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Earlier this year actor James Franco and biographer Paul Mariani fielded questions at the Boston College premiere of The Broken Tower, a film directed by and starring Franco, based on Mariani's 1999 biography, The Broken Tower: The Life of Hart Crane.
Poet Kelly Norman Ellis, author of Tougaloo Blues and longtime P&W-supported writer and presenter of literary events, dotes on Chicago's South Side and the Neighborhood Writing Alliance.
I’ve lived and worked on Chicago’s South Side for almost thirteen years. As an educator and writer, I am attracted to organizations that express a commitment to writing and art outside the academic community. Our writing program at Chicago State seeks to coalition build with community organizations so that our students realize the benefits and necessity of teaching outside of the academy.
The Neighborhood Writing Alliance (NWA) located on the South Side of Chicago fills this need. NWA runs writing workshops for adults in low-income neighborhoods throughout Chicago, and publishes selected pieces from those workshops in its quarterly award-winning publication, Journal of Ordinary Thought (JOT). Founded in 1996 by Hal Adams, Deborah Epstein, and Sunny Fischer, NWA grew out of JOT, which was founded by Hal Adams in 1991.
Hundreds of Chicago adults have participated in NWA writing groups in a range of settings—from public libraries and public schools (where parents participate) to social service agencies and public housing projects. Workshops are conducted across ethnic lines. In one workshop, I taught African Americans born in Chicago, Mississippi, and Jamaica; Polish immigrants; fourth generation Irish Americans and second generation Mexican Americans. Participants in these workshops write primarily from their own experience, but through writing and discussion make connections between their personal experiences and broader social issues.
Workshop leaders are Chicago-based professional writers and arts educators such as Krista Franklin, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Parneshia Jones, Tony Lindsay, Carlos Flores, and Valerie Wallace, to name a few. NWA also has an impressive Writer’s Advisory Council, which includes Achy Obejas, Alex Kotlowitz, television journalist Bill Kurtis. The legendary Studs Turkel also served on the council before his death.
Our MFA program at Chicago State believes in the connection of writing and social justice. NWA demonstrates this principal at work by providing internships to our writing students on the graduate and undergraduate level, allowing them to experience the successful marriage of art and activism.
Photo: Kelly Norman Ellis. Credit: Natasha Marin.
Support for Readings/Workshops events in Chicago is provided by an endowment established with generous contributions from Poets & Writers Board of Directors and others. Additional support comes from the Friends of Poets & Writers.
This ad campaign, developed by the Voskhod ad agency for the bookstore 100,000 Books in Yekaterinburg, Russia, recently won an award at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity .
Poet Kelle Groom's memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, about her recovery from alcoholism following the death of her fourteen-month-old son, is published this month by Free Press. Check out this and other new and noteworthy books in the July/August issue's Page One section.
Didn't like that novel? Disappointed with that poetry collection? Consider turning it into art using the simple steps in this brief how-to video.
Last night in Brooklyn the Moby Awards, sponsored by indie press Melville House, celebrated the best, worst, and weirdest of last year's book trailers. A panel of critics, editors, and other lit types representing the Huffington Post, McNally Jackson Books, the Millions, GoodReads, and more selected the following to receive the honorary golden sperm whale.
Lifetime Achievement Award
Ron Charles for his Totally Hip Video Book Review Series for the Washington Post
Grand Jury/We’re Giving You This Award Because Otherwise You’d Win Too Many Other Awards
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Book Trailer as Stand Alone Art Object
How Did You Get This Number? by Sloane Crosley
Best Small House
Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer
Best Big House
Packing for Mars by Mary Roach
Worst Performance by an Author
Jonathan Franzen in his Freedom trailer
Most Celebtastic Performance
James Franco in the trailer for Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story
Worst Small / No House
Pirates: The Midnight Passage by James R. Hannibal
Worst Big House
Savages by Don Winslow
What Are We Doing To Our Children?
It’s A Book by Lane Smith
General Technical Excellence and Courageous Pursuit of Gloriousness
Electric Literature, including the below short "Can a Book Save Your Life?"
Most Monkey Sex
Bonobo Handshake by Vanessa Woods
Worst Soundtrack
Ghostgirl by Tonya Hurley
Most Angelic Angel Falling to Earth
Teen tome Torment by Lauren Kate
Most Conflicted (we published the book but the trailer is sooo good!)
The Beaufort Diaries by T Cooper
"Just because it happened doesn't make it interesting." Author and teacher Marion Roach Smith offers this and other priceless nuggets of advice for anyone thinking of writing a memoir in The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life, forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing on June 9.
The twenty-third annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced last night in New York City. Coinciding with this year's Book Expo America, the awards event brought out over four hundred attendees in celebration of LGBT literature.
Adam Haslett was honored for his novel, Union Atlantic (Nan A. Talese), the follow-up to his story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here (Doubleday, 2002), a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Eileen Myles, author of more than a dozen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, won the award in lesbian fiction for Inferno (A Poet's Novel) (OR Books).
Anna Swanson and Brian Teare took the prizes in poetry, Swanson for her debut collection, The Nights Also (Tightrope Books), and Teare for Pleasure (Ahsahta Press). Two novelists won in debut fiction, Amber Dawn for Sub Rosa (Arsenal Pulp Press) and David Pratt for Bob the Book (Chelsea Station Editions). The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet (Harper Perennial) by Myrlin Hermes won in bisexual fiction, and Holding Still For as Long as Possible (House of Anansi Press) by Zoe Whittall received the transgender fiction prize.
Barbara Hammer and Julie Marie Wade were also recognized for their memoirs, Hammer! Making Movies Out of Sex and Life (Feminist Press) and Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press), respectively. A complete list of winners, including honorees in drama, anthology, and young adult literature, is posted on the Lambda Literary website.
In the video below, fiction winner Haslett presents a dramatic reading of passages from Union Atlantic.
Looking for a distinctive cover for your homemade chapbook or writing journal? Check out book artist Pam Deluco's process of using recycled denim to make paper in this video, which was produced by Shape What's to Come, an online community of women sponsored by—who else?—Levi's. When your cover is ready, have a look at DIY: How to Make and Bind Chapbooks.
We've all seen movie trailers and book trailers, but here's a new one: a trailer for an undergraduate lecture course that was offered last fall at the University of Michigan. "Comparative Literature 382: Literature and the Other Arts: Dividing Time: Art House Animation and Poetics" used animated films, poems, short stories, aesthetic theory, and film criticism to examine "how the timing, technique, technology, attention to audience, and intertextual relations of a given work condition our experience of it."
