Poets & Writers Theater

“My work often deals with dislocation, belonging, migration, of course, and I tend to create characters that are unnamed and not quite easy to place.” Valeria Luiselli, a 2019 MacArthur “Genius” fellowship recipient, talks about how she combines fiction and nonfiction to challenge conventional notions of authorship, and the ways in which the lives of others are documented.

“If you’ve never read my work before, then I would hope when you read it, that you felt the way you did when you were a kid, that you felt a sense of wonder.” Kelly Link, a 2018 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship recipient, talks about her literary influences and why she incorporates the fantastic into stories of contemporary life.

“When you see yourself reflected in literature, it enlarges your ideas of what is possible for you.” MacArthur “Genius” Grant recipient Jesmyn Ward takes PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown on a tour of her hometown in Mississippi and shares the parts of her life and community that inspire her writing. Ward is the winner of the 2017 National Book Award in fiction for Sing, Unbured, Sing (Scribner, 2017).

"Prose, when it's done right, is like empathy training wheels." On The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, George Saunders explains why books feel like friends and breaks down his writing process, which includes a nun in his head.

In this video from Open Road Media, authors Samuel R. Delany and N. K. Jemisin and literary agent Merrilee Heifetz speak about the late Octavia E. Butler, who in 1995 became the first science fiction writer to win a “Genius” grant from the MacArthur Foundation. “Her stories really weren’t about aliens.... they were about people,” says Jemisin.

"The mind must / set itself up / wherever it goes..." So begins the poem "New Rooms" by Kay Ryan from her collection, Erratic Facts (Grove Press, 2015). Ryan is a former U.S. poet laureate, Pulitzer Prize-winner, and recipient of a MacArthur "Genius" grant.

“It’s all failure in the making of art.” Poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, recipient of a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship, talks about a poem’s inevitable failure, the exhilaration of writing, and the challenge of artistic reinvention.

"I'm pursuing a kind of language which is just as complicated, and also as transparent, as human experience." The MacArthur Genius Grant–recipient reads from his new poetry collection, How to Be Drawn (Penguin, 2015), and speaks about his musical influences and how he continues to develop his voice.

"With first drafts, the best feeling, and sort of the rarest, is when I also don't know what's going to happen.... It's a wonderful pleasure, you're writing the way a reader reads." In this video from the Chicago Humanities Festival, Karen Russell speaks with Time Out Chicago's Laura Pearson about her process. Russell shares how she found her agent Denise Shannon in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

One of this year's MacArthur fellows, each of whom received $500,000, is Matthew Carter, a master type designer, who during his career has designed over 250 fonts. Most recently Carter has focused on developing easily readable fonts for computer screens, including those for handheld devices.