The documentary film To Be Heard, which made its debut last November and won a grand jury prize and the audience award at the film festival Doc NYC, follows three teens from the South Bronx whose struggle to change their lives begins when they start to write poetry.

The Welcome, which premiered at the Ashland Independent Film Festival in Oregon last month, is a documentary film about a group of veterans who met over Memorial Day weekend in 2008 to use poetry and storytelling to come to terms with their experiences in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. You can read some of the resulting poems and watch videos of the veterans reading them at The Welcome Home Project's website.

In April and early May the multimedia production Muse's Market toured the Western United States, bringing together a combination of live music, art, performance poetry, and philosophy to address the topic of sustainability.

The documentary film Louder Than a Bomb, produced and directed by Jon Siskel and Greg Jacobs, follows four teams as they prepare for and compete in Chicago's youth poetry slam. The film, which has been picking up awards from film festivals all across the country, will open May 18 at the IFC Center in New York City. Visit www.louderthanabombfilm.com for screening dates in a city near you.

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.

Last December Ivan Tresoldi, a street poetry artist from Milano, Italy, led a workshop for young Kosovo Serbian poets and artists sponsored by forumZFD, a bipartisan organization with a mission to push for "the realization of the idea of a Civilian Peace Service." The aim of the workshop was to help participants deal with the past and create poetry and art along the topic of memories and identities. For more information about Kosovo, visit the State Department's Web site.

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.

Since its release last year, Grace Paley: Collected Shorts, a documentary directed by Lilly Rivlin, has won awards at several film festivals, including the Palm Springs International Film Festival and the Washington Jewish Film Festival.

A Man Within, the documentary about Naked Lunch author William S. Burroughs that premieres on the PBS series Independent Lens tonight, explores the late writer's fascination with, among many other things, guns. "Burroughs didn't feel at home unless he had a loaded gun by his side."

This clip features photos of the demonstrations in Cairo's Tahrir Square by Hany Soliman as well as footage of poet Kamal Abdel Halim reciting two poems in protest of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.