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United States Of Poetry
''United States of Poetry'' (''USOP'') was a five-part American television series created for PBS. The series' first aired in February 1995. ''USOP'' was created and produced by Joshua Blum, the founder of Washington Square Films, and New York poet Bob Holman and director, Mark Pellington. The anthology was composed of five half-hour segments and featured more than 60 poets including three Nobel Prize winners, rappers, slammers, cowboys, and a seven-year-old jump-rope artist. It was accompanied by a book published by Abrams Books and a soundtrack album with music by tomandandy issued by Mouth Almighty Records, under Mercury Records. The book contained an extra sixth section for poems that did not make the series. History In 1990, Joshua Blum met Bob Holman at the Nuyorican Poets Café, where Holman had helped popularize slam poetry. Despite Holman's initial aversion to the idea of television, Blum convinced him to make a demo for MTV featuring 40 local poets called "Smokin' Word" ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bob Holman
Bob Holman is an American poet and poetry activist, most closely identified with the oral tradition, the spoken word, and poetry slam. As a promoter of poetry in many media, Holman has spent the last four decades working variously as an author, editor, publisher, performer, emcee of live events, director of theatrical productions, producer of films and television programs, record label executive, university professor, and archivist. He was described by Henry Louis Gates Jr. in ''The New Yorker'' as "the postmodern promoter who has done more to bring poetry to cafes and bars than anyone since Ferlinghetti." Early years Holman was born in LaFollette, Tennessee in 1948 and raised in Harlan, Kentucky, the child of "a coal miner's daughter and the only Jew in town." His father committed suicide when Holman was two. After his mother remarried, Holman was raised in rural Ohio. He attended Columbia College and graduated in 1970 with a degree in English. At Columbia, Holman studied ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Joshua Blum
Joshua Blum is an American film, television, commercial, and theater producer based in New York City. He established Washington Square Films (WSF), a production and management company based in New York and Los Angeles, in 1995. Career At Washington Square Films, Blum created and produced the company's debut project, ''The United States of Poetry'' (''USOP''), a five-part series for PBS, together with Bob Holman. The ''United States of Poetry'' was directed by Mark Pellington. The program featured 60 poets performing in stylized poetry videos. Joshua Blum has served as Producer or Executive Producer for Steven Soderbergh, Abel Ferrara,Sally Potter, and Pedro Almodóvar. Blum has also produced the early work of J. C. Chandor, Kelly Reichardt, and Alex Ross Perry. In 2023, Washington Square Films produced a live musical based on the 1972 Jamaican film ''The Harder They Come'', with music by Jimmy Cliff and a book and additional songs by Suzan-Lori Parks. The musical was developed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Beatty
Paul Beatty (born June 9, 1962) is an American author and professor of writing at Columbia University. Paul Beatty. Professor, Writing. Teaching Spring 2025. Columbia University. Retrieved April 23, 2025. In 2016, he won the and the for his novel '' The Sellout''. It was the first time a writer from the United States was honored with the Man Booker. |
Hal Sirowitz
Hal Sirowitz (born 1949) is an American poet. Sirowitz has a degree from Hofstra in education. He first began to attract attention at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe where he was a frequent competitor in their Friday Night Poetry Slam. He eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team, and competed in the 1993 National Poetry Slam (held that year in San Francisco) along with his Nuyorican teammates Maggie Estep, Tracie Morris, and Regie Cabico. Sirowitz would later perform his poetry on stages across the country, and on television programs such as MTV's ''Spoken Word: Unplugged'' and PBS's ''The United States of Poetry''. He has written eleven books of poetry, including the volumes ''Mother Said'', ''My Therapist Said'' and ''Father Said''. He is the best-selling translated poet in Norway, where ''Mother Said'' has been adapted for the stage and turned into a series of animated cartoons. Sirowitz is a 1994 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and is the former Poet Laureate ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sheryl Noethe
Sheryl Noethe is an American poet and served as Montana's poet laureate from 2011 to 2013. Biography Born in Minnesota "into a family that didn't read books", Noethe discovered writing through a collection of Dorothy Parker's short stories and read voraciously to escape an abusive home life. In 5th grade, her teacher told her that she would become an author, which she credits with changing her life. By Noethe's teens, she had published poetry. Honors Noethe has won or received the following honors: * Academy of American Poets Award * McKnight Foundation fellowship * National Endowment for the Arts fellowship * Montana Arts Council fellowship * Emerging Voices Award – New Rivers Press * Honorable mention – Pushcart Prize The Pushcart Prize is an American literary prize published by Pushcart Press that honors the best "poetry, short fiction, essays or literary whatnot" published in the small presses over the previous year. Magazine and small book press editors are ... * ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pedro Pietri
Pedro Pietri (March 21, 1944 – March 3, 2004) was a Puerto Rican poet and playwright and one of the co-founders of the Nuyorican Movement. He was considered by some as the poet laureate of the Nuyorican Movement. Early years Pietri was born in Ponce, Puerto Rico, however his family moved to New York City in 1947, when he was only three years old. They settled in the west side (Manhattanville) section of Manhattan where he and his siblings received their primary and secondary education. Pedro was greatly influenced by his aunt, who often recited poetry and on occasions put on theatrical plays in the First Spanish Methodist church in El Barrio. Pietri himself started to write poems as a student at Haaren High School. After graduating from high school, Pietri worked in a variety of jobs until he was drafted into the Army and sent to fight in the Vietnam War. The experiences that he faced in the Army and Vietnam, plus the discrimination that he witnessed while growing up in N ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thylias Moss
Thylias Moss (born February 27, 1954, in Cleveland, Ohio) is an American poet, writer, experimental filmmaker, sound artist and playwright of African-American, Native American, and European heritage. Her poetry has been published in a number of collections and anthologies, and she has also published essays, children's books, and plays. She is the pioneer of Limited Fork Theory, a literary theory concerned with the limitations and capacity of human understanding of art. Youth Moss was born Thylias Rebecca Brasier, in a working-class family in Ohio. Her father chose the name Thylias because he decided she needed a name that had not existed before. According to Moss, her first few years of life were happy, living with her family in the upstairs rooms of an older Jewish couple named Feldman (who Moss believes were Holocaust survivors). The Feldmans treated Moss like a grandchild. When Moss was five, the Feldmans sold their house and moved away. Her parents continued to live in the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
James Still (poet)
James Still (July 16, 1906 – April 28, 2001) was an American poet, novelist and folklorist. He lived most of his life in a log house along the Dead Mare Branch of Little Carr Creek, Knott County, Kentucky. He was best known for the novel '' River of Earth'', which depicted the struggles of coal mining in eastern Kentucky. Life Early life Lonie, Still's mother was sixteen when she moved to Alabama due to a tornado destroying the family home. His father, J. Alex Still, was a horse doctor with no formal training. James Still was born July 16, 1906, near Lafayette, Alabama. Still was considered a quiet child but a hard worker. He along with his nine siblings worked the family farm. They farmed cotton, sugar cane, soybeans and corn. At the age of seven, Still began grade school. He found greater interest not in the school text books but at home where there was an edition of the '' Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge''. He became enriched with philosophy, physics and the great Britis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rita Dove
Rita Frances Dove (born August 28, 1952) is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as United States Poet Laureate, Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing. Early life Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, to Ray D ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sparrow (American Poet)
Sparrow (born Michael Gorelick, October 2, 1953) is an American poet, activist, and musician. As a member of the New York-based literary group The Unbearables, Sparrow has published several poetry collections with Soft Skull Press, as well as chapbooks in collaboration with the St. Mark's Poetry Project, and he has served as the editor for the literary journal ''Big Fish''. He has been published in ''The New Yorker'' (after picketing their offices in 1996 while holding a sign reading, "My Poetry is as bad as yours)", '' The Quarterly'', and ''The New York Times.'' He is the founder both of the "One Size Fits All Movement" and the East Village Militia. He was also featured in the PBS series '' The United States of Poetry'', and his music (with the band Foamola) is featured on the poetry compilation '' Poemfone: New Word Order''. He is also a gossip columnist for the Phoenicia Times, a contributing editor to Chronogram, and a substitute teacher. He currently lives with his wife ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lord Buckley
Lord Richard Buckley (born Richard Myrle Buckley; April 5, 1906 – November 12, 1960) was an American stand-up comedian and recording artist, who in the 1940s and 1950s created a character that was, according to ''The New York Times'', "an unlikely persona ... part English royalty, part Dizzy Gillespie." Michael Packenham, writing in ''The Baltimore Sun'', described him as "a magnificent stand-up comedian... Buckley's work, his very presence, projected the sense that life's most immortal truths lie in the inextricable weaving together of love and irony—affection for all humanity married to laughter." Buckley's unique stage persona anticipated aspects of the Beat Generation sensibility, and influenced contemporary figures as varied as Dizzy Gillespie, Lenny Bruce, Wavy Gravy, Del Close, and, even after Buckley's death, Ken Kesey, George Harrison, Tom Waits, Frank Zappa, Robin Williams, and Jimmy Buffett. Bob Dylan, in his book ''Chronicles'', said "Buckley was the hipster b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
