Weighted Words

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“I come here to talk about metaphor, language, and reality—not too ambitious.” In this 2013 TEDx Talk, the late Daniel Menaker speaks about his mother, who was an editor at Fortune magazine, his love of language, the significance of metaphor, and how phrases become clichés. The venerable writer and editor died at the age of seventy-nine on October 26, 2020.

Young-Ha Kim

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“The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins.” Young-Ha Kim delivers a TEDx Talk about all children beginning as artists, novel writing as a process of composing one sentence after another, and the value of a world in which everyone creates art, whether in public or in private. Kim’s story collection Diary of a Murderer (Mariner Books, 2019), translated from the Korean by Krys Lee, is featured in Page One in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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I Have a Time Machine

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Brenda Shaughnessy reads her poem “I Have a Time Machine” and discusses the role that poetry can play in recovering from traumatic experiences for a TEDx event at Harvard University. Shaughnessy is the author of Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press, 2012) and So Much Synth (Copper Canyon Press, 2016).

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Telling Your Secrets Can Set You Free

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“I tell my students that if you want to be a writer you need to learn how to look.” In this TEDxNavesink video, Melissa Febos shares her lifetime habit of secrecy and explains how telling your secrets can set you free. Her debut essay collection, Abandon Me (Bloomsbury, 2017), is featured in Page One in the March/April issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

Sharon Olds

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In this TEDx Talk, Sharon Olds speaks about the moments “in between” that have inspired her life and poetry, and reads from her collection Stag's Leap (Knopf, 2012), as well as her poem “Ode to the Hymen.” Olds's latest collection, Odes (Knopf, 2016), is featured in Page One in the September/October issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.

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Lauren Redniss

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Lauren Redniss gives a TEDx Talk about the process of trial, error, and transforming mistakes that went into the creation of her second book, Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout (It Books, 2010). Redniss was awarded the 2016 PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for her latest book, Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future (Random House, 2015).

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