Poets & Writers Theater

“On the wall of the room there was a mirror / reflecting back a comical skull that was laughing at itself.” In this bilingual poetry reading, “Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence” is read in the original Spanish by Homero Aridjis and the English translation is read by George McWhirter. Aridjis and McWhirter won the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize for the collection of the same name, published by New Directions.

“My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer / I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar / like what I remember of love when I was young.” In this video, Nobel Prize–winning author Louise Glück reads “Crossroads” from her collection A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. Glück died at the age of eighty on October 13, 2023.

“Is it not enough to enter ending, one self in the halving road, and the fires in us blot the coasts that reject us...” In this short film by Lior Shamriz and Chloé Griffin, poet Canisia Lubrin reads from her collection The Dyzgraphxst (McClelland and Stewart, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Griffin Poetry Prize.

“What I love about water is that it spends its whole time falling,” begins Alice Oswald as she introduces her poem “A Short Story of Falling” from her 2017 Griffin Poetry Prize–winning collection, Falling Awake (Jonathan Cape, 2016). “It’s always, apparently, trying to find the lowest place possible and when it finds the lowest place possible, it lies there wide awake.”

“We’d cut school like knives through butter, the three / Of us — Peter, Stephen and I — to play / Just about all the music we knew…” In this video, award–winning poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads “Boys” from his second collection of poems, Heaven (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), which was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2016. 

“I have withheld more than I have written. I have restrained more than I have given. I have left unsaid more than I have said.” In this Granta video, Dionne Brand reads from her collection The Blue Clerk (McClelland & Stewart, 2018), which was shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.

"They called her Sparrow, / so the Lord would be watchful of her..." Norman Dubie, Arizona State University Regents' Professor of English, reads "Sparrow" from his poetry collection The Quotations of Bone (Copper Canyon Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize.