Poets & Writers Theater

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast with guest host Chris Gillespie, award-winning author Richard Powers discusses how the issues of environmental exploitation and artificial intelligence inspired his new novel, Playground (Norton, 2024), which is set on the island of Makatea in French Polynesia.

“Reading during lockdown created a really powerful sense of connection with the books.” In this video, Maya Jasanoff, chair of the judges for the 2021 Booker Prize, speaks about the “deliberate quality” of the thirteen longlisted titles, which include Second Place by Rachel Cusk, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, and Bewilderment by Richard Powers.

“We like to think about people and nature as two separate things,” says Richard Powers speaking about his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory (Norton, 2018), in this PBS NewsHour interview. “This book is precisely a book that challenges that notion of human separatism.” For more Powers, read “A Talk in the Woods: Barbara Kingsolver and Richard Powers” from the November/December 2018 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“You don’t need a lot of sensitivity or soul to feel moved by a redwood forest,” says Richard Powers about the origins of his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Overstory (Norton, 2018). In this 92nd Street Y video, Powers joins Barbara Kingsolver, author of the novel Unsheltered (HarperCollins, 2018), for a reading and conversation with Kevin Larimer, editor in chief of Poets & Writers Magazine. The authors were featured in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.