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In this 2023 event co-presented by Bellevue Literary Review at the Center for Fiction, Jayne Anne Phillips reads from her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, Night Watch (Knopf, 2023), and discusses setting her story during the Civil War in West Virginia in a conversation with editor Danielle Ofri. “History gives us the facts, but literature tells us the story,” says Phillips. “The characters access the meaning of history for us.”
“These are notes on encountering the daily, the literary, the visual, violent, the arbitrary, the ordinary, and the beautiful…. They are always concerned with what I think of as the ordinary, extraordinary matter of Black life.” In this Virginia Museum of Fine Arts event, Christina Sharpe discusses her latest book, Ordinary Notes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), which weaves the past, present, and future together through various mediums ranging from lyric to photography.
In this Brown University Department of Literary Arts event, Xochitl Gonzalez reads from her second novel, Anita de Monte Laughs Last (Flatiron Books, 2024), and discusses writing about Latino art and academia in a conversation with the university’s president Christina H. Paxson.
“I always start asking myself, if I really love this book, how did it get to me?” In this conversation with Politics and Prose Bookstore co-owner Bradley Graham, Paul Yamazaki talks about his book, Reading the Room: A Bookseller’s Tale (Ode Books, 2024), and discusses his life and career as the principal buyer at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers in San Francisco.
Directed and cowritten by Ethan Hawke, Wildcat is a film based on the short stories and letters of Flannery O’Connor and explores both her characters and her life. Starring Maya Hawke and Laura Linney, the film dramatizes some of O’Connor’s most famous short stories and delves into the author’s craft and faith.
In this recent installment of UC Berkeley’s Lunch Poems series, Brandon Shimoda reads a selection of poems and essays with the theme of “oranges,” which address the memory of Japanese American incarceration and war.
“When I sit down, I invite that muse, that ardor, that passion to get to some place of discovery.” In this preview for the season four premiere of the public television series Poetry in America, poets Richard Blanco and Amanda Gorman, among other writers and scholars, join host Elisa New to discuss two poems by pioneering Black poet Phillis Wheatley. Watch the full episode here.
In this inaugural Mary Oliver Memorial Event, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón introduces her signature project which includes site-specific poetry installations in seven national parks and the anthology You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, published by Milkweed Editions in association with the Library of Congress. Limón is joined by poets Molly McCully Brown, Jake Skeets, Analicia Sotelo, and Paul Tran for a reading and conversation.
In this Politics and Prose event, Dylan Thomas Prize–winning author Nam Le reads from his debut poetry collection, 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem (Knopf, 2024), and discusses the choice to write poetry rather than prose, and the sometimes questionable authority of writing about trauma in a conversation with Natasha Sajé.
“You’ve got one idea that excites you, and all these other ideas start to kind of come out of it.” In this Sligo County Libraries event, award-winning author Paul Murray discusses the middle-class challenges of the characters in his latest novel, The Bee Sting (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023), in a conversation with Colm Tóibín.
