Poets & Writers Theater

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 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. 

“I know all the dark places / Where the sun hasn’t reached yet...” Charles Simic reads his poem “Summer Morning,” which he says needs no introduction, in this video for an installment of Poetry Breaks, a series created by Leita Luchetti in the 1980s and 1990s presented in partnership with the Academy of American Poets. The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

In this 2013 video, Nobel laureate Alice Munro talks about her fascination with reading and writing at an early age in Canada’s countryside, how she can become “desperately consumed” with writing, and the ways in which her writing life changed throughout her long-standing career. Munro died at the age of ninety-two on May 13, 2024.

In this 2014 Louisiana Channel interview from his home in Brooklyn, Paul Auster talks about how a chance meeting with legendary baseball player Willie Mays led him to become a writer and what he has learned about writing. “The essence of being an artist is to confront the things you’re trying to do, to tackle it head on, and if it’s good, it will have its own beauty.” Auster died at the age of seventy-seven on April 30, 2024.

“If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story…” In this video filmed for the Palestine Festival of Literature, actor Brian Cox reads “If I Must Die” by the late Palestinian poet and English literature professor Refaat Alareer, who died after an Israeli airstrike on Gaza on December 6, 2023. Alareer’s posthumous book of the same name will be published in September by OR Books.

In this 2001 Lannan Foundation event, John Barth speaks about the ways in which self-confidence and temperament play a role in his writing in a conversation with literary critic Michael Silverblatt. Barth died at the age of ninety-three on April 2, 2024. For more from Barth, read “All Trees Are Oak Trees: Introductions to Literature” from the January/February 2004 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this 2013 video, Lyn Hejinian reads from her book The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn, 2012) for the Lunch Poem reading series at the University of California in Berkeley, where she was Professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair Emerita. Hejinian died at the age of eighty-two on February 24, 2024.

In this 2022 virtual reading hosted by the Frostburg Center for Literary Arts in Maryland, Elizabeth Arnold reads a selection of poems from her books, including her most recent, Skeleton Coast (Flood Editions, 2017), and discusses dream poems and her writing career. Arnold died at the age of sixty-six on February 24, 2024.

“Words are the intricate bonds of language. Words make a family, a tribe, and a civilization. Language is the context of our experience.” Poet, novelist, and Native American scholar N. Scott Momaday speaks about the power of storytelling and his extensive writing career in a conversation with Dean Nelson from his home in New Mexico for the 2023 Writer’s Symposium by the Sea at Point Loma Nazarene University. Momaday died at the age of eighty-nine on January 24, 2024.

“My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer / I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar / like what I remember of love when I was young.” In this video, Nobel Prize–winning author Louise Glück reads “Crossroads” from her collection A Village Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009), which was shortlisted for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. Glück died at the age of eighty on October 13, 2023.

“I saw a writer who was quite new to the craft, but excited by it, and sort of experimental, and there’s a freshness to these stories that surprised me.” In this 2003 PBS NewsHour interview, renowned author and critic John Updike speaks about looking back on his early career and the stories included in his collection The Early Stories: 1953-1975 (Knopf, 2003) with correspondent Jeffrey Brown.

“Don’t waste your life reading stuff that isn’t giving you pleasure.” In this 2020 CBS Mornings interview with cohost Jeff Glor, novelist Martin Amis talks candidly about his deep friendships with writers, grief and death, and his autobiographical novel Inside Story (Knopf, 2020). Amis died at the age of seventy-three on May 19, 2023.

“Last night the moon lifted itself / on one wing / over the fields.” In this 1992 recording for Howard County Poetry and Literature Society’s The Writing Life, Linda Pastan reads her poem “Elegy,” which appears in her collection Imperfect Paradise (Norton, 1989). Pastan died at the age of ninety on January 30, 2023.

“The best things that happen in poems are discoveries, they’re accidents; what comes out of our imagination, out of our deepest self, out of our memory.” In this 2007 PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Simic speaks about his childhood in Yugoslavia, writing about war, becoming a U.S. poet laureate, and the freedom in poetry. Simic died at the age of eighty-four on January 9, 2023.

“Joan Didion taught me that family was always part of the story, along with place, and that the writer’s job was to face the terror, beauty, banality, and truth inherent in being a citizen of both.” In this video, Hilton Als speaks about Joan Didion’s influence on his writing at a celebration of her life and work held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York.

“I never know what to say after someone says ‘that’s beautiful’ except to agree with them. For me, beauty is an end of conversation.” In this 2011 video for the Cortland Review, as a part of the documentary series Poets in Person, the late Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Dunn speaks about his writing practice from his home. Dunn died at the age of eighty-two on June 24, 2021.

“I’ll dig in, / into my days, having come here to live, not to visit.” The late Denise Levertov reads poems from her collections Evening Train (New Directions, 1992) and Sands of the Well (New Directions, 1996) in this video from a 1993 event at the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles.

“There’s something in people that is naturally story-like. You’re taking all this unformed, chaotic stuff and making sense of it.” Award-winning novelist and poet Peter Straub speaks about creating characters and his love of writing horror stories in this 2012 Open Road Media interview. Straub, who received the 2008 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award for his generosity to the literary community, died at the age of seventy-nine on September 4, 2022.

“As I often tell students: What other people call revision, I call writing,” says poet, critic, and professor James Longenbach about writing his books The Lyric Now (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and Forever (Norton, 2021) as a writer-in-residence in this 2021 installment of James Merrill House’s video series Studio 107. Longenbach died at the age of sixty-two on July 29, 2022.