured heirloom, or a history, reduced.” In this Center for Fiction event, Hafizah Augustus Geter reads from her book The Black Period: On Personhood, Race, and Origin (Random House, 2022) and speaks with New York Times Magazine staff writer and author J Wortham. For more from Geter, read “Twelve Ways to Create Space to Write No Matter Where You Are” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“This whole thing has been a great big fat lesson in just be yourself.” In this Center for Fiction event, Dawn Winter talks about writing her debut novel, Sedating Elaine (Knopf, 2022), with her editor Jenny Jackson, vice president and executive editor at Knopf.

This virtual round-robin reading of new Asian American fiction features Nawaaz Ahmed, author of Radiant Fugitives (Counterpoint, 2021), Jackson Bliss, author Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Melissa Chadburn, author of A Tiny Upward Shove (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), Tracey Lien, author of All That’s Left Unsaid (HarperCollins, 2022), and Soon Wiley, author of When We Fell Apart (Dutton Books, 2022). The event was hosted by the Center for Fiction and presented in partnership with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

“It is a new kind of survivor narrative, one that I wish that I had when I was growing up,” says Chantal V. Johnson about her debut novel, Post-traumatic (Little, Brown, 2022), in this reading and conversation with Torrey Peters at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn.

Madhu Kaza and Jeremy Tiang speak about their “slow, long fall into translation” and how writing and literary translation are forms of encounter in this conversation for the Literary Translation Clinic series, presented by the Center for Fiction and Cedilla & Co.

“To what and whom am I responsible when translating this text?” In this Center for Fiction virtual event, Brazilian literature translator Katrina Dodson offers ways to consider a practical philosophy of translation and speaks with translator Heather Cleary about questions and ways to approach the work. The Literary Translation Clinic is a monthly series of open sessions with a focus on literary translation as a profession hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co.

“To me, [revision] is about the majesty of failure,” says Kiese Laymon in this conversation about the newly revised edition of his debut novel, Long Division (Scribner, 2021), with Peter Ho Davies for the Center for Fiction.

“I was really interested in the idea of the body as a place of imprisonment but also, the body as a place of liberation.” Olivia Laing speaks about her latest book, Everybody: A Book About Freedom (Norton, 2021), and how she addresses the themes of illness, sexual violence, and incarceration with imagery and by including historical figures of the past century in this conversation with author Maggie Nelson for the Center for Fiction.

In this Center for Fiction virtual event, Sora Kim-Russell, editor and Korean literature translator, joins Alex Zucker for a conversation about revision, editing, and co-translation. The center’s Literary Translation Clinics are a monthly series of knowledge-sharing open sessions with a focus on literary translation as a profession hosted by members of the translator collective, Cedilla & Co.

In this Center for Fiction video, Brian Gresko, host of Lit Hub’s Antibody: A Quarantine Reading Series, moderates this all-star fundraiser reading for the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc) featuring Jericho Brown, Carmen Maria Machado, Celese Ng, and Karen Russell.

“Jeremy could not move, speak. Happenings were happening too fast, and his mind switched from simple sentences.” In this virtual Center for Fiction event, Tracy O’Neill reads from her new novel, Quotients (Soho Press, 2020), and speaks with Gina Apostol about the book’s themes and how they relate to our times.

To celebrate the launch of The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer (Avid Reader Press, 2020), authors Mary Gannon and Kevin Larimer speak with novelist Nicole Dennis-Benn, literary agent Annie Hwang, publicist Michael Taeckens, and publisher and editor Jamia Wilson about the need for new voices in literature and the ins and outs of the literary world in this online event hosted by the Center for Fiction.

In a craft talk at the Center for Fiction in New York City, A. M. Homes discusses the value of having a writing routine, how she approaches novels and short stories differently, and her fascination with Barbie. Homes is the author of Days of Awe (Viking, 2018), which is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“One person’s didacticism is another person’s revelation.” At the Center for Fiction, Parul Sehgal moderates a conversation with authors Viet Thanh Nguyen and Chinelo Okparanta as part of the 2017 PEN World Voices Festival.

“There was something blurry about it, how she tipped moment by moment between woman and child.” In this 2012 video, Leopoldine Core reads from her short story “Teenage Hate” at the Center for Fiction. Her debut short story collection, When Watched (Penguin Books, 2016), is a finalist for the 29th annual Lambda Literary Awards.