Poets & Writers Theater

In this Poets & Writers event, Karen Russell reads from her new novel, The Antidote (Knopf, 2025), and joins frequent Poets & Writers Magazine contributor Brian Gresko for a discussion on the Dust Bowl research that went into the book and the competing histories of the so-called American Dream of westward expansion. A profile of Russell by Gresko appears in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Books Are Magic event, Ada Calhoun talks about the themes of love and identity in her debut novel, Crush (Viking, 2025), the expectations of marriage as a Gen Xer, and the current state of women’s literature in a conversation with Taffy Brodesser-Akner.

In this Georgetown University Qatar event, Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Hisham Matar discusses the origins of his latest novel, My Friends (Random House, 2024), which follows three Libyan friends living in London as exiles, in a conversation with Kamila Shamsie.

In this conversation hosted by the Korea Society, authors Gina Chung and Yun Ko-eun discuss the many possibilities of the short story form, the defining characteristics of their respective authorial voices, and the differences between writing and reading stories in English and Korean.

For this Conduit Club event hosted by Max Porter in London, Egyptian Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad discusses his debut memoir, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (Knopf, 2025), and reflects on the “derangement of language” while reporting the War on Terror and the threats faced by journalists in Gaza today.

In this Harvard Radcliffe Institute event, Ilya Kaminsky reads a selection of poems from his collection Deaf Republic (Graywolf Press, 2019), including “We Lived Happily During the War” and “While the Child Sleeps, Sonya Undresses,” and discusses being an immigrant and poet in between languages in a conversation with Stephanie Sandler.

Author and journalist Jessie Tu talks about her experience and expectations for writing her second novel, The Honeyeaters (Allen & Unwin, 2024), and the “colonial and imperialist legacies” around language in a conversation with Annabel Crabb at this Roaring Stories Bookshop event in Sydney, Australia.

In this Green Apple Books event, Karissa Chen reads from her debut novel, Homeseeking (G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2025), and speaks about how her late grandfather’s experiences during the Chinese Civil War inspired the book in a conversation with Vanessa Hua.

In this Center for Fiction event, author Mariana Enriquez talks about the supernatural themes and local Argentinian language and humor within her short story collection A Sunny Place for Shady People (Hogarth, 2024) with translator Megan McDowell in a conversation moderated by Melissa Lozada-Oliva.

In this video, Nikki Giovanni reads a selection of her poems and speaks about her life and career for the Wright Conversations series hosted by the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and PBS Books. Giovanni died at the age of eighty-one on December 9, 2024.

In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers features editor India Lena González introduces the 2024 cohort of “5 Over 50” debut authors: Suzette Mullen, author of The Only Way Through Is Out (University of Wisconsin Press, 2024); Dorsía Smith Silva, author of In Inheritance of Drowning (CavanKerry Press, 2024); Uchenna Awoke, author of The Liquid Eye of a Moon (Catapult, 2024); Parul Kapur, author of Inside the Mirror (University of Nebraska Press, 2024); and Deborah Jackson Taffa, author of Whiskey Tender (Harper, 2024).

In this event presented by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Kundiman, writers Hannah Bae, Jen Lue, Gina Chung, and Rajat Singh read from their work and participate in a conversation moderated by Thuy Phan, regional cochair of Kundiman Northeast.

In this 2023 event cohosted by the Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival (BCLF) and the Center for Fiction, Elizabeth Nunez speaks with Lauren Francis-Sharma about 5 Minutes With Elizabeth Nunez, an original BCLF short film series celebrating the author and her most revered novels. Nunez died at the age of eighty on November 11, 2024. 

In this event at the Southbank Centre in London celebrating the launch of the Palestine Festival of Literature’s anthology of essays, Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities With Palestine (Haymarket Books, 2024), editor Mahdi Sabbagh and writers Jehan Bseiso and Mirza Waheed discuss the question of solidarity in a conversation moderated by Zena Agha.

“Your mind wants to move, and the best thing a work of art can do is take your mind with it, moving somewhere you never expected to move.” Anne Carson talks about the artists and philosophers who inspire her to create and think, and how boxing has helped her in the wake of her recent diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in a conversation with Norwegian author Linn Ullmann for this Louisiana Channel event.

In this Poets & Writers event, 2024 Jackson Poetry Prize winner Fady Joudah reads a selection of poems, including from his National Book Award–nominated collection, [...] (Milkweed Editions, 2024), and joins Pádraig Ó Tuama for a conversation about his work and life as a poet.

“It’s an ongoing interrogation of how we think about narrative. It’s my ongoing interrogation of history.” In this Toronto Public Library event, poet and novelist Dionne Brand speaks about how her new nonfiction book, Salvage: Readings From the Wreck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), wrestles with the ways novels from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries sustain and reproduce colonialism in a conversation with David Chariandy.

“If the only thing we can give to each other is ourselves, we better do it. Now.” In this inaugural Speak Now series event hosted by Columbia University School of the Arts, Claudia Rankine reads from her work-in-progress “Triage” and discusses political censorship in higher education and the importance of literature in crises in a conversation with Sarah Cole.

In this NGC Bocas Lit Fest event, Edwidge Danticat speaks about the roots of her work and reads excerpts from her works of fiction and nonfiction, including the preface from her new essay collection, We’re Alone (Graywolf Press, 2024), in a conversation with Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw. A profile of Danticat by Renée H. Shea appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The reason why I favor long poems—not just writing them but reading them—is that it just feels like a much truer picture of the self, or selves.” In this Books Are Magic event, Jason Koo reads from his latest poetry collection, No Rest (Diode Editions, 2024), and discusses the narrative opportunities of long poems in a conversation with Bessie Flores Zaldívar.