Poets & Writers Theater

“You can slash a book. There are different ways to measure depth, but not many readers measure a book’s depth with a knife, making a cut from the first page all the way down to the last.” Yiyun Li reads from her novel The Book of Goose (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022) in this Politics and Prose event with Maud Casey in Washington, D.C.

Putsata Reang speaks about her life as the daughter of a Cambodian refugee family and her debut memoir, Ma and Me (MCD Books, 2022), in this interview with NAACP president and Spokesman-Review columnist Kiantha Duncan for the Northwest Passages Book Club in Spokane. Reang is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Elamin Abdelmahmoud discusses his debut memoir, Son of Elsewhere: A Memoir in Pieces (Ballantine Books, 2022), with writer Sarah Hagi in this video for Toronto Reference Library’s Appel Salon series. Abdelmahmoud is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The first time I tried reading any of these poems aloud, I discovered that they had effectively broken my writing practice.” In this virtual lecture for the 2021 Creative Capital Artist Retreat, Simone White talks about the writing process for her latest poetry collection, or, on being the other woman (Duke University Press, 2022), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It would be a beautiful world if young people were encouraged to chart their histories in really deep and meaningful ways.” Prince Shakur talks about his debut memoir, When They Tell You to Be Good (Tin House, 2022), and the significance of writing in this genre for the Black Writer’s Studio podcast with host Khadijah Ali-Coleman, executive director of the Hurston/Wright Foundation. Shakur is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The experience of being disabled in the world is an experience of feeling always kept on the sidelines of real life.” In this short video, Chloé Cooper Jones, a 2020 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant recipient, speaks about her debut memoir, Easy Beauty (Avid Reader Press, 2022). Cooper Jones is featured in “The New Nonfiction 2022” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Of the foreground, we will not speak. Look past the / blotted figures.” Jenny Xie reads “Red Puncta,” which appears in her second poetry collection, The Rupture Tense (Graywolf Press, 2022), in this video for the Nation’s Spring Poetry Reading, which also featured Golden and Donika Kelly, hosted by Kaveh Akbar. The Rupture Tense is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“This is what was bequeathed us: / This earth the beloved left / And, leaving, / Left to us.” In this virtual reading for the Dire Literary Series hosted by Timothy Gager, poet Gregory Orr reads from his latest collection, Selected Books of the Beloved (Copper Canyon Press, 2022), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Simon & Schuster Books video, Sidik Fofana reads from his debut story collection, Stories From the Tenants Downstairs (Scribner, 2022), which is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“As someone who is now a part of the next generation of Black queer writing, I pull a lot from what James Baldwin stood for,” says George M. Johnson, author of All Boys Aren’t Blue: A Memoir-Manifesto (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), in this video for GLAAD’s NEON series. Johnson, whose book has been banned from school libraries, is the 2022 honorary chair of Banned Books Week.