Poets & Writers Theater

In this PBS NewsHour video, Danzy Senna discusses her latest novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the ways in which she uses comedy and satire to shed light on the reality of race in America in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.

In this PBS NewHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with best-selling author Rebecca Yarros and romance bookstore owner Leah Koch about the rise of the romantasy genre, which mixes elements of romance and fantasy stories.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Kaveh Akbar speaks about writing his first novel, Martyr! (Knopf, 2024), and how pop culture as well as Persian and contemporary literature mix into the narrative in an interview with Jeffrey Brown. The novel is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Humor is humanizing and it helps us remain in a space of authenticity and lightness.” In this video for PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Megan Fernandes offers her take on humor and humiliation in poetry and reads a poem from her collection I Do Everything I’m Told (Tin House, 2023). For more from Fernandes, read her installment of our Craft Capsule series.

“I had to pretend I was someone else writing about me to gain some distance from myself because part of the subject of this book is how difficult it is for us to know ourselves.” Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his family’s struggles and traumas, and the challenges of writing his new book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial (Grove Atlantic, 2023), in this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown. Nguyen’s memoir is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I saw a writer who was quite new to the craft, but excited by it, and sort of experimental, and there’s a freshness to these stories that surprised me.” In this 2003 PBS NewsHour interview, renowned author and critic John Updike speaks about looking back on his early career and the stories included in his collection The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (Knopf, 2003) with correspondent Jeffrey Brown.

Author, lyricist, and former New York City youth poet laureate Ramya Ramana discusses and reads a piece about forgiveness in this video for PBS Newshour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series. “Forgiveness is a doorway. A garden of curses spill from her lips and the city inside me crumbles. I tell myself, all poison has once been poisoned too,” reads Ramana.

“I don’t mind failing. Writers, most of what we do fails. And that’s the lesson that writing teaches you.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, author and musician James McBride discusses his musical, various projects, and his new novel, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Riverhead Books, 2023), an imagined story of his grandmother set in the 1930s.

“What I’m hoping is, ten years from now, a young Puerto Rican poet on the island or somewhere else knows that this is a possibility, that living a life with and through poetry is an honorable way of engaging with the world.” Ricardo Alberto Maldonado, the first Latino executive director and president of the Academy of American Poets, reflects on why he began writing and the importance of expanding the linguistic diversity of poetry in this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown.

“Speak to me; speak into me, / the wind said, when I woke this morning, Let’s see what happens.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Carl Phillips reads a selection of poems from his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022), and speaks to Jeffrey Brown about the intimacy and power of poetry. Phillips is the recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize.

In this PBS NewsHour report, Jeffrey Brown speaks to the teams behind memoir publishing platforms LifeTime Memoirs and StoryTerrace, which help anyone looking to publish a memoir about their lives or those of loved ones.

In this PBS NewsHour video, National Book Award-winning poet and professor Nikky Finney discusses the work of social justice activism and preservation in her community of Columbia, South Carolina, which includes opening a cultural arts center honoring her father’s legacy as the first Black chief justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court since the Reconstruction era.

“Nowadays, I lie down in the sunlight / To see my mama moting around / As sympathetic ash. / Yes, one morning whether misty or yellow / I’ll be soot with her.” In this installment of PBS NewsHour’s “Brief But Spectacular” series, Kimiko Hahn reads her poem “A Dusting,” which appears in her collection Foreign Bodies (Norton, 2022), and speaks about the power of poetry to connect us with our loved ones.

“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown sits down with literary critics Gilbert Cruz of the New York Times and Maureen Corrigan of NPR to discuss their favorite fiction and nonfiction books of 2022, which include Trust by Hernan Diaz, Foster by Claire Keegan, If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, Stay True by Hua Hsu, and Also a Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me by Ada Calhoun.

“They are not just a challenge in an individual school system or library, but legislation being introduced in statehouses that would affect the availability of books all over the state in every school and library.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel about the intensifying efforts across the United States to ban specific books related to LGBTQIA+ issues, race, and freedom of speech.

“Now the oil-fired heating boiler comes to life / Abruptly, drowsily, like the timed collapse / Of a sawn-down tree, I imagine them.” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, the late Seamus Heaney reads from and speaks about his final collection, Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). The Nobel Prize–winning poet died at the age of seventy-four on August 30, 2013.

“Poetry is a place where both grief and grace can live, where rage can be explored and examined, not simply exploited.” In this 2018 PBS NewsHour video, Ada Limón shares her opinion on why she sees more and more people turning to poetry in the search for “radical hope” in the digital age. Limón was named the twenty-fourth poet laureate of the United States today.

“We in the fields, the watchers from the burnt slope, / Facing the west, facing the bright sky, hopelessly longing / to know the red beauty…” In this 2011 PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Yang reads William Everson’s poem “We in the Fields” along with other poems published in Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems From New Directions, an anthology edited by the poet celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of New Directions. Yang’s new poetry collection, Line and Light (Graywolf Press, 2022), is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I still believe that we listen more closely to a whisper than to a shout.” In this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove speaks about history, rage, the power of poetry, and her latest collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021).