Poets & Writers Theater

“Daily, I remind myself: the future is not dependent / on your inability to describe your undoing.” Lara Mimosa Montes reads from her latest poetry collection, Thresholes (Coffee House Press, 2020), and answers questions about writing as part of the Loft Literary Center’s annual Wordplay festival, held virtually this year.

“Years ago, right after I moved into my last apartment in Chicago, the one I expected to die alone in to the soundtrack of an NCIS marathon, I thought I had a ghost.” In this Loft Literary Center video, one of their recent online events from their annual Wordplay festival (held entirely virtually this year through May 9) features a reading by Samantha Irby from her fourth essay collection, Wow, No Thank You (Vintage, 2020), backdropped with video footage of rabbits.

“Beauty’s just a bite / away from want. / I’ve seen Fox chew / off her own limb / for one more taste / of freedom.” In this 2012 video, Tiffany Midge reads from her collection The Woman Who Married a Bear (University of New Mexico Press, 2016) at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. Midge’s debut memoir, Bury My Heart at Chuck E. Cheese’s (Bison Books, 2019), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Poems engage our imagination such that the confusion is not the end point.” Patrick Rosal, who won the Academy of American Poets’ 2017 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his fourth collection, Brooklyn Antediluvian (Persea Books, 2016), talks about the importance of art and reads several of his poems at the Loft Literary Center.

Lesley Nneka Arimah reads “War Stories” from her debut story collection, What It Means When a Man Falls From the Sky (Riverhead, 2017), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I’m aware of the rules, but part of what makes you an artist is how you deviate from those rules, and that’s all about play.” Bao Phi, whose poetry collection Thousand Star Hotel (Coffee House Press, 2017) is in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, talks about the importance of reading, writing, drawing, and playing to engage the imagination.

“Halfway between you and me is a long ways away, but there is a small town where we will not be seen, where we will hide in plain sight, where we will be strangers until we are not.” In this video from 2015, the Loft Literary Center and BUST Magazine presents Roxane Gay, who reads tweets and from her short story, “Do You Have a Place for Me?”