Poets & Writers Theater

In this reading celebrating the annual Poets House Showcase exhibition, Hala Alyan reads from The Moon That Turns You Back (Ecco, 2024), Cynthia Cruz reads from Sweet Repetition (University of Chicago Press, 2025), Carl Phillips reads from Scattered Snows, to the North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and Rowan Ricardo Phillips reads from Silver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024).

“may the tide / that is entering even now / the lip of our understanding / carry you out / beyond the face of fear…” Here’s a poem to help welcome in the new year: Elizabeth Acevedo reads “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton in this 2021 installment of the Ours Poetica series, sponsored by Complexly and the Poetry Foundation.

Lena Moses-Schmitt reads from her debut collection, True Mistakes (University of Arkansas Press, 2025), and talks about how a constant sense of awe continuously inspires her life and poetics in this Green Apple Books event with Leigh Lucas. Moses-Schmitt is featured in “New Ways of Seeing: Our Twenty-First Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, The Odyssey is a film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem chronicling the journey and adventures of the legendary Greek king of Ithaca as he returns home after the Trojan War. Starring Matt Damon, Anne Hathaway, Tom Holland, Lupita Nyong’o, and Zendaya, the film is set to be released on July 17, 2026.

Watch authors Malcolm Gladwell, Meg Rosoff, Emma Thompson, Colm Toibin, and others read the classic poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” by Clement Clarke Moore in this Penguin Books video from 2013.

Nadia Alexis reads from her debut collection, Beyond the Watershed (CavanKerry Books, 2025), and talks about her process of writing poetry and compiling photography around the Haitian American experience with Melissa Ginsburg in this event at Square Books. Alexis is featured in “New Ways of Seeing: Our Twenty-First Annual Look at Debut Poets” in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

As the end of the year approaches, Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books, and Maureen Corrigan, professor and book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, reveal their favorite books of 2025 for PBS Newshour, which include The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Hogarth, 2025) by Kiran Desai, The Antidote (Knopf, 2025) by Karen Russell, and A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction (Ecco, 2025) by Elizabeth McCracken.

In this Library of Congress video, Arthur Sze speaks about his journey to poetry and his plans to have a special focus on poetry in translation as the twenty-fifth U.S. poet laureate. An interview with Sze by Rigoberto González appears in the January/February 2026 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Beyond Baroque celebration of Teresa Dzieglewicz’s debut collection, Something Small of How to See a River (Tupelo Press, 2025), poets Jessica Abughattas, Meghann Plunkett, and Arumandhira Howard read their work exploring strength, care, and radical joy along with Dzieglewicz, whose collection is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 Fall Fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist May-Zhee Lim, readers include Hillary Behrman, Denise Derya Brandt, Kim Coleman Foote, Sophia Huneycutt, Rachel León, Kat Lewis, Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay, Radhika Singh, Grace Spulak, and Diana Xin.

In this Green Apple Books event, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents a night of readings featuring writers François Luong, Aimee Phan, Minnie Phan, and Thien Pham, sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library and San Francisco Arts Commission.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Bryan Washington speaks about how his experiences in Tokyo and Osaka informed his latest novel, Palaver (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025), and how third-person narratives reflect the estrangement of being in a different country.

For the “Seriously Celebrating the New Yorker’s 100th Anniversary: Fiction” event hosted by the House of SpeakEasy at Joe’s Pub in New York, Yiyun Li weaves together stories about connecting with hairdressers in salons over the years and how real-life stories can sometimes transform into different stories through fiction writing. “People tell us stories and our stories live in their memory. And hair grows, life goes on,” says Li.

Watch the trailer for The Thing With Feathers directed by Dylan Southern and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. A film adaptation of the novel Grief Is the Thing With Feathers by Max Porter (Graywolf Press, 2016), the film follows a grieving widow who is greeted by an unwanted house guest while struggling to raise two young sons.

In this discussion hosted by the University of Southern California, Elaine Hsieh Chou talks about playing with surrealism and absurdism in her new short story collection, Where Are You Really From (Penguin Press, 2025), and reflects on the impact of her debut novel, Disorientation (Penguin Books, 2022), in a conversation with Dr. Dorinne Kondo.

“This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.” In this video that originally aired in 2012, poet Joy Harjo reads her poem “Perhaps the World Ends Here,” which appears in her collection The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (Norton, 1994), for PBS NewsHour.

Watch the trailer for Hamnet, a film adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel of the same name. Directed by Chloé Zhao and starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal, the film follows the relationship between William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes, and the impact of their young son’s tragic death on their lives.

In this 60 Minutes interview, Margaret Atwood speaks about her response to book banning, her new memoir, Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts (Doubleday, 2025), and why she says the popularity of her novel The Handmaid’s Tale is “not due to me or the excellence of the book. It’s partly the twists and turns of history.”

In this Books Are Magic event, Lana Lin reads from her book The Autobiography of H. Lan Thao Lam (Dorothy, a Publishing Project, 2025) and discusses how she uses both Gertrude Stein and Audre Lorde’s genre-bending approaches to autobiography in order to highlight Asian diasporic narratives in a conversation with Monique Truong.

In this event hosted by City Lights Bookstore, Harryette Mullen reads from her latest poetry collection, Regaining Consciousness (Graywolf Press, 2025), and talks about how her poetics remain playful even in the face of disaster in a conversation with Tonya M. Foster.