Poets & Writers Theater

Watch the trailer for My Oxford Year, a film adaptation of the debut novel of the same name by Julia Whelan. The film stars Sofia Carson as Anna, an ambitious American student with a keen interest in poetry who sets off for Oxford University and meets Jamie, played by Corey Mylchreest, a charming local who alters her plans.

In this 2020 Wheeler Centre virtual event, Roanna Gonsalves hosts a discussion about womanhood in fiction and the power of translation with Fernanda Melchor, author of Hurricane Season (New Directions, 2020), translated from the Spanish by Sophie Hughes; and Mieko Kawakami, author of Breasts and Eggs (Europa Editions, 2020), translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

In this Poets House event, Garrett Hongo reads from his fourth poetry collection, Ocean of Clouds (Knopf, 2025), and Edward Hirsch reads from his new memoir, My Childhood in Pieces: A Stand-Up Comedy, a Skokie Elegy (Knopf, 2025), followed by a conversation between the authors about their friendship and humor.

“She was a short story that kind of got too big and started rolling away from me,” says Katie Yee about her debut novel, Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books, 2025), in this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, in which they discuss writing outside of your own experience and usual style.

In this Creative Writing Series event at the University of Notre Dame, Kristen Arnett reads from her novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One (Riverhead Books, 2025) and talks about how she played with form by using different typefaces for “funny” and “not funny,” and her process to ensure that each joke lands.

Directed by Ebs Burnough, this documentary explores the influence that Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel, On the Road, has had on writers, actors, storytellers and artists, and follows the lives of Americans who set off on their own journeys in the footsteps of the famous author, who died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven.

Marissa Davis reads from her debut poetry collection, End of Empire (Penguin Books, 2025), in this Books Are Magic event with poets Sasha Burshteyn and A. D. Lauren-Abunassar. Davis’s book is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this video from the keynote of A Writing Room’s 2022 retreat, best-selling author Anne Lamott speaks about the discipline needed to write and reflects on writing as a spiritual and moral practice grounded in truth telling.

In this virtual reading and conversation, Poets & Writers Magazine features editor India Lena González introduces the five debut authors featured in “First Fiction 2025”: Sarah Yahm, author of Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation (Dzanc Books, 2025); Jon Hickey, author of Big Chief (Simon & Schuster, 2025); Carrie R. Moore, author of Make Your Way Home (Tin House Books, 2025); Aaron John Curtis, author of Old School Indian (Hillman Grad Books, 2025); and Jemimah Wei, author of The Original Daughter (Doubleday, 2025).

In this Daily Show interview, author Rob Franklin speaks about the themes of race, class, and privilege in his debut novel, Great Black Hope (Summit Books, 2025), with host Josh Johnson.

In this PBS NewsHour video, Ann Patchett, author and owner of Parnassus Books in Nashville, and Maureen Corrigan, professor and book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, offer recommendations for summer reading, including The Satisfaction Café (Scribner, 2025) by Kathy Wang, King of Ashes (Flatiron Books, 2025) by S. A. Cosby, and A Marriage at Sea: A True Story of Love, Obsession, and Shipwreck (Riverhead Books, 2025) by Sophie Elmhirst.

In this Service95 Book Club conversation hosted by Dua Lipa, author Vincent Delecroix talks about the 2021 English Channel disaster that inspired his novel Small Boat (Hope Road Publishing, 2025), translated from the French by Helen Stevenson, and his decision to write from the perspective of a bystander observing calamity.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers discusses the themes of Blackness, intersectionality, and diaspora in her essay collection, Misbehaving at the Crossroads (Harper, 2025), and how it serves as a companion piece to her novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021).

In this excerpt from an interview with NBC Chicago, the late Andrea Gibson reads their poem “Love Letter From the Afterlife” to their wife Megan Falley. Gibson died at the age of forty-nine on July 14, 2025.

In this 2021 virtual craft talk hosted by the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama, author and professor Victoria Redel speaks about narrative structure and the use of collage in fiction and how fragmented, nonlinear storytelling can deepen emotional impact and thematic complexity.

In this Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination event, Guadalupe Nettel, Ayşegül Savaş, and Maylis de Kerangal talk about their recent story collections and how short story collections are received in the current publishing industry. Savaş’s first story collection, Long Distance, is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Autism wants to be understood, researched, and recognized as a disability, not a disease.” In this Button Poetry video, Kay Kassirer reads their poem “Autism Speaks (after Arvind Nandakumar).”

“In a lot of ways, this popular culture is the water that I swim in. I can’t escape it.” In this Magers & Quinn Booksellers event, Alice Bolin reads an essay about Star Trek from her latest collection, Culture Creep: Notes on the Pop Apocalypse (Mariner Books, 2025), and discusses technology, cults, and feminism with author Sally Franson.

In this Books Are Magic event, Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda reads from her English translation of Yoko Tawada’s essay collection Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (New Directions, 2025) and discusses Tawada’s defamiliarization of the Japanese and German languages in a conversation with fellow translator Susan Bernofsky.

In this episode of The Seeds podcast with Alana Hadid, poet aja monet reads from her second collection, Florida Water (Haymarket Books, 2025), and reflects on the role of faith in her artistry and activism, and the current state of movement organizing for Palestine. Florida Water is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.