Poets & Writers Theater

“If we are always the threat / To whom or where do we turn for protection?” In this Litquake festival video from 2020, Pamela Sneed reads from her book Funeral Diva (City Light Books, 2020), for which she won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award’s lesbian poetry prize, and speaks with Tommy Pico about breaking apart genres and writing about pandemics.

“It was in the autumn—it felt like the perfect time to do this ritual, when everything’s changing to go to sleep for the winter....” In this interview at the 2018 Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark, CAConrad talks about how performing rituals after their boyfriend’s death gave rise to the poetry in their collection While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry.

“Most of my works, I’m delving deeper into the stories of women because we’re so used to being silenced.” Nicole Dennis-Benn, who won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction for her debut novel, Here Comes the Sun (Liveright, 2016), speaks about exploring dynamics of race, money, class, culture, and gender in Jamaica in her writing.

“I was thinking what would happen if someone was as much of a recluse as I am, maybe more, but is not a writer?” Rabih Alameddine talks about writer and artist Bruno Schultz, the idea of a necessary person, and the inspiration behind his novel An Unnecessary Woman (Grove Press, 2013). Alameddine won the 2017 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction for his novel The Angel of History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016).

“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.

“Frank grew crows for hands / it was a difficult childhood...” In this video, CAConrad reads a series of poems from The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010) for a 2013 reading at the Machine Project in Los Angeles. CAConrad’s poetry collection While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017) won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry.