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“In the days since her arrest, Mary Ripley has not slept—ironic, since sleeping is precisely what she was doing on the night her landlady was murdered.” In this short animation, Christina Dalcher narrates her seven-sentence story, “The Burden of Proof.” Dalcher is the author of the debut novel, Vox (Berkley, 2018), which takes place in a dystopian United States where women are only allowed to speak one hundred words per day.
“We laugh and for one heartbeat forget to be afraid.” This short film of John Glenday’s poem “The Big Push” is inspired by James Herbert Gunn’s 1916 painting “The Eve of the Battle of the Somme.” Animated by Xin Li, the film was produced by the Poetry Society and Mosaic Films.
“They await counterintelligence / transmissions from our laptops / and our blue teeth, await word / of humanity’s critical mass, / our ripening.” Kyle Dargan’s poem “The Robots Are Coming” is brought to life in this animated Motionpoems film by Julia Iverson. Dargan’s new poetry collection, Anagnorisis (TriQuarterly Books, 2018), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
“One Halloween night, a distraught young woman named Harriet stopped midway across the Brooklyn Bridge…” In this animated short film, Fiona Davis, author of The Masterpiece (Dutton, 2018), narrates her seven-sentence story, “Girl on the Bridge.”
“Sit down, world / and relax / so you don’t have tornadoes.” Preschool Poets, an animated series codirected by Nancy Kangas and Josh Kun, collects poems written by preschool students in Columbus, Ohio, and matches them up with renowned animators. Animated by Stas Santimov, “Bullets” was written by Brayden and read by his classmate Miracle.
“Every time you choose wrong. Blame it on empire.” Gary Jackson’s poem “Tryouts” from his debut collection, Missing You, Metropolis (Graywolf Press, 2010), is animated by Victor Newman and narrated by Chuck Johnson for Motionpoems.
In this animated TED-Ed lesson, Sam Slote, an associate professor at Trinity College Dublin and the author of Joyce’s Nietzschean Ethics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), explains what makes James Joyce’s Ulysses a literary masterpiece and why Joyce, himself, once said: “If Ulysses isn’t worth reading, then life isn’t worth living.”
In this animated short film, David Bell narrates his seven-sentence story, “The Investigation.” Bell is the director of Western Kentucky University’s MFA creative writing program and the author of the crime thriller novel Somebody’s Daughter (Berkley, 2018).
In this Motionpoems film, Matthew Zapruder’s poem “Albert Einstein,” from his collection Sun Bear (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), is animated by John Akre. Zapruder’s most recent book, Why Poetry (Ecco, 2017), explores what poems are and how all readers can enjoy them.
In this animated short film by Phil Borst, which was commissioned by the Washington Post, Victoria Chang reads the conclusion of her poem “The Boss Calls Us at Home.” Chang’s fourth book of poetry, Barbie Chang (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), is featured in Page One in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
