Poets & Writers Theater

“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.

“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).

“At the heart of it, it’s all about making things.” In this Ride Channel video, Bret Anthony Johnston, author most recently of the novel We Burn Daylight (Random House, 2024), talks about the link between skateboarding and writing, and how they are both “a way to escape yourself” and “give yourself over to something much bigger than you.” For more from Johnston, read his installment of our Ten Questions series.

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.

In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, author Julia Phillips talks about the ferocity of sister relationships, themes of isolation and survival, and her second novel, Bear (Hogarth, 2024). A profile of Phillips by Renée H. Shea appears in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this WREG News Channel 3 interview in Memphis, Tara M. Stringfellow talks about how her work as an attorney informed her writing and discusses the poems in her first collection, Magic Enuff (Dial Press, 2024). For more from Stringfellow, read her installment of our Ten Questions series.

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Nicola Yoon talks about the rarity of writing fast, the experience of seeing adaptations of her books, and her new novel, One of Our Kind (Knopf, 2024).

In this interview for the Otherppl With Brad Listi podcast, Morgan Talty offers advice about book advances and publishing, and talks about the popularity of short stories and writing his first novel, Fire Exit (Tin House, 2024). For more from Talty, read his installment of our Ten Questions series.

“The book is really for every woman who’s aging and has secret desires and anxieties about those desires,” says Miranda July about her second novel, All Fours (Riverhead Books, 2024), and the importance of writing and speaking about female bodies of all ages in this Daily Show interview with host Desi Lydic.

In this Louisiana Channel video, Russian poet and journalist Maria Stepanova offers her advice for young writers to look forward to something unknown and to be able to “look into the future with some degree of hope.”

In this episode of The Larry Arnn Show, Hillsdale College president Larry P. Arnn interviews author Chigozie Obioma who discusses his life in Nigeria, the inspiration behind his second novel, An Orchestra of Minorities (Little, Brown, 2019), and how the Classics inform his work. Obioma’s third novel, The Road to the Country (Hogarth, 2024), is featured in Page One in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

“I want to create a legacy for the people who come after me.” In this interview hosted by Las Comadres Para Las Americas and Latinx in Publishing, Michelle Herrera Mulligan speaks about launching Atria Books’ new imprint, Primero Sueño Press, whose mission is to publish Latinx authors from the United States in English and Spanish and bring them to new audiences. Read more about the press in “A New Imprint for Latinx Authors” by Jennifer De Leon in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

In this short video about the novel Kairos (Granta Books, 2023), winner of the 2024 International Booker Prize, German author Jenny Erpenbeck speaks about the universality of themes of hope, decay, and disappointment in the story and translator Michael Hoffmann talks about maintaining the spirit of the text through translation.

In this event hosted by the Townsend Center for the Humanities and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Ocean Vuong talks about his journey through poetry and teaching, how his voice and understanding of genre have changed, and whether or not poetry can change the world in a conversation with Cathy Park Hong. “I’ve always been doubtful of myself, of my work, of my life. But when I’m writing, when I’m inside the poem, I rarely feel true fear,” says Vuong.

In this Poetry.LA interview, bridgette bianca reads from her debut collection, be/trouble (Writ Large Press, 2020), and talks about the origins of her writing career, documenting her experiences as a professor, and her love of romance novels in a conversation with host Luivette Resto.

In this Late Night With Seth Meyers interview, Amor Towles talks about the television adaptation of his novel A Gentleman in Moscow, and bringing life to the short stories in his new book, Table for Two (Viking, 2024).

In this 2014 Louisiana Channel interview from his home in Brooklyn, Paul Auster talks about how a chance meeting with legendary baseball player Willie Mays led him to become a writer and what he has learned about writing. “The essence of being an artist is to confront the things you’re trying to do, to tackle it head on, and if it’s good, it will have its own beauty.” Auster died at the age of seventy-seven on April 30, 2024.

In this 60 Minutes interview, Salman Rushdie speaks with Anderson Cooper about surviving an attempt on his life in 2022 and detailing the experience in his new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House, 2024).

Philip Metres, author of Fugitive/Refuge (Copper Canyon Press, 2024), and Jessica Jacobs, author of unalone (Four Way Books, 2024), speak about the coincidence of their shared book-cover imagery and themes of faith and ancestry in their new poetry collections for this episode of “The Sound of Ideas” morning program from Ideastream in Cleveland.