As a documentary poet, Camille Dungy writes not just about headline-making news, but about news on a more intimate scale — about motherhood, marriage, and her garden. It’s an approach she says was very much inspired by the "godmother" of documentary poetry, Muriel Rukeyeser.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Literature
For generations, through wars, crisis, and political upheaval, documentary poets have helped make sense of some of our most difficult moments – by expressing what might otherwise be impossible to say. So what are they writing about today?
We celebrate weird fiction in all its forms, from haunted video tapes on YouTube to the original eldritch being himself, H.P. Lovecraft.
In her latest novel, Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell takes us into the world of Renaissance Italy, where she unravels the tale of a young woman, Lucrezia de’ Medici. Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with O’Farrell about what we can learn about history and ourselves through the many layers of portraits.
When it comes to wonder and awe, historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, the author of “Doubt” and “The End of the Soul,” says there’s another, even older tradition we can all access – poetry.
Given the chance, how do Africans tell stories about their own imagined future? And how might the story be different? To get a sense of where African science fiction is heading, we talked with Nnedi Okorafor and Ainehi Edoro.
After Jamaican writer Marlon James won the Booker Prize, he plunged into the world of African witches and demons, tricksters and shapeshifters. James recounts how he created his Dark Star Trilogy by digging into old African myths and folklore.
Wakanda is a very American version of an idealized African future. So how do African science fiction writers tell stories about their own imagined future?
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