Poets & Writers Theater

“If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” In this TED Talk, Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books, 1995), shares twelve truths she’s learned from life and her writing.

“Human creativity is nature manifest in us.” In this TED Talk video, actor and author Ethan Hawke speaks about the importance of creativity, the necessity of taking leaps to express yourself, and how we turn to poetry for sustenance.

In this TED Talk, Casey Gerald speaks about a poignant day in his childhood and how those events altered his thoughts on belief, faith, and doubt. Gerald is the author of the debut memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here (Riverhead Books, 2018), and is featured in “The Genre of Resistance” in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws, gut-wrench guillotine your tongue.” In this TED Talk, Clint Smith speaks about the danger of silence and finding the courage to speak up against ignorance and injustice. “The Poet at Work,” Smith’s profile of poet Kevin Young, is in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration.” In this TED Talk, literary critic Parul Sehgal discusses how jealousy has influenced fiction throughout history. Sehgal is featured in Reviewers & Critics in the May/June 2017 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Nigerian author Chris Abani gives a TED Talk on the concept of ubuntu, sharing stories of remarkable people, and concludes with Lucille Clifton's poem "Libation." Abani has taught at the VONA/Voices workshop, which was featured in "The Moment of Truth: Eleven Authors Share Stories of Life-Changing Retreats" in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Anne Curzan, an English professor at the University of Michigan, continues to be fascinated with language. In this TED talk, she offers insight on how words make it into dictionaries and who decides whether "YOLO" is, in fact, a word.

In this TED talk, former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins shares poems from the perspective of two very different dogs and reveals what they really feel about their masters.

"We're all going to die—and poems can help us live with that." In this TED talk literary critic Stephen Burt uses his favorite poems to help convey how poetry (simply a set of techniques used to make patterns that put emotions into words) can help us further understand and cope with what it means to be a person.

In this video from a TED conference in March, Elizabeth Gilbert reflects on why success can be as disorienting as failure and offers a simple—though hard—way to carry on, regardless of outcomes.

In telling the story of the whaleship Essex, which was attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in the southern Pacific Ocean in 1820, novelist Karen Thompson Walker (The Age of Miracles) shows how fear propels imagination, as it forces us to imagine the possible futures and how to cope with them.

In this TED Talk video, poet Lemon Andersen performs “Please Don’t Take My Air Jordans,” written by Reg E. Gaines, and then discusses the influences and experiences that inspired his artistic journey and the musicality on his poetry.

What happens when a dream you've held since childhood doesn't come true? As Lisa Bu adjusted to a new life in the United States, she turned to books to expand her mind and create a new path for herself. She shares her unique approach to reading in this talk about the magic of books from TEDTalks.

Poet Shane Koyczan delivers a performance of "To This Day," his spoken-word poem about bullying that went viral as a video project with eighty different animators earlier this year.

The associate art director at Knopf, who has designed covers of books by Bret Easton Ellis, Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Michael Ondaatje, David Sedaris, Donna Tartt, and many others (as well as an issue of Poets & Writers Magazine), gave a hilarious talk at a recent TED conference. Check it out.

At one of last year's TED conferences, writer A. J. Jacobs spoke about his long, three-tiered self-improvement project that has resulted in three books, The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World (2004), The Year of Biblical Thinking: One Man's Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (2007), and Drop-Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012).

"Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories." At the TED conference two years ago, novelist Chimamanda Adichie warned that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

She may be done giving public talks about Eat, Pray, Love, but this clip from 2009 is worth another look. In it Gilbert offers a refreshing way to think about creativity. "Somehow we've completely internalized and accepted, collectively, this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will ultimately lead to anguish," she says. "Are you guys all cool with that idea?"