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“Elephant on an orange line, underneath a yellow circle / meaning sun. / 6 green, vertical lines, with color all from the top / meaning flowers.” In this animated short film for the TED-Ed “There’s a Poem for That” series, Aracelis Girmay reads her poem “For Estefani Lora, Third Grade, Who Made Me a Card” from her collection Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007).
“My mama’s tongue is a telegram from her mother / decorated with the coqui’s of el campo...” Denice Frohman reads her poem “Accents” for this animated TED-Ed short film directed by Kapwa and Robertino Zambrano.
“Back home we are plagued by a politeness / so dense even the doctors cannot call things / what they are…” Safia Elhillo narrates her poem “To Make Use of Water” from her collection, The January Children (University of Nebraska Press, 2017), for this animated TED-Ed film directed by Jérémie Balais and Jeffig Le Bars.
“I watched a dandelion lose its mind in the wind / and when it did, it scattered a thousand seeds.“ Andrea Gibson, author of Lord of the Butterflies (Button Poetry, 2018), reads their poem “The Nutritionist” for this animated TED-Ed film directed by Tomás Pichardo-Espaillat.
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 TED-Ed “poetic experiment,” three different animators interpret Walt Whitman's poem “A Noiseless Patient Spider” read by poets Mahogany Browne, Joanna Hoffman, and Rives.
"Simply put, we are creatures of rhythm and repetition.... Pattern can be pleasure." In this TED-Ed lesson by David Silverstein, animated by Avi Ofer, the pleasure we experience in the repetition of language within poetry, and even in Eminem songs, is deciphered.
"What makes something 'Kafkaesque?'... It's not the absurdity of bureaucracy alone." This TED-Ed animated short film, created by educator Noah Tavlin and narrated by Addison Anderson, explains the combination of external circumstances and human tendencies that characterize a situation as truly "Kafkaesque."
Educators David T. Freeman and Gregory Taylor share the power and reasoning behind William Shakespeare's usage of iambic pentameter in this TED-Ed short film animated by Brad Purnell.
"The point of fiction is to cast a spell, a momentary illusion that you are living in the world of the story." In this TED-Ed animated video, author Nalo Hopkinson highlights examples from Kelly Link and Tiphanie Yanique, and shares ideas on how to get readers immersed into stories that engage the senses.
