Poets & Writers Theater

“I wanted to look at trauma now, not as an individual thing but as a structural thing, as a collective thing, and as an ongoing thing.” In this virtual event hosted by The Word, A Storytelling Sanctuary, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal discusses the origins of her essay collection, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024), trauma in contemporary writing, and returning to fantasy and surrealism during a time of a crisis in a conversation with Angela María Spring.

In this Books Are Magic event with Adam Dalva, author and translator Laura Marris reads from and speaks about her debut essay collection, The Age of Loneliness (Graywolf Press, 2024), which is featured in Page One in the September/October of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this event hosted by the Free Library of Philadelphia, Morgan Parker discusses her debut essay collection, You Get What You Pay For (One World, 2024), and the challenges of writing about mental health in a conversation with Shantrelle Lewis. Parker’s book is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Samantha Irby reads from her new essay collection, Quietly Hostile (Vintage, 2023), and speaks with writer and editor Jazmine Hughes for this Books Are Magic event held at St. Ann’s Church in Brooklyn, New York. Quietly Hostile is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 best-selling essay collection Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life From Dear Sugar has been adapted into a Hulu miniseries starring Kathryn Hahn, Sarah Pidgeon, Quentin Plair, and Merritt Wever. The series follows Clare, a writer who becomes an advice columnist while her own life is falling apart.

“The minute I was born I was not just myself, but the memory of someone else,” reads Hilton Als from his essay collection White Girls, published in 2014 by McSweeney’s and reprinted in 2019 by Penguin Books, in this video in which he tells the story of how he got his name.

In this video, Sabrina Imbler speaks about their debut book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (Little, Brown, 2022), with journalist Heather Smith after an introduction by Rebecca Solnit for this event hosted by the Green Arcade in San Francisco. Imbler’s book is featured in Page One in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I was writing just about the experience of grief and life amidst dying...then I wanted to tell stories that made my parents alive, that brought them back to life and made it clear why this was such a loss.” In this A Word on Words interview, Margaret Renkl talks about her debut essay collection, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss (Milkweed Editions, 2019), which is featured in “5 Over 50” in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Emilie Pine talks about fear of failure, connecting to readers, being open about grief and loss, and the power of storytelling with Ireland Unfiltered’s Dion Fanning. Pine’s debut essay collection, Notes to Self (Dial Press, 2019), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“A good bookstore is your friend.” Ross Gay reads his essay about his love for independent bookstores and how they are a “laboratory for our coming together” at one of his favorite places, the Book Corner in Bloomington, Indiana. Gay’s essay collection, The Book of Delights, is forthcoming from Algonquin Books in February.

Roxane Gay reads part of “The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion” from her essay collection, Bad Feminist (Harper Perennial, 2014). Her debut memoir, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (Harper, 2017), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Upon moments like these, time never stops gnawing its little beaver teeth and the dialogue never stops even after we stop listening.” In this 2012 video, Peter Orner reads from his novel Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown, 2011). His first essay collection, Am I Alone Here? Notes on Living to Read and Reading to Live (Catapult, 2016), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"Home swells as a sentiment because it has disappeared as an achievable reality." James Wood, literary critic for the New Yorker and a professor of practice at Harvard University, reads from The Nearest Thing to Life, a collection of essays from the Mandel Lectures in Humanities, a book series published by Brandeis University Press.

Darryl Pinckney, author of the new novel, Black Deutschland (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), reads from "In Ferguson," an essay he wrote for the New York Review of Books​ on ​witnessing the demonstrations occurring in​ Ferguson, Missouri,​ ​in November 2014.​