Poets & Writers Theater

In this PBS NewsHour video, Danzy Senna discusses her latest novel, Colored Television (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the ways in which she uses comedy and satire to shed light on the reality of race in America in a conversation with Jeffrey Brown.

In this PBS NewHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with best-selling author Rebecca Yarros and romance bookstore owner Leah Koch about the rise of the romantasy genre, which mixes elements of romance and fantasy stories.

“I had to pretend I was someone else writing about me to gain some distance from myself because part of the subject of this book is how difficult it is for us to know ourselves.” Viet Thanh Nguyen talks about his family’s struggles and traumas, and the challenges of writing his new book, A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, a History, a Memorial (Grove Atlantic, 2023), in this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown. Nguyen’s memoir is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“Speak to me; speak into me, / the wind said, when I woke this morning, Let’s see what happens.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Carl Phillips reads a selection of poems from his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2022), and speaks to Jeffrey Brown about the intimacy and power of poetry. Phillips is the recipient of the 2021 Jackson Poetry Prize.

“They are not just a challenge in an individual school system or library, but legislation being introduced in statehouses that would affect the availability of books all over the state in every school and library.” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown speaks with PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel about the intensifying efforts across the United States to ban specific books related to LGBTQIA+ issues, race, and freedom of speech.

“I still believe that we listen more closely to a whisper than to a shout.” In this PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Rita Dove speaks about history, rage, the power of poetry, and her latest collection, Playlist for the Apocalypse (Norton, 2021).

“A book is much more than a transactional object. The words are flooding in, and ideas are filling you in emotion. It’s haunting in a good way.” In this PBS NewsHour interview, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Louise Erdrich speaks from her bookstore Birchbark Books & Native Arts in Minneapolis about her love of books and her new novel, The Sentence (Harper, 2021), a ghost story which explores the racial divides of her hometown.

“I’m carrying this for America, but for Indigenous peoples in particular,” says Joy Harjo about what it means to be the first Native American to serve as the poet laureate of the United States in this 2019 PBS NewsHour interview with Jeffrey Brown. A Q&A with Harjo about her new memoir, Poet Warrior (Norton, 2021), appears in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I look back, just with a little wonder. Wonder that I stuck with this thing.” In this 2004 interview with Jeffrey Brown for PBS NewsHour, Philip Roth reflects on his writing career and the role of a writer. Roth died at the age of eighty-five on May 22, 2018.

Paul Muldoon speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about “Muldoon’s Picnic,” a monthly show held at the Irish Arts Center in New York featuring music, storytelling, and poetry.

In this video, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown tours an exhibit on Emily Dickinson at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City, where visitors can listen to readings of her poems, examine remnants of her life, and view handwritten manuscripts.

“There are no rules to writing...and if there are rules, really they’re there to be broken.” Colum McCann, author of Letters to a Young Writer: Some Practical and Philosophical Advice (Random House, 2017), speaks to Jeffrey Brown about the challenges and excitement of writing today at the 2017 AWP conference and book fair.

“For me, books are the things that tell you what you need to do in life and they’re also the things that help you make sense of your life.” Will Schwalbe, author of Books for Living (Knopf, 2016), speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about the importance of reading and the books that have taught him life lessons such as Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train (Riverhead Books, 2015), James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (Dial Press, 1956), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (Knopf, 1977).

“The vitality of poetry right now, I think, is at a high pitch.” Jeff Shotts, executive editor of Graywolf Press, speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffery Brown about the independent press’s success, poetry submissions and rejections, and why there’s never been a better time than now for poetry publishing. 

“It took me a very long time to learn how to write about Colombia.” At the 2015 National Book Festival, Juan Gabriel Vásquez speaks with PBS NewHour’s Jeffrey Brown about his literary influences and journey to write stories about Colombia, where he was born. Vásquez’s fourth novel, Reputations (Riverhead Books, 2016), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

"Literature played a profound role in turning my life around, but it was also journaling as well, like being able to really write and ask myself those tough questions..." Shaka Senghor, author of the memoir, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison (Drop a Gem Publishing, 2013), speaks with Jeffrey Brown about how reading and writing helped him to examine his life, and the need for American citizens to understand the prison system.

“I gave my body to the mountain whole. / For my body, the clinic gave out petals inked with curses. / Refill, refill, refill, until they stopped.” William Brewer reads poems from his debut poetry collection, I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), and takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of his hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia to speak about the opioid crisis.

“Poetry comes to me out of thin air or out of my unconscious mind. It’s sort of the way dreams come to us…” In this PBS NewsHour video, Jeffrey Brown revisits a conversation with John Ashbery from 2007 in which he speaks about his life as a poet and reads from his collection Notes From the Air: Selected Later Poems (Ecco, 2007). Ashbery died on September 3, 2017 at the age of ninety.

Man Booker Prize–winner Marlon James speaks with PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown about the voices in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (Riverhead Books, 2015) and what writing with all the senses means.

"What happens if you take the fantastic and the historical and bind them into the same book?" The award-winning author speaks with PBS NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about the mix of magic and reality in his latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Random House, 2015).