The Healing Project
Spoken word poet Tony Styxx performs a piece about resilience and hope in a short film by Kelli Camille Films.
A curated selection of videos, including book trailers, brief interviews, and other literary curiosities updated daily.
Ernest Hemingway's Manuscripts
Patrick and Sean Hemingway, the son and grandson of Ernest Hemingway, describe how the original manuscripts of A Moveable Feast provided insight on the man and his true intentions for the book. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition was released by Scribner in 2010.
All the Way
Charles Bukowski's poem "Roll the Dice" is the inspiration for this film by Willem Martinot. Read by Tom O'Bedlam and set to music by Tony Anderson, the poem serves as a reminder that if something is important to us, it is worth going all the way.
Word Crimes
"Weird Al" Yankovic is "gonna familiarize you with the nomenclature" in his latest parody, set to the tune of Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines." Rules on pronouns, prepositions, contractions, and punctuation are thoroughly covered, along with the misuse of the word "literally."
Walter Kirn
The novelist, critic, and essayist shares why he thinks writers are "predatory in a benevolent way" and how he met his inspiration for Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade (Liveright, 2014), a memoir of his friendship with a con man and convicted murderer.
Elissa Washuta
"Still I miss those frightening times, those ugly moods, that mix of irrational up and devastating low. I miss them because they were mine." Elissa Washuta's memoir, My Body Is a Book of Rules, will be published by Red Hen Press in August.
Tracy K. Smith
"In my own writing, I feel safest when I'm farthest from what I know." Tracy K. Smith reads "Digging" by Seamus Heney, the poem she feels "invited her to start writing poetry," and from "My God, It's Full of Stars," a poem she wrote about her father. This video, part of the P.O.P. series, was shot and edited by Rachel Eliza Griffiths in collaboration with the Academy of American Poets.
There's Nothing
"There's nothing I can tell you that you don't already know." Leah Browning's meditative poem "There's Nothing" is portrayed in this clip from Poetry Storehouse. Browning's third chapbook, In The Chair Museum, was published by Dancing Girl Press in 2013.
Epitaph in Reverse
In this clip, poet Bianca Stone combines poetry, music, and art, telling a story through the deconstruction of her own drawings. Stone is the author of Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Tin House/Octopus Books, 2014).
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard was well known for his fiction in his native country, but his six-volume, 3,600-page autobiography, My Struggle, has made him a literary sensation, with some calling his long form and brutal honesty ground-breaking. In this clip, author Jeffrey Eugenides interviews Knausgaard on what it was like to write without shame. "It felt like a rush, is it possible to say this? And if it is, that's freedom."