Poets & Writers Theater

In this PBS Independent Lens documentary codirected by Dawn Logsdon, who also narrates, and Lucie Faulknor, the history of public libraries is uncovered, from the quiet revolutionaries who opened these doors to all, to today’s librarians who service the public in an age of closures and book bans. “Libraries are not just about books. They’re about people, and they’re about stories.”

“It’s an opportunity for a character, whose story could not have been told by [Mark] Twain, to have his story told.” In this short video, Percival Everett speaks about his novel James (Doubleday, 2024), a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. Everett won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for James.

“Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity / we once were?” Marie Howe, who won the 2025 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, reads her poem “Singularity” in this short film directed by Matthew Thompson and produced by the Adrian Brinkerhoff Poetry Foundation for their Read By poetry film series.

In this Books Are Magic event, Cathy Linh Che reads from her second poetry collection, Becoming Ghost (Washington Square Press, 2025), and talks about how her parents’ experience as extras in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now shaped her book in a conversation with poet Wo Chan.

In this Poets & Writers Live event introduced by Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González, Douglas Kearney reads from his new poetry collection, I Imagine I Been Science Fiction Always (Wave Books, 2025), and joins Poets & Writers Magazine contributing editor Destiny O. Birdsong for a conversation. A profile of Kearney by Birdsong appears in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author Vauhini Vara talks about the current discourse of artificial intelligence and the ChatGPT conversation that led to writing her essay collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025).

For this Straits Times video, Korean author Baek Se-hee and translator Anton Hur reflect on the global success and universal resonance of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) and discuss the current state of mental health in East Asian countries in their first joint interview.

“The loneliest people have the earth to love / And not one friend their own age.” Jericho Brown reads his poem “Labor,” which appears in his second poetry collection, The New Testament (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), in this video for the Dear Poet series, the Academy of American Poets’ educational project for National Poetry Month.

In this Enoch Pratt Free Library event in Baltimore, Lydia Millet reads from her story collection Atavists (Norton, 2025) and discusses the humor in her writing in a conversation with Betsy Boyd. Atavists is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“If only the sky were kind enough to lend me his blue coat.” In this video, Yuki Tanaka reads an excerpt from the title poem of his debut collection, Chronicle of Drifting (Copper Canyon Press, 2025), which is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I was doing nine years in prison, and poems became my way to see the world.” In this Common Read event hosted by the Sims Memorial Library at Southeastern Louisiana University, Reginald Dwayne Betts, author of Felon (Norton, 2020), answers questions from the audience and presents a lecture and reading introduced by Louisiana poet laureate Alison Pelegrin.

In this video, Ricardo Hernandez, assistant director of Programs & Partnerships at Poets & Writers, hosts a celebratory reading by the 2025 fiction cohort of Get the Word Out, a publicity incubator for early career authors. Introduced by writer and publicist Jennifer Huang, readers include Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Roohi Choudhry, Kerry Donoghue, Lacey N. Dunham, Shasta Grant, Laura Venita Green, Benedict Nguyễn, Miranda Schmidt, and Daniel Tam-Claiborne.

In this Strand Book Store event, Torrey Peters reads from her book Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories (Random House, 2025) and talks about the experience of transitioning and how literature can broaden understandings of self beyond identity in a conversation with essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu. “A lot of these stories are invitations to a reader to identify with these characters who are probably not like the reader,” says Peters.

In this Villanova University Literary Festival event, Victoria Chang reads from her poetry collections Obit (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) and With My Back to the World (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and speaks about her ekphrastic poems and the power of writing in conversation with other artists and people in her life.

In this event hosted by the Palestine Festival of Literature and Mizna in Minneapolis, poets Mosab Abu Toha, Sarah Aziza, Nick Estes, Dina Omar, Sagirah Shahid, Danez Smith, and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha come together for an evening of performance, music, and conversation about the meaning and power of literature.

In this Lambda Literary video, Rob Macaisa Colgate reads “History of Display,” which appears in his debut poetry collection, Hardly Creatures (Tin House Books, 2025). The collection is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this Poetry in the Park event in Milwaukee’s Juneau Park hosted by Juneau Park Friends and Woodland Pattern, poets Aleena Ahmed, Ajamou Butler, Steven Espada Dawson, and Margaret Rozga read a selection of poems. Dawson, author of Late to the Search Party (Scribner, 2025), is featured in Literary MagNet in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Jennifer Acker, founder and editor in chief of the Common, answers questions about the journal’s mission, slush piles, and her editorial process in this virtual event with Becky Tuch for the Lit Mag News Roundup. An interview with Acker about the Common’s fifteenth anniversary is featured in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“The only counsel that is acceptable is to work! To work very hard until you discover the kind of writer that you want to be.” Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa dispenses advice to emerging writers in this Louisiana Channel interview with Christian Lund. Vargas Llosa died at the age of eighty-nine on April 13, 2025.

In this event hosted by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan, Jane Wong reads “To Love a Mosquito,” a chapter from her memoir, Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023), and pieces of her mother’s diary, followed by a discussion about her approaches to poetry versus creative nonfiction.