Poets & Writers Theater

In this Books Are Magic event, Lili Anolik reads from her new biography, Didion and Babitz (Scribner, 2024), and discusses how the book originated from discovering a box of Eve Babitz’s unsent letters, which included a letter to Joan Didion, in a conversation with Emma Straub.

The Man Who Invented Christmas (Crown, 2008), a biography by Les Standiford focusing on the events in 1843 that inspired Charles Dickens to write A Christmas Carol, has been adapted into a feature film. Directed by Bharat Nalluri, the film stars Christopher Plummer, Jonathan Pryce, and Dan Stevens.

“When you think about all her heroines who struggled to curb their temperament and discipline themselves, you get a sense of the writer herself.” Directed by Nancy Porter, this film biography from PBS's American Masters series, offers an intimate portrait of Louisa May Alcott and the influence her novel Little Women continues to have across cultures and generations.

“There are so many women who are not married, and don’t have children, out there; there are so many of us but it’s still a bit provocative to write about.” In this interview for BBC News, Dorthe Nors talks about Jane Austen, writing about women, and her novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal (Graywolf Press, 2018), with Helena Kelly, author of the biography Jane Austen, the Secret Radical (Knopf, 2017).

"It's what we editors lose sleep over, you know. Are we really making books better or just making them different?" In the new biopic, Genius, Colin Firth stars as Maxwell Perkins, famous editor of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, played by Jude Law. The film is based on the National Book Award–winning biography Maxwell Perkins: Editor of Genius (Dutton, 1978) by A. Scott Berg.

"I didn't set out to write a book about Mary Shelley." Author Charlotte Gordon discusses her book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (Random House, 2015), which won the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award in biography.

Watch the book trailer for Terese Svoboda​'s new biography of poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet, which will be released by Schaffner Press in February 2016. "The Art of Biography: Falling In and Out of Love" by Svoboda is in the January/February issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Author Michael Lennon discusses his biography, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, in which he explores Mailer’s writing techniques, literary influences, and legendary grudges.

Half in Love: Surving the Legacy of Suicide by Linda Gray Sexton, the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, was published last week by Counterpoint. In this clip, which was produced shortly after the publication of Diane Middlebrook's 1991 biography of the poet, Anne Sexton reads her work and appears in home movies taken before her death in 1974.