Poets & Writers Theater

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.

For this LIVE From NYPL event, Jamaica Kincaid and illustrator Kara Walker discuss their collaborative book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and the racial, colonial history of gardening in a conversation with Hilton Als.

“You really have to write as though this will be it, that there won’t be another chance with this, as though paper is scarce.” For this LIVE From NYPL event, award-winning author Colm Tóibín reads from his newest novel, Long Island (Scribner, 2024), and discusses the challenges of writing about extended families in a conversation with Caoilinn Hughes.

In this video, Marilynne Robinson talks about her new book, Reading Genesis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), a new interpretation and analysis of the book of Genesis, in a conversation with author Ayana Mathis for the LIVE From NYPL series.

“I was really curious about how this fear of impending loss affects people.” In this 2023 LIVE From NYPL event, C Pam Zhang reads from her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey (Riverhead Books, 2023), and discusses grief, natural disasters, and apocalypse in a conversation with author and television host Padma Lakshmi.

For this LIVE From NYPL event, award-winning author Vauhini Vara reads from her short story collection, This Is Salvaged (Norton, 2023), and discusses exploring the intimacy of relationships between children, parents, friends, siblings, neighbors, and lovers in a conversation with novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison.

“There’s something about straight lines on a page and the ability to use punctuation in an expected and familiar way that changes the way you do honesty on the page.” Poet and essayist Camonghne Felix speaks about mental health and heartbreak, and the vulnerability she found in writing her debut memoir, Dyscalculia: A Love Story of Epic Miscalculation (One World, 2023), for this Live From NYPL event with multi-disciplinary artist Bunny Michael.

“Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, / Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, / They Lion grow.” Watch this 2013 LIVE From NYPL recording of an event featuring the late Philip Levine reading his rousing poem “They Feed They Lion” in tribute to Federico García Lorca.

"Within that economy of words, you choose words that have certain angles, that have certain edges, that effect people in a certain way." Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose memoir Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015) is a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, speaks with Khalil Gibran Muhammad about what he learned as a poet and how those skills continue to influence his writing.

“Everything that I was able to write and put into this book was very liberating.” For this LIVE From NYPL event, Glory Edim talks about her decision to write Gather Me: A Memoir in Praise of the Books That Saved Me (Ballantine Books, 2024) and the underrepresentation of Black women in the memoir genre, as well as the complexities of memory in a conversation with Aminatou Sow.