Poets & Writers Theater

Watch this short video offering a glimpse of the miniature books handwritten by revered authors in the library of Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House at Windsor Castle, the residence of the British royal family in the eponymous English town. Read more about the miniature library in “The Written Image: Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House Library Books” in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Some people say fiction is all a lie. To me, fiction is one of the best ways we can learn truth.” In this Unban Coolies interview, Amy Tan talks about the importance of observation in her writing, identity and biodiversity, and how her interest in bird conversation inspired her new book, The Backyard Bird Chronicles (Knopf, 2024), which is featured in “The Written Image” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“When Henry started this walk at age thirty-two in 1849, he wore a broad-brimmed hat designed with a miniature shelf to hold the flowers he found,” reads Ben Shattuck from his essay “Three Walks,” first published in the Common and included in his book, Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House, April 2022). For more on the book, read “The Written Image: Ben Shattuck” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“It was like a portrait of the room with different people using that room day after day.” In this video for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, artist and writer Sophie Calle speaks about her time working as a hotel maid and documenting her observations of guests for her book The Hotel (Siglio Press, 2021). Calle’s project is featured in “The Written Image: The Hotel” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“We are all connected. We are not separate from the waters of the world.” In this TEDx Talk, artist and water advocate Basia Irland speaks about her ongoing project Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, which is featured in “The Written Image” in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

The author of the novels The Time Traveler’s Wife (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004) and Her Fearful Symmetry (Scribner, 2009) reads from her new graphic novel Raven Girl, featured in this issue's The Written Image, at the Royal Opera House in London.

Kenneth Patchen's poem "A Biography of Southern Rain" is read over Billie Holiday's "Stormy Weather" in this moody video featuring some of the late poet's visual work. For more about Patchen's painted books, silk-screened broadsides, and "picture-poems," read The Written Image in the current issue.

Charles Bukowski: Poet on the Edge, an exhibition of photographs, letters, special editions, and other ephemera, is being shown at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, through February 11, 2011. For a look at two of the poet's pen-and-ink drawings featured in the exhibition, check out The Written Image in the January/February 2011 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.