Poets & Writers Theater

“How do you take the nightmares and dreams and put them onto paper?” asks Julie Taymor in this trailer for the second season of Poetry in America featuring interviews with Marilyn Chin, Katie Couric, Elena Kagan, John Kerry, Maxine Hong Kingston, and others. Created and directed by Harvard professor Elisa New, each episode explores and interprets a single American poem.

“Being born a writer, I had to tell, I had to blab these stories out.” Maxine Hong Kingston speaks about her award-winning book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, (Knopf, 1976) and the power of imagination with Jeffrey Brown and Celeste Ng, who chose the book for PBS NewsHour’s Now Read This book club.

“The reason why we have narrative scarcity is because we have economic scarcity, and people don’t have equal access to modes of storytelling.” Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about the value and pressure placed on stories told by writers from minority cultures at an event with Maxine Hong Kingston. Nguyen’s first story collection, The Refugees (Grove Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Last week Maxine Hong Kingston, whose memoir, I Love a Broad Margin to My Life, was published in January by Knopf, and Leslie Marmon Silko, author of the memoir The Turquoise Ledge (Viking, 2010), read together at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York City.