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The documentary Behind Those Books, written by Kaven Brown, directed by Mills Miller, and featuring interviews with Terry McMillan, Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Kevin Powell, is billed as "the first and only comprehensive documentation, on film, of the urban literature genre, giving viewers a raw and uncut look inside the emerging industry." It will premiere May 28 at Tribeca Cinemas in New York City.
To film the documentary TITOS: A Poet in Precarious Balance, director Nikos Chrisikakis accompanied Titos Patrikios for eighteen months in the eighty-three-year-old poet's native Athens, Greece.
On April 15 Little, Brown will publish The Pale King, David Foster Wallace's final, unfinished novel. In this BBC documentary, Geoff Ward discusses the life and works of the author who committed suicide in 2008, at the age of forty-six. Ward also talks to Wallace's editor, Michael Pietsch, about the difficult task of assembling Wallace's final fragments into The Pale King.
For your viewing pleasure we present this 1963 documentary Ray Bradbury: Story of a Writer, produced and directed by Terry Sanders, in which the late science fiction author (who was forty-three when the film was made) shares his thoughts on writing and perseverance: "You've got to be inspired and mad and excited and love it more than anything else in the world!"
This PBS video explores the very complex and compelling phenomenon of creativity—a component of writing that all poets and writers must learn to understand for themselves. “Whatever we can do to expand our capacity for uncertainty, that is wonderful preparation for creativity.”
"Poetry begins with hearing...begins with hearing the sounds of passion." In this first feature documentary of poet laureate W. S. Merwin, the poet and environmental activist shares his work and life. The film, directed by Stefan Schaefer, is available on VOD or DVD with a portion of the proceeds supporting the Merwin Conservancy.
"It was the end of day. / Shadows came engulfing." As part of the Poets On documentary series, hosted by Carol Frost and directed by Gerard Meola, the late Pulitzer Prize–winning author Donald Justice reads his poetry and attempts to answer such timeless questions as, "What makes a line?" and "How important is originality?"
"Sometimes in my dreams I sign and everyone understands me." In this 2011 documentary directed by Judy Lieff, a deaf teen is introduced to American Sign Language (ASL) Poetry and enters into the spoken word slam scene. Deaf Jam has inspired a website which includes resources for ASL poets and workshops with the artists featured in the film.
"The great thing with poetry is that you can hide a lot of your feelings and a lot of your truth in metaphor, and that's why I felt safe." In this teaser for a documentary from BBC Radio 1, spoken word poets share stories of their first experiences writing poems and how poetry has made an impact on their lives.
In the September/October 2009 issue of Poets & Writers Magazine, we published the essay "Taking It to the Streets: My Year in Guerrilla Publishing" in which Mike Heppner writes about his trajectory from commercially published author to small press author to self-published, D-I-Y author. In this video, Heppner describes the final stage of his Man Talking Project: hand-delivering his manuscript to one of his readers.
