Poets & Writers Theater

“I am afraid / that the mouths I feed will turn against me / will refuse to swallow in the silence / I am warning them to avoid.” Audre Lorde reads her poem “Blackstudies,” which appears in her book New York Head Shop and Museum (Broadside Press, 1974), in this video from the Poetry Center’s American Poetry Archives collection at San Francisco State University.

In this 2021 reading at the Poetry Center in San Francisco State University, Angel Dominguez reads two letters to Diego de Landa from their first poetry collection, Desgraciado (the collected letters) (Nightboat Books, 2022), which is featured in Page One in the March/April 2022 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I would LOVE to imagine / being alive in five / years but I have these bones u know? / and just like that I’m writing / a poem / a poem / a poem / again.” In this 2018 video from the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Tommy Pico reads an excerpt from Feed (Tin House Books, 2019), the fourth book in the Teebs tetralogy of book-length poems.

“Forgive / yourself, they say, but / after you forgive / what you have lived, / what is left?” At San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center, Forrest Gander reads “Stepping Out of the Light” from his collection Be With (New Directions, 2018), for which he won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize award in poetry.

“Poses no significant litter problem. / Ranks as ‘not particularly outstanding,’ according to the Forest Service.” At the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University, Forrest Gander reads from the opening of Casting Deep Shade (Copper Canyon Press, 2019), C. D. Wright’s posthumously published collection. The multigenre, three-panel, hardcover book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, John Keene reads from his short story “Cold” from his collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2015) at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University. Keene is a 2018 recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize.

Fred Moten reads from his poetry collection The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions, 2016) at an event cosponsored by San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center and the Green Arcade bookstore. Moten received a Grant to Artist award for 2018 from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

“‘In a dark cave, I saw’ ‘an apparition:’ ‘almost real, almost there—’...” In this video, Alice Notley reads from her feminist epic The Descent of Alette (Penguin Books, 1996) at the Lab in San Francisco. The two-night program included a reading of the entire book-length poem and was cosponsored by the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.

"People always say, is it autobiographical? And the thing is, the whole thing is autobiography, because you're replicating your inner life." At an event at San Francisco State University's Poetry Center, Sarah Schulman shares an anecdote about working for an all-women's trucking company in the seventies, a point of inspiration for her latest novel, The Cosmopolitans (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2016).