Poets & Writers Theater

In this PBS Books virtual event celebrating the release of the fortieth anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, published by Everyman’s Library, author Sandra Cisneros discusses the novel and how it has touched many lives and affected the literary landscape in a conversation with Heather-Marie Montilla.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Juliet Grames speaks about her new novel, The Lost Boy of Santa Chionia (Knopf, 2024), which is set in an isolated Italian village in the 1960s.

In this Poetry.LA video, Lynne Thompson, author most recently of Blue on a Blue Palette (BOA Editions, 2024), and Séamus Isaac Fey, author of the debut collection, decompose (Not a Cult, 2024), read from their work and speak about playing with poetic form and organizing poetry manuscripts.

In this Green Apple Books event, the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN) presents the Then & Now: Vietnamese American Literature reading series with opening remarks by executive director Isabelle Thuy Pelaud, followed by readings by Lan Duong, Hieu Minh Nguyen, Anastasia Le, Angie Chau, Frank Thanh Nguyen, and Carolyn Huynh with introductions by chief operating officer Kathy Nguyen.

In this event hosted by the Royal Society of Literature, Claire Messud, author most recently of This Strange Eventful History (Norton, 2024), and Anne Michaels, author most recently of Held (Knopf, 2024), speak about the shared themes of history and memory in their new novels in a conversation with novelist Elif Shafak.

“If the only thing we can give to each other is ourselves, we better do it. Now.” In this inaugural Speak Now series event hosted by Columbia University School of the Arts, Claudia Rankine reads from her work-in-progress “Triage” and discusses political censorship in higher education and the importance of literature in crises in a conversation with Sarah Cole.

“The book is, in many ways, about expectations and change.” In this Fane Productions event, Juli Min reads from her debut novel, Shanghailanders (Spiegel & Grau, 2024), and discusses her choice to begin the novel in the future in Shanghai and how the diverse and multifaceted city is its own character in a conversation with author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan.

In this NBC News video, New York Times Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz talks about assembling the newspaper’s recently released list of top 100 books of the twenty-first century with the help of a panel of novelists, nonfiction writers, poets, critics, and book lovers.

“It’s not, I don’t think, hyperbolic to say that books can and have changed people’s lives, and how we find books matters a great deal.” In this conversation with Politics and Prose Bookstore co-owner Bradley Graham, author Evan Friss talks about his book The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Viking, 2024) and how bookstores serve as important spaces that foster community and culture in America.

In this event at the Writer’s Center, John Vercher reads from his third novel, Devil Is Fine (Celadon, 2024), and discusses how surrealist and absurdist fiction can be a vehicle to greater truths in a conversation with author Chet’la Sebree.

In this Books Are Magic event, Kat Tang reads from her debut novel, Five-Star Stranger (Scribner, 2024), and describes her experience revisiting a novel manuscript years after finishing her MFA in a conversation with author Jinwoo Chong.

Watch the trailer for the short film Greta, directed by Benjamin Font and based on the short story of the same name by Miciah Bay Gault, which was first published in Switchyard magazine.

“I wanted to look at trauma now, not as an individual thing but as a structural thing, as a collective thing, and as an ongoing thing.” In this virtual event hosted by The Word, A Storytelling Sanctuary, Vanessa Angélica Villarreal discusses the origins of her essay collection, Magical/Realism: Essays on Music, Memory, Fantasy, and Borders (Tiny Reparations Books, 2024), trauma in contemporary writing, and returning to fantasy and surrealism during a time of a crisis in a conversation with Angela María Spring.

“I was building up a writing life alongside working on this project, and for many of those years, I didn’t even know that it would look like this.” In this interview for the Otherppl With Brad Listi podcast, Nina Sharma talks about her writing practices while working on her debut essay collection, The Way You Make Me Feel: Love in Black and Brown (Penguin Press, 2024).

In this Center for Fiction event, Padma Viswanathan, author of Like Every Form of Love: A Memoir of Friendship and True Crime (7.13 Books, 2024), and Tracy O’Neill, author of Woman of Interest (HarperOne, 2024), discuss their memoirs and how they broke genre conventions to craft their stories.

In this Penguin Random House video, China Miéville and Keanu Reeves answer questions from readers about the writing process and inspiration for their collaborative novel, The Book of Elsewhere (Del Rey, 2024), based on the comic book series BRZRKR.

In this installment of the Visions of America: All Stories, All People, All Places series hosted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services and PBS Books, Kaoukab Chebaro, head of Global Studies at the Columbia University Libraries, discusses the importance of first-person storytelling and her work in preserving the individual history of Arabs across the globe.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Dinaw Mengestu discusses the complex characters with sometimes uncertain motivations in his latest novel, Someone Like Us (Knopf, 2024), the nature of diasporic communities in American cities, and the mainstream expectations placed upon immigrant stories.

In this interview, Ferdia Lennon talks about his Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize–winning novel, Glorious Exploits (Henry Holt, 2024), which opens in Sicily in 412 BCE with two characters hatching a plan to direct a production of Euripides’s Medea.

For this LIVE From NYPL event, Jamaica Kincaid and illustrator Kara Walker discuss their collaborative book, An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), and the racial, colonial history of gardening in a conversation with Hilton Als.