Poets & Writers Theater

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Roxane Gay talks about how the word feminism has been defined through the centuries, the work included in her new anthology, The Portable Feminist Reader (Penguin Classics, 2025), and writing a romance novel with Channing Tatum.

In this video from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Amanda Gorman reads her poem “What We Carry,” which appears in her debut collection, Call Us What We Carry (Viking, 2021), set to world-renowned cellist Jan Vogler’s performance of “Suite for Violoncello No. 1 in G Major, BWV 1007: I. Prélude” by Johann Sebastian Bach.

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Kwame Alexander talks about winning an Emmy Award for the television adaptation of his novel The Crossover, and reads one of his poems which appears in This Is the Honey: An Anthology of Contemporary Black Poets (Little, Brown, 2024). For more on the anthology, read “The Anthologist: A Compendium of Uncommon Collections” in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“For me, poetry is the act of paying attention. It pushes me to pay attention to a moment, a feeling, an idea, an image.” Clint Smith speaks about what poetry means to him, the themes in his new collection, Above Ground (Little, Brown, 2023), and reads his poem “All at Once” in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

In this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, George Saunders speaks about his latest story collection, Liberation Day (Random House, 2022), and the need to be in a “holy state of not knowing anything” when starting a new writing project. Liberation Day is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“A free society does not ban books.” Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones speaks about her personal journey to develop The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story (One World, 2021) as well as the attempts in certain states to ban the book from schools in this interview for The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

Jason Reynolds speaks about his appointment by the Library of Congress as the seventh National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, the importance of young readers, and the danger of banning books in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.

“I remembered something that Raymond Chandler said, ‘When you don’t know what do to next, bring on the man with the gun,’” says Stephen King in this interview on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, in which he discusses experiencing writer’s block and shares the top five favorites stories he’s written.

In this clip from The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Julie Andrews speaks about her latest book, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years (Hachette Books, 2019), which is cowritten by her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, and exchanges personalized limericks with the host.

"Prose, when it's done right, is like empathy training wheels." On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, George Saunders explains why books feel like friends and breaks down his writing process, which includes a nun in his head.

"Once upon a time, there was a girl named Little Red Reading Hood who loved her grandmother's local independent bookstore." On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Franzen, author of Purity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015), reads a modern bedtime story about consumerism for the show's host.

“Death closes all: but something ere the end, / Some work of noble note, may yet be done…” Actress Helen Mirren and Stephen Colbert share an emotional moment as she reads the last lines of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.